A Mattermost Alternative for Companies That Would Rather Not Run the Server

It is the only one of the four you can host yourself, and the only one that publishes no price at any tier. Slack sells chat on its own with a per person rate printed on the page. Microsoft Teams has a standalone plan and sells its suite both with and without Teams, so the chat can be valued. Google Chat has no price because it is bundled into Workspace and cannot be bought alone. Mattermost has three plans and quotes all three.

Not for production. Every tier on the pricing page routes to a person: Contact Sales for Professional, Get Pricing for Enterprise, Request Quote for Enterprise Advanced. There is a free limited use edition offered for technical evaluation, and licenses can also be bought through resellers, but there is no self service checkout for a production deployment.

Professional is channel based collaboration with single sign on, directory sync, guest accounts and business hours support, capped at two hundred and fifty users. Enterprise Advanced adds attribute based access control, air gapped operation, mobile hardening and scale to two hundred thousand concurrent users.

If you have the people to run it, you should not, and we give that answer regularly. You pay us when nobody on your side wants to own a server, and when somebody still has to design the channel structure, decide who may open one and who outside the company may reach in, set the retention position, provision people and remove them, wire chat into Desk and CRM, and still be doing all of it a year from now.

We cannot compute that one, and for a different reason than on our Google Chat page. There the chat had no price because it was bundled into something else. Here it has a price and Mattermost will not publish it, so there is no per seat figure to divide our three hundred by. What can be said is that the license is the part of self hosting people estimate correctly, and the server, the upgrades and the backups are the part they do not.

On people. Licenses are sold per activated seat as a prepaid annual subscription, and if you pass your seat count mid term you buy the extra seats on a quarterly true forward, prorated to your renewal date. Guests are free up to a one to one ratio with licensed seats where they sit in exactly one channel, and count as paid users once they are in more than one.

For engineering and security operations, and for anyone who has to hold their own data, yes, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Playbooks, FIPS and STIG images, air gapped deployment and a self hosted language model are things Cliq does not do and does not try to do. Cliq wins on one thing, which is that it already sits next to Desk, CRM, Projects and People. If your requirement is sovereign infrastructure, buy Mattermost.

That is the reason to choose it. Cliq sits alongside Desk, CRM, Projects and People, so a conversation becomes a ticket, a note on the customer record and a line on a report with nothing wired in between. Mattermost integrates deeply into engineering tooling, from Jira and GitHub through to GitLab and Zoom, and does it well. The difference is that those are connectors somebody maintains and ours is one suite from one vendor.

We design the channel and team structure and the naming, set the restricted and open split, write the external access rules, settle the history and retention position, provision people and remove them when they leave, configure up to five bots or integrations, connect Cliq to Zoho Desk, CRM and Projects, run the migration off whatever you are on now, and produce the monthly access reporting. Support for your team is unlimited and included. The figure covers up to a hundred users in one organization.

You do. You buy Cliq direct from Zoho and we manage it, which is how all of our Zoho work runs with one exception. Managed Zoho Assist is that exception, because there we carry the subscription ourselves. On Cliq the license, the data and the account all stay in your name, so leaving means we hand back the keys rather than move a subscription.

Yes, and coming off a self hosted server adds a step. As well as listing the channels people actually use, the ones nobody has posted in for a year and the outside companies still holding access, we export the history off your own instance and agree what happens to the server afterward. Decommissioning it properly is part of the job, because a forgotten server holding years of conversation is a liability rather than a backup.

No. Three hundred a month, month to month, thirty days’ notice, and no setup fee. That is worth comparing directly against a prepaid annual seat license, because the two commitments are not the same shape. What your existing Mattermost agreement obliges you to is between you and them, and it is worth reading before assuming you can stop paying for it this quarter.

Then use whatever you already hold and keep your three hundred dollars. Five people who all sit in one room do not have a governance problem, and that includes here. Come back when the second team starts, or when the first person leaves and nobody is sure what they could still read.

Three hundred a month per organization covers the review, the structure design, the permissions, the migration, the integrations and the ongoing tuning, with nothing metered and nobody counted up to a hundred users. Your Zoho Cliq license stays yours.