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Mattermost is a great tool for small, shifting freelance teams
Updated January 19, 2024

Mattermost is a great tool for small, shifting freelance teams

Jonathan Warren | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Mattermost

Mattermost is used by my company as a cost-effective alternative to other collaboration platforms. It allows us to effectively delineate our different projects and ongoing discussions, and add external users as needed to collaborate on specific projects without exposing them to other business discussions and unrelated projects. We have installed the self-managed version on our own server and have not leveraged the paid enterprise support.
  • User management
  • Discussion delineation (channels)
  • Multi-platform support
  • Easy installation and maintenance
  • Notifications - buggy on iOS and macOS
  • Embedded media integration - some attachments only download, or don't display/navigate well inside the app
  • Integrations with email and calendar would be nice if native to the app
  • Low operations costs
  • Flexible user access controls minimizes onboarding time
  • Regular manual back-end maintenance required
While we have not modified the Mattermost software package in any way, we do have it deployed on our own cloud server, which has allowed for cost savings and direct integration with our existing technical infrastructure. This allows us to manage and apply security updates in an aligned way with our other technical infrastructure, and allows us to quickly address and mitigate potential vulnerabilities or incidents if they should occur. We have found the manual Mattermost installation to be robust and flexible.
We have not yet found useful integrations with other products and platforms in our technical suite. Those that exist look useful in their intended circumstances, and we look forward to getting to work with them in the future. We would love to see greater email and calendar integration within Mattermost, allowing a more fulsome cloud experience for our users.
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 love Mattermost because it works perfectly for our company structure (freelance resource collaboration on projects) and we know our data is safe and exportable.

Do you think Mattermost delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Mattermost's feature set?

Yes

Did Mattermost live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Mattermost go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Mattermost again?

Yes

Mattermost is a fantastic alternative to Slack and Microsoft Teams in terms of cost-effectiveness, simplicity of maintenance, and control over your business data. We chose Mattermost because our company's structure is cost-prohibitive for Slack and Microsoft Teams. Mattermost allows us the user control we need to attach external guest users to specific projects, as well as the security of knowing exactly where our business data is stored. A self-managed installation of Mattermost may not be as effective when applied to large, rapidly scaling teams as that may require more IT support than available - however they do provide a paid, managed option.

Mattermost Feature Ratings

Project Management
9.0
Scheduling
Not Rated
Workflow Automation
Not Rated
Mobile Access
8
Search
10
Communication
9.2
Chat
10
Notifications
6
Discussions
10
Surveys
10
Internal knowledgebase
10
File Sharing & Management
9.7
Video files
10
Audio files
10
Document collaboration
9
Access control
10
Advanced security features
9
Device sync
10

Using Mattermost

2 - All company employees are using Mattermost, with flexibility to add freelance workers as needed to specific projects. We appreciate that Mattermost can scale to meet our needs, while being a cost-effective solution for our business between projects when our resource count is low. Our core staff fundamentally represents leadership and sales, as well as technical direction.
1 - Currently I (technical director) support our installation of Mattermost on a cloud server. This allows us to maintain a low monthly cost for the service, and is balanced with only moderate needs to maintain security and other software updates on the server. Now that Mattermost is built into the Ubuntu app repository, it's extremely simple to set up and maintain a Mattermost installation with only minimal experience working with a Linux command line.
  • Business Development & Collaboration
  • Project Communication
  • Sharing resources, establishing a repository of business and project information
  • Searchable repository of vendors and solution providers
  • Scaling to include external project resources
  • Voice and video communication with coworkers
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.

Evaluating Mattermost and Competitors

  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
We wanted a chat/media collaboration tool that would scale up and down with our small business, that would be easy to maintain in the long-term, and that would complement our other technology platforms. Mattermost was chosen after trying several low-cost solutions due to it's robust feature set and ease of setup and maintenance.
Special attention would be given to notifications and how effectively the app displays them. When business is slow and employees aren't necessarily checking Mattermost daily as part of their routine, it's critical that notifications clearly come through to prompt them to open the app. We have had some challenges with notifications not coming through, and the surprise of checking in on the app only to discover that you've missed important call-outs.