Mattermost vs. Microsoft Teams vs. Simpro

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.

Incentivized

It's amazing as a daily driver for team communication, and document search/store. Also, if you're doing a lot of LONG meetings and have trouble remembering details, the AI summarization is amazing and convenient. It just works. I'm not saying I always do this, of course, but if I need to 'skim' instead of really digging into every detail from a meeting, the AI-generated summary is generally good enough that I can get away with it.

Simpro is well suited for job and team management, tracking inventory and the workflow is very logical. The mobile app for our field technicians works very well to clock on and off and then being in a position to report to a customer based on factual information has made invoicing a breeze! Reporting can be a bit frustrating especially on materials used on different cost centre numbers as you can only specify a job number, but not a cost centre number.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• All in one communication for Teams.
• High quality and reliable both audio and video meetings.
• Well organized and clear instant chat.
• Excellent security features.
• Beautiful integration with 3rd party tools and systems.
• Perfect compatibility with windows ,android and iOS.
• Allow meetings recordings for later us or sharing with teams that missed the live.

Incentivized

• Billing: straight from a closed, complete job. Carries overall equipment, hours, takes one click to bill.
• simPRO retains notes on all emails; notes can be entered by anyone to track communication with clients.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• The webinars feature has some missing functionally such as the ability for all users to use the Q&A feature (only those with a Microsoft Teams account can use it now), the ability to upload documents for attendees to easily access and download, and the ability for presenters and organizers to easily chat amongst themselves throughout the webinar.
• The "Channels" organization hierarchy could be more clear. If you have several channels set up, it can get clunky and hard to find the specific channel you are looking for.
• The MS Planner tool lacks functionality and organization. You cannot assign more than one person to a task and it's confusing when you try to share tasks with people - it would be nice if they were automatically added to someone's calendar.

Incentivized

• Ability to create leave forms for the employees (to my best knowledge, this doesn't exist).
• Ability to color code jobs, quotes by criticality.
• Assign status to equipment (e.g. "ordered"; "arrived").

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Microsoft Teams is included with our Office 365 subscription and we have no intention of migrating off of Office 365 and Microsoft products. Since Microsoft Teams is included for free with our Office 365 subscription, and since we enjoy all the features, benefits, and functionality, there is no question that our team will continue to use the product

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If you have the full Microsoft Office suite, it works really well because it's integrated well within its ecosystem, but if not, it can be annoying because it tries to open a shared file in the web versions of the file equivalents. The web version is also a bit slow, and the login is very difficult to handle if you have multiple Microsoft or Outlook accounts.

Incentivized

As mentioned before, materials reporting could use some work as one cannot report by cost centre number, only by job number. It makes it difficult with large jobs with multiple cost centre numbers to easily extract information for reporting. Other than that the system is user friendly and easy to understand.

Incentivized

Rare, but outages do happen

Incentivized

Sometimes about once a week I get a message that says "Sorry, there seems to be something wrong". But it goes away in a few minutes.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The overall support provided by Microsoft for Microsoft Teams has been quite good but there is still some room for improvements. Microsoft needs to proactively work on fixing the open bugs in order to provide a seamless experience to the users. But over the service and experience provided by the Microsoft team have been quite satisfactory.

Incentivized

It is a great option for solar project management. It needs some improvements for real-time one-page reports, inventory management, scheduling and custom views. I believe these will come because they listen to their customers. I would also like to see some better training and not be expected to pay out of pocket for it.

Incentivized

This went as expected. No surprises or major hurdles.

Incentivized

I find everything I need for my day-to-day work.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Microsoft Teams offers a much more integrated experience between their chat and video call function compared to Google Chat and Slack. Both other tools are much better for internal communications are they have simpler UI without other features. Whereas Microsoft Teams can be used for more critical conversations, particularly between external companies, and has been very useful in sales conversations which is what we chose it for when speaking to companies that work exclusively through Microsoft.

Incentivized

monday.com was easier to set up and you can create boards with loads of subtasks which helps manage a project. Also, the ability to integrate with google was much better as we could link it to the calendar and also store documents that the engineers could see easier onsite. Overall we could make monday.com work better for our business based on how we are set up but simPRO will be great for other businesses with more specific needs.

Incentivized

Honestly, this tool is worth every penny. Yes, it's not free and you pay for the quality of services and the license. But the ROI and the benefits are all there. Also, the renewal, negotiation, and contract terms are all very well explained by our Microsoft account manager, and she's a charm.

It does not appear to have a limit to how many teams and employees we can have using it

Incentivized

I used Skype for Business to take calls, hold conferences, and provide remote assistance to users. Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, is superior to Skype for Business in my opinion. My job entails a lot of screen sharing.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Personally, I would say that by using Microsoft Teams, it upped my collaboration with my colleagues by around 50% or around more than half of what I usually did prior to using it.
• I had 100% show rate and attendance on all of my meetings in the past 6 months.
• If I may add, I also have been chattier & collaborative towards my colleagues in past 3 months particularly the month of December when we had huge traffic at work. I would estimate this behavior to have been increased by around 60% than what I usually incur during normal operating days.

Incentivized

• Increased team collaboration.
• Increased inventory awareness.
• Decreased down time between jobs.

Incentivized