GitLab vs. Mattermost vs. Slack

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GitLab
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
GitLab is an intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps, where software teams enable AI at every stage of the software lifecycle to ship faster. The platform enables teams to automate repetitive tasks across planning, building, securing, testing, deploying, and maintaining software.
$0
per month per user
Mattermost
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Mattermost from the company of the same name in Palo Alto is a messaging, collaboration and communication platform providing high security and compliance for the businesses that need it.
$0
per month per user
Slack
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Slack is a group messaging or team collaboration app that aims to simplify communication for businesses. Features include open discussions, private groups, and direct messaging, as well as deep contextual search and message archiving, and file sharing. Slack integrates with a number of other tools, such as MailChimp, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Slack was acquired by Salesforce in December 2020. The product is free to use, and also has paid plans with more features and greater controls. The…
$8.75
per month per user
Pricing
GitLabMattermostSlack
Editions & Modules
GitLab Free (self-managed)
$0
GitLab Free
$0
GitLab Premium
$29
per month per user
GitLab Premium (self-managed)
$29
per month per user
GitLab Ultimate
Contact Sales
GitLab Ultimate (self-managed)
Contact Sales
Free Self-Hosted
$0
per month per user
Professional
$10
per month per user
Enterprise
Contact Us
per month per user
Free
$0
Pro
$7.25*
per month per user
Business+
$12.50*
per month per user
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitLabMattermostSlack
Free Trial
YesYesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsGitLab Credits enable flexible, consumption-based access to agentic AI capabilities in the GitLab platform, allowing you to scale AI adoption at your own pace while maintaining cost predictability. Powered by Duo Agent Platform, GitLab’s agentic AI capabilities help software teams to collaborate at AI speed, without compromising quality and enterprise security. If usage exceeds monthly allocations and overage terms are accepted, automated on-demand billing activates without service interruption, so your developers never lose access to AI capabilities they need. Real-time dashboards provide transparency into AI consumption patterns. Software teams can see usage across users, projects, and groups with granular attribution for cost allocation. Automated threshold alerts facilitate proactive planning. Advanced analytics deliver trending, forecasting, and FinOps integration.*Per active user, per month, when paying once a year. Pro is $8.75 USD per active user when paying month to month. Business+ is $15.00 USD per active user when paying month to month.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GitLabMattermostSlack
Considered Multiple Products
GitLab
Chose GitLab
I liked GitLab better than Beanstalk. GitLab had a free option, which Beanstalk did not at the time. From what I have used of Bitbucket, I probably like it better than GitLab, specifically I like the design better. Doing things in Bitbucket seemed a bit slower to me though. Now …
Chose GitLab
GitLab is miles ahead of the competition. In so many words, having a simple UI with robust security and the ability to conduct Git actions takes the cake. The competitions like to say they can do these things easily but their products are more confusing and hard to use.
Chose GitLab
GitHub is an inferior product from most points of view. We had to use it and the teams finds no positives about it. Everything is a downgrade from our previous GitLab solution.

GitLab CI\CD is vastly superior to workflows, for example doing a manual node is just "when : manual" …
Chose GitLab
My feedback may not be important here because when I joined the company they already had GitLab and we still use it due to the ability to do CI/CD Integration, deployments, debugging, code owners approval, and Jira integration. So far we have not had any major blocker that has …
Chose GitLab
The first thing is other products except GitLab is there is very costly and does not have any customise thing. Gitlab is an open-source license product that makes its use easier and more cost-effective that's why we have chosen Gitlab among other products with the same …
Chose GitLab
GitLab is free and open-source with all the functionalities you get with GitHub so it becomes an obvious choice for all the businesses to go with.
Chose GitLab
A few years ago, GitHub didn't offer free private plans or CI tools. Now that those are standard, I have the impression that GitHub has the best package for small teams like ours, especially due to more integrations and community support.
Chose GitLab
As a front-end to revision control workflows, all three products are similar. Bitbucket suffers from the usual problems with Atlassian: it's slow and bloated. GitHub is a viable alternative for these workflows; the choice is entirely dependent on organizational constraints. For …
Chose GitLab
Gitlab has a free version on-premise install, which makes it the best between them. Gitorious was our solution between Gitlab but it was abandoned for a long time. GitHub doesn't have a free version for private repositories. Bitbucket was not so good at the time and on-premise …
Chose GitLab
They are almost the same. I hardly found any difference in them.
Chose GitLab
GitLab stands up great to other Git hosting services. GitLab CI blows GitLab past it's competitors to take a Git server and make it a complete application management platform. Versus GitHub, GitLab does not stand up for hosting open source projects as GitHub has a much larger …
Mattermost
Chose Mattermost
Slack got very expensive and limited for the use we expected and also for the economic resources of the company. Mattermost allows custom modifications, and its interface is very similar to Slack, so we didn't need much time to adapt to it. We've been using Mattermost for 3 …
Chose Mattermost
Mattermost is very comparable to Slack. While Slack is more well-known and has a larger budget for advertising, Mattermost can hold its own. Slack probably has some additional integrations, but for what we were looking for (a quality communication tool) Mattermost was a great …
Chose Mattermost
Slack is excellent and has many of the same features as Mattermost. However, the cost if you have a larger group can be prohibitive. Mattermost is a better ROI per user, in our opinion. It also allows us to host it ourselves, which is more desirable for management by our MIS …
Chose Mattermost
As compare to Slack with this tool, Mattermost has introduced more convenience and features for collaboration. All updates come with new and advanced features and functions which always fascinate me and become the reason for using this efficient tool.
Chose Mattermost
We selected mattermost since we can control storage of our data. Slack is a great tool and offers more robust features compared to mattermost. However, the previously mentioned reason & the competitive pricing allowed us to stick with mattermost.
Chose Mattermost
Microsoft Teams feels quite clunky and the video chat is buggy. Slack is close but maybe not quite as feature-rich. Mattermost just feels like the right tool for a company my size ~1000+ users. No one has had any major issues with this tool and there haven't been any …
Chose Mattermost
Mattermost is very similar to Slack and has the advantage (in our case) of being entirely on-premises, and entirely free. The feature set is similar, and it has filled the original need that Slack was suggested as a solution for very well. Teams is potentially a better choice …
Chose Mattermost
Honestly iv just used these two but when it comes to customization, they don't come close to Mattermost. Slack and Teams are Less flexible, Not self hosted. Not Open source,etc I will also say that i noticed integration capabilities are very limited with teams and Slack and not …
Chose Mattermost
Slack is by far my personal favorite due to the age of the platform and the maturity of the features. Mattermost is a close 2nd-
Chose Mattermost
Unlike Slack and Discord, Mattermost is self-hosted and focused on security. I used Discord before for community management and much simpler and less secure operations. Slack is great, but the fact that is cloud based takes out a lot of its independence.
Chose Mattermost
In comparison to Slack, where Slack is strictly for internal communication, Mattermost actually has the format to display and not alter source code. Google Chat is also even more limited in comparison to Slack and Mattermost. If you collaborate on code every single day, then …
Chose Mattermost
They're very similar. I think it's really a matter of preference. Again, one of the things I like about Mattermost is that it's strictly for business (atleast for us) it's different from the more mainstream messaging apps used so we can kind of separate work vs personal messages.
Chose Mattermost
Much more expensive than most chat applications but you have more control over things by self-hosting. Your security team will be able to design a very secure place to store all your code, passwords, and internal details, but most companies will not require this. It would be …
Chose Mattermost
These products all required cloud connectivity and licensing that was a significant cost. Mattermost allowed us to pilot this among just the Ops team and then evangelize this to the other infrastructure team. This allowed us to slowly show the value of this software and expand …
Chose Mattermost
to reduce cost we shifted to Mattermost.
Chose Mattermost
Mattermost works better in that there aren’t constant updates and changes which can make finding past messages difficult. Mattermost also works better for channel creation and communication
Chose Mattermost
Mattermost provides a familiar user interface, fast performance, and a complete set of user collaboration tools and features - it stands out by providing a self-managed installation option for better integration with existing IT assets and more control over data storage. We …
Chose Mattermost
key selling points for us was that its open source and can be self hosted.
Chose Mattermost
First of all, we don't lose messages; we can see or search messages from any point in the past. Second, it offers to manage the whole product ourselves from hosting to serving users of our organisation. We feel that we have full control over data, managing users, …
Chose Mattermost
Skype is a light version when compared to Mattermost. Skype is easy to login (using username and password). Whereas, Mattermost login or setup or configuration is way different from Skype. We wanted to integrate with Jumpcloud for various reasons, so we have selected Mattermost …
Slack
Chose Slack
Slack is vastly easier to use than Teams and far less convoluted. It also handles Trello and GitLab integrations in a way that is easy to read and digest (whereas Teams handles them in the most useless way possible). Every time I use Teams, something is broken or I can't find …
Chose Slack
Much simpler and more pleasant to use than the alternatives.
Provides integrations, with external services, that work out of the box which is often an Achilles heel of competitive solutions.
Pricing is unfortunately not that great when compared to alternatives that come in a …
Chose Slack
The most convenient way to organize and follow thread (so any conversation) and a very large way to customize the workspace by individual (my workspace is organize in my way, but my colleague can have their own structure and organization). Also being able to add customized …
Chose Slack
Good User interface, feels easy to use
Easy to open a thread and have a discussion with rich text editing
Integrations are good, helps to check the status of many entities from single place
Chose Slack
Slack is systematically organizing channel for different groups and also notification of slack is very good compared to Microsoft Teams as in if you use same slack login with mobile as well as computer you get notified over both in slack while i was facing the problem in teams …
Chose Slack
Microsoft Teams, Google Chat and Skype for Business were no match for Slack's features, ease of use and integrations. The other products feel like an afterthought or bundle as part of a more extensive offering, so they can't compete with Slack. Slack is easy to use for novice …
Chose Slack
None of the competition coming from the Microsoft or Cisco provide the user experience of today's consumerized social media. Slack, on the other hand, is fully on par with the best and most known social media applications that consumers use. Consumerization of IT shows here as …
Features
GitLabMattermostSlack
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Mattermost
8.0
46 Ratings
3% above category average
Slack
7.9
625 Ratings
2% above category average
Task Management00 Ratings7.034 Ratings7.7428 Ratings
Gantt Charts00 Ratings7.59 Ratings6.961 Ratings
Scheduling00 Ratings7.69 Ratings7.8361 Ratings
Workflow Automation00 Ratings7.426 Ratings8.1394 Ratings
Mobile Access00 Ratings9.042 Ratings9.4598 Ratings
Search00 Ratings8.924 Ratings8.3605 Ratings
Visual planning tools00 Ratings8.511 Ratings7.4273 Ratings
Communication
Comparison of Communication features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Mattermost
8.1
50 Ratings
1% above category average
Slack
8.8
633 Ratings
10% above category average
Chat00 Ratings9.250 Ratings9.6632 Ratings
Notifications00 Ratings8.350 Ratings8.8629 Ratings
Discussions00 Ratings8.947 Ratings9.2617 Ratings
Surveys00 Ratings9.029 Ratings8.1410 Ratings
Internal knowledgebase00 Ratings6.233 Ratings7.8409 Ratings
Integrates with GoToMeeting00 Ratings7.78 Ratings8.9110 Ratings
Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts00 Ratings8.012 Ratings8.7182 Ratings
Integrates with Outlook00 Ratings7.58 Ratings8.9120 Ratings
File Sharing & Management
Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Product A and Product B
GitLab
-
Ratings
Mattermost
9.0
28 Ratings
11% above category average
Slack
8.4
600 Ratings
5% above category average
Versioning00 Ratings7.911 Ratings8.2324 Ratings
Video files00 Ratings9.322 Ratings8.3538 Ratings
Audio files00 Ratings9.322 Ratings8.5525 Ratings
Document collaboration00 Ratings7.918 Ratings8.0426 Ratings
Access control00 Ratings9.922 Ratings8.3409 Ratings
Advanced security features00 Ratings9.019 Ratings8.3360 Ratings
Integrates with Google Drive00 Ratings8.212 Ratings9.0211 Ratings
Device sync00 Ratings10.016 Ratings9.0452 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GitLabMattermostSlack
Small Businesses
GitGuardian
GitGuardian
Score 9.0 out of 10
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.0 out of 10
Stackby
Stackby
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Veracode
Veracode
Score 8.8 out of 10
Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger
Score 9.8 out of 10
Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger
Score 9.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Veracode
Veracode
Score 8.8 out of 10
HCL Connections
HCL Connections
Score 9.0 out of 10
HCL Connections
HCL Connections
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GitLabMattermostSlack
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(152 ratings)
7.8
(50 ratings)
9.2
(628 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(5 ratings)
6.4
(7 ratings)
10.0
(25 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(6 ratings)
6.4
(6 ratings)
9.0
(248 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(12 ratings)
8.0
(9 ratings)
9.9
(68 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.7
(5 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(35 ratings)
9.2
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GitLabMattermostSlack
Likelihood to Recommend
GitLab
GitLab is good if you work a lot with code and do complex repository actions. It gives you a very good overview of what were the states of your branches and the files in them at different stages in time. It's also way easier and more efficient to write pipelines for CI\CD. It's easier to read and it's easier to write them. It takes fewer clicks to achieve the same things with GitLab than it does for competitor products.
Read full review
Mattermost
I used Mattermost on a full remote company and it perfectly suited our collaboration and communication culture. The company dealt with privileged and personal information of a huge data base of users, so it was a significant advantage for our need to comply with industry regulations.
Read full review
Salesforce
Slack is great for tracking commits to new coding projects. You can take parts of code that still need to be implemented later and easily search through the history of comments if there is something that goes wrong with a code commitment. It can be difficult for people that only like Teams to adjust to a new platform if you are using both to communicate.
Read full review
Pros
GitLab
  • GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
  • It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
  • Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
  • Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.
Read full review
Mattermost
  • Easy intergration to our main CRM (Monday.com)
  • I'm not techy myself but I have seen a lot of our previous integrations in Slack transferred over to Mattermost so that's fun
  • The desktop and phone app (android) works well enough. I haven't tried it on the Apple ecosystem yet.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Huddles Run smoothly without any interferences.
  • Smooth individual calls quick and easy without any interruptions.
  • seamless notifications across multiple devices
  • The ability to easily tag a team member to urgently attend to a specific escalation.
  • Slack being user friendly and able to integrate easily with other platforms and apps.
  • How to easily open up different channels for different escalations and needs.
  • a safe direct messaging option.
Read full review
Cons
GitLab
  • CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
  • Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
  • Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.
Read full review
Mattermost
  • Some of the features in paid plans could be free, however, they have much offered in free plan (self-hosted)
  • The Desktop App we use on windows has some bugs, like when Mattermost is down and comes back up, the app needs restart
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Would love a better integration with GitHub. For example, notifications when your PR is updated, when review is requested, @-mention in comments, etc.
  • Improved "Later" tab, for example the ability to create to-do lists or making the "Later" tab into a more powerful to-do list (annotate items with notes)
  • More powerful integrations, e.g. Google Calendar could render a calendar view within Slack, rather than sending the daily schedule
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
GitLab
I really feel the platform has matured quite faster than others, and it is always at the top of its game compared to the different vendors like GitHub, Azure pipelines, CircleCI, Travis, Jenkins. Since it provides, agents, CI/CD, repository hosting, Secrets management, user management, and Single Sign on; among other features
Read full review
Mattermost
Mattermost has been an excellent tool for our business, allowing for a very cost-effective means of communicating, collaborating, and sharing project and business documentation and resources. The free community edition allows for simple installation on existing cloud server resources which results in significantly lower recurring costs compared to the competition
Read full review
Salesforce
To be more transparent, I give 10 because Slack serves our collaboration needs. It provide us a good platform for team communication relaying important update within the company, it has even mobile app where you can install in your phone to monitor any updates within that team that needs your immediate attention and intervention.
Read full review
Usability
GitLab
I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!
Read full review
Mattermost
It's an extremely easy to use software, and I would recommend it to every company that is growing. I think they could improve their notification system, as it gets a little spammy sometimes and important notifications get lost. Also needs to improve the number of private chats that you are allowed to create.
Read full review
Salesforce
My rating was 7. Its intuitive interface and user-friendly features like channels, threads, and integrations make it excellent for team communication and onboarding. However, its usability is held back by the resource-intensive desktop app and cluttered feeling in large workspaces. The mobile app's performance and unreliable notifications have also been noted as weaknesses.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
GitLab
I've never had experienced outages from GItlab itself, but regarding the code I have deployed to Gitlab, the history helps a lot to trace the cause of the issue or performing a rollback to go back to a working version
Read full review
Mattermost
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Yes, the app works 24/7. I don't even recall having any period that we could not use since the implementation. Even the maintenance periods are barely noticeable and our work is not impacted by it when it happens.
Read full review
Performance
GitLab
GItlab reponsiveness is amazing, has never left me IDLE. I've never had issues even with complex projects. I have not experienced any issues when integrating it with agents for example or SSO
Read full review
Mattermost
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Slack is a soft app, we don't have many issues with it. I recall one or two people complaining about something during our usage period, but I didn't have a bad experience. When the app is slow, usually the problem is with my computer or my internet. The app works just fine.
Read full review
Support Rating
GitLab
At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft
Read full review
Mattermost
We have not had to contact support for Mattermost ever. All that we have needed has been available in the documentation or website. One of our DevOps team members set it up in a couple of hours. The whole team was using Mattermost that same day. No support needed.
Read full review
Salesforce
Whenever I've had to troubleshoot an issue with Slack (which, to be honest, has not happened very often), their online documentation has been easy to locate, easy to understand, and effective in resolving my issue. Slack's ever-growing popularity also means that there's a large community of practice out there that can be depended upon.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
GitLab
No answers on this topic
Mattermost
This went as expected. No surprises or major hurdles.
Read full review
Salesforce
I was not part of the implementation team, but I recall being 100% happy and excited to learn and use a new tool. I'm still am to be honest.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
GitLab
Gitlab seems more cutting-edge than GitHub; however, its AI tools are not yet as mature as those of CoPilot. It feels like the next-generation product, so as we selected a tool for our startup, we decided to invest in the disruptor in the space. While there are fewer out-of-the-box templates for Gitlab, we have never discovered a lack of feature parity.
Read full review
Mattermost
I feel slack is a bit more difficult to use overall than Mattermost. Mattermost makes the tasks of communicating across departments and team members easier, as well as giving the ability to share information via hyper links, attachments, and other forms of communication among every body here. Also, easier user interface
Read full review
Salesforce
I like Slack better than ClickUp, because I would spend 30-60 minutes a day updating my ClickUp tasks. The way ClickUp was used was very micromanaging. I billed by the hour, so I was willing to put in the time to alert the boss what tasks I was working on.
One of my jobs used Hive - I mostly just ran it in the background in case anyone messaged me. I did not use it often.
Read full review
Scalability
GitLab
I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended
Read full review
Mattermost
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
GitLab
  • GitLab cut down our spent on container, package and infrastructure registry
  • Best thing is we can now have everything in single platform which cost effective too
  • Quality of support is really good and they do have emergency support team as well which is great
Read full review
Mattermost
  • Improved Communication Efficiency by consolidating all the variety of messaging apps etc
  • real-time communication and collaboration has improved the orgs ability to address issues and implement changes rapidly.
  • Accelerated decision-making processes, reducing the time required for team approvals and discussions which used to be in back and forth emails.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Slack has been incredibly helpful in connecting various tech apps and ecosystems, creating a more streamlined and responsive process.
  • Slack has made it significantly easier to communicate with our team members across multiple time zones, creating a more engaging environment for our all-remote team.
Read full review
ScreenShots

GitLab Screenshots

Screenshot of What is Intelligent Orchestration for DevSecOps?Screenshot of an overview of GitLab Duo Agent PlatformScreenshot of a new agent creation screen

Mattermost Screenshots

Screenshot of Channels: All team communications in one place.Screenshot of Playbooks: Orchestrates work across tools and teams.Screenshot of Boards: Project planning and milestones.Screenshot of Connections: Unites the entire technology stack through a single point of collaboration.