Open Source Slack

Posted: 2016-08-27 14:43:02 by Alasdair Keyes

Direct Link | RSS feed


Slack has been gaining a lot of traction for collaboration in the IT world over the last few years and it's quite a good tool but the "Cloud" aspect of it and the potential lack of privacy that comes with it is a big concern. Slack is often used to transfer files with business data and transmit data passwords (a practice I'm very much against). Although it uses TLS to stop snoopers betweeon your client and Slack itself, having Slack hold on to all your conversations is a worrying proposal for a business.

Enter Mattermost, an open source alternative to Slack that you install into your own infrastructure. It has a free cut-down version and further more advanced versions for a fee, however the basic slack functionality you're used to is all available in the free version.

The interface is heavily influenced by Slack and everything is where you'd expect and includes apps for all major OSes including Linux.

The downside of Mattermost is the management of the stack on your infrastructure, backups, updates etc but if you have an existing IT team, this should be a very minimal workload addition for the security and peace of mind that all your shared files/conversations are all stored in-house.

For testing they also provide an easy to install docker image, well worth a test.


If you found this useful, please feel free to donate via bitcoin to 1NT2ErDzLDBPB8CDLk6j1qUdT6FmxkMmNz

© Alasdair Keyes

IT Consultancy Services

I'm now available for IT consultancy and software development services - Cloudee LTD.



Happy user of Digital Ocean (Affiliate link)


Version:master-7894892c1f


Validate HTML 5