As close as you can get to Slack without being Slack

Overall I have been using Rocket Chat for over a year now and it's been a great tool for collaboration and communication internally.

Pros

Rocket Chat is, in my opinion, the best alternative to Slack that is available today. The best part about Rocket Chat is that you can install it on your own local servers so you're no reliant on someone else storing your data on their servers on the Internet. This can be particularly valuable for those who may distrust the Internet a good deal. Rocket Chat offers a wide variety of features that make it, again in my opinion, the best contender to face off against the Slack platform.

Cons

Rocket Chat can sometimes be tricky or actually impossible to update and the features and settings can sometimes be a little difficult to understand what exactly they do.

My 6 months with Rocket Chat

Very satisfied . I have used Slack, Teamwork Chat before, but Rocket Chat is very economical to me ( free- minus the VPS cost). ANd it has everything we need.

Pros

1. Installation is a breeze. I was able to install Rocket Chat, get SSL configured, and had a running server set up in an hour without having to wave through endless linux commands. 2. Inbuilt support, for Video call using Jitsi, and inbuilt notifications. 3. Slack like user interface , which my team can instantly connect to.

Cons

1. The Quote a message, can be improved, it is visually not very clear. 2. The Video call doesn't ring inside the application, only gives a button to join which makes people skip it some times. 3. On Windows, if the app is running in background, you need to go to the notification panel to bring it to front, if you start from the Start Menu, it doesn't come to front. Overall, the shortcomings are very less and trivial. The software is very stable and a breeze to use.

Great product, user friendly, feature rich, ldap connectivity and doesn't require lots of ram, hd.

I like it, will need to see how my users experiences are. This was easy to deploy but customizing it was a learning curve but with a little research, figured out how to do it. Half my org uses MS TEAMS and comparting it to Rocket.Chat has me pretty amazed how feature rich rocket chat really is. Make sure if you want video chat capability to enable JITSI in the server admin console. One but I found was embedded video chat window doesn't display users webcam but if I detach that, webcam is displayed.

Pros

Relatively easy to install considering its a snap included in the Ubuntu 20 server bundle. Free to install, easy to use. Great for document collaboration, video calling and basic chat and integrates well with Microsoft AD.

Cons

Found several bugs in newest version. The software overall is stable but I personally have seen half a dozen bugs while testing this including LDAP integration and listing users names; some of which are included but not displayed in the client. I wish this had a capability to see all activated users and the presence status of each user in the admin console.

Good & free corporate chat alternative

Rocket.Chat is an overall-nice & free alternative to other enterprise messaging tools. A few words about setting it up: - The server runs on-premises, so all chat data currently resides in our own infrastructure - this was also one of the reasons we chose this. - Secondly it supports LDAP, so this played well with our Active Directory accounts. - Voice calling requires additional setup, which we decided to skip. - Mimetypes for supported file attachments need to be configured by hand, one-by-one And about usability: first of all, it does lack some nice-to-haves here and there: - It cannot be integrated with SharePoint, so there are no status updates when going in a meeting. - Since the desktop client is an Electron app, notifications are a bit lacking; these aren't persistent and besides showing a small blip in the system tray icon, you can't really tell whether there are any new messages. - Also due to the client being an Electron app, it cannot support systemwide shortcuts - It lacks the "threading discussion" that you see in other chat apps. However, all basic features are in place. Pasting images and links gives you a nice preview and text formatting is simple and works as expected. Also, it has a nice Off-The-Record mode where messages are not persisted. And finally, features are still being developed so new features are added constantly.

Pros

- Supports LDAP authentication - On-premises server - Platform availability (both web, mobile and Desktop) - Good & clean usability

Cons

- Some things are still not working in the mobile native app (e.g.: voting on polls) - No support for threaded chat - No straightforward integration with SharePoint - Electron client app only, so notifications are a bit lacking

Rocket.Chat Open Source Messaging Platform

We're using it just within the Systems department, and I like that it's installed locally and is completely controlled by us. We use it daily for quick messages between systems techs that don't need to be on our cloud messaging platform.

Pros

I love the simplicity and functionality of Rocket.Chat, especially for an open source app. Integration with Active Directory was quick and easy, and the mobile, desktop, and Web apps work great!

Cons

My one niggle with RC is with the way notifications work when you're logged in on multiple devices and apps. When I read a message on my desktop app, it's not marked as read on my mobile apps. I've searched high and low in the admin settings and can't find anything that I can turn on to fix that.