Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board vs. Mattermost

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Social Squared is a SharePoint Discussion Board App that can be deployed across SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams. Social Squared improves productivity and efficiency by providing structured discussion forums for employee and student discussions. For Microsoft SharePoint Social Squared is a SharePoint discussion board application where users can post questions within relevant forums and receive answers to their questions from subject matter experts. The…
$2,200
per year per installation
Mattermost
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Mattermost from the company of the same name in Palo Alto is a messaging, collaboration and communication platform providing high security and compliance for the businesses that need it.
$0
per month per user
Pricing
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion BoardMattermost
Editions & Modules
Social Squared Discussion Board
From $2200
per year per installation
Social Squared Discussion Board Enterprise Edition
POA
per year per installation
Free Self-Hosted
$0
per month per user
Professional
$10
per month per user
Enterprise
Contact Us
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion BoardMattermost
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsPrices stated are minimum per installation for "stock" products. $2.20 per user/year on top of base price. Enterprise editions can be amended to suit business needs if deemed necessary, additional costs incurred and TBD. All packages include free technical support. Free upgrades available to latest versions of tool as they are released.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion BoardMattermost
Features
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion BoardMattermost
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
-
Ratings
Mattermost
8.3
46 Ratings
7% above category average
Task Management00 Ratings7.034 Ratings
Gantt Charts00 Ratings8.410 Ratings
Scheduling00 Ratings8.410 Ratings
Workflow Automation00 Ratings7.427 Ratings
Mobile Access00 Ratings9.043 Ratings
Search00 Ratings8.925 Ratings
Visual planning tools00 Ratings9.012 Ratings
Communication
Comparison of Communication features of Product A and Product B
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
-
Ratings
Mattermost
8.4
49 Ratings
6% above category average
Chat00 Ratings9.249 Ratings
Notifications00 Ratings8.449 Ratings
Discussions00 Ratings8.947 Ratings
Surveys00 Ratings8.930 Ratings
Internal knowledgebase00 Ratings6.233 Ratings
Integrates with GoToMeeting00 Ratings8.99 Ratings
Integrates with Gmail and Google Hangouts00 Ratings8.713 Ratings
Integrates with Outlook00 Ratings8.39 Ratings
File Sharing & Management
Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Product A and Product B
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board
-
Ratings
Mattermost
9.1
29 Ratings
15% above category average
Versioning00 Ratings9.012 Ratings
Video files00 Ratings9.323 Ratings
Audio files00 Ratings9.323 Ratings
Document collaboration00 Ratings7.919 Ratings
Access control00 Ratings9.923 Ratings
Advanced security features00 Ratings9.020 Ratings
Integrates with Google Drive00 Ratings8.613 Ratings
Device sync00 Ratings10.017 Ratings
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User Ratings
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion BoardMattermost
Likelihood to Recommend
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(51 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(7 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(36 ratings)
User Testimonials
Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion BoardMattermost
Likelihood to Recommend
Lightning Tools
Their customer service it top notch and always responsive. I struggled in the beginning a little bit because I'm not tech savvy and we had to add it to our SharePoint site but they helped me along the way and even had share screen meetings with me to assist!!
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Mattermost
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.
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Pros
Lightning Tools
  • Organizing Data
  • Opens up discussion, whether publicly or anonymously
  • Easy to setup
Read full review
Mattermost
  • 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.
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Cons
Lightning Tools
  • I would love to be able to assign various people as administrators of different topics (this may be an option now but a couple years ago it wasn't)
Read full review
Mattermost
  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Mattermost
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
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Usability
Lightning Tools
Our employees really like the fact that they can find things easily with the search feature and add questions and comments as they see fit.
Read full review
Mattermost
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.
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Support Rating
Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Mattermost
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.
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Implementation Rating
Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Mattermost
This went as expected. No surprises or major hurdles.
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Alternatives Considered
Lightning Tools
No answers on this topic
Mattermost
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
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Return on Investment
Lightning Tools
  • We signed up for a 3 year contract and hope to do another 3yr contract when this one is up. :)
Read full review
Mattermost
  • 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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Lightning Tools Social Squared Discussion Board Screenshots

Screenshot of MODERN, RESPONSIVE SHAREPOINT DISCUSSION BOARD
Discussion Forums can be created for a variety of different reasons. This example is a Forum Group for the Microsoft 365 technologies such as Teams, Planner, and SharePoint. Forums are then created within the Forum Groups for more specific discussions. Under the SharePoint Forum Group, there is a Forum for SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online. Anyone looking to ask a question regarding SharePoint 2019 for example would be able to post their question under SharePoint On-Premises rather than SharePoint Online. This also allows subject matter experts to focus more on the questions that they can respond to and provide value.Screenshot of SHAREPOINT DISCUSS BOARD – TOPICS VIEW
When navigating into a forum, the topics and discussions that are taking place are shown. Any new topics that not yet read will be highlighted. It also displays whether topics have been answered, their average ratings, how many views and posts are within the topic, and also provides the ability to subscribe to the forum to be notified of new posts within it.Screenshot of READING DISCUSSIONS AND PROVIDING FEEDBACK
Social Squared offers a threaded discussion view with the ability to provide feedback to other users.

Posts can be rated, voted upon, or liked by users in order to give feedback to the user creating or responding to a post. Additionally, replies can be marked as answered or marked as featured, which gives readers of forums assurance that the response they are reading is validated to be the correct answer.

Users also receive feedback through the earning of badges. The more users post or mark posts as answered, the more points are rewarded. This makes it easy to spot subject matter experts.Screenshot of SUGGESTED TAGS
Social Squared provides a rich text editor for creating and replying to topics. The Rich Text toolbar provides functionality such as inserting images, YouTube videos, Stream Videos, Formatted Code Inserts, as well as font formatting.

While typing, suggestions on how to tag a post appear. Selecting an existing tag will provide consistency in the tags used making it easier for other users to discover the post.Screenshot of SOCIAL SQUARED TAG CLOUD VIEW
The Social Squared Tag Cloud view makes it easy to navigate to posts within a specific category even if they span multiple forums. The more a tag appears in different posts, the more prominent it will be in the tag cloud. Users can navigate to posts with the tag in one click.Screenshot of DISCUSSION BOARD WITHIN MICROSOFT TEAMS TAB
Social Squared is a Discussion Board App for Microsoft Teams Tab’s and Microsoft Teams Personal Apps. Social Squared provides information workers the ability to post questions within relevant forums, and receive answers from their team. The Discussion Board layout for posts makes it easier to find answers to questions that may have already been asked before. Through features such as “Mark as Answered”, “Forum Moderation”, “Post Rating”, “Post Likes”, “Post Voting”, users will be assured that the answers they are reading are validated.

Mattermost Screenshots

Screenshot of Channels: All team communications in one place.Screenshot of Playbooks: Orchestrates work across tools and teams.Screenshot of Boards: Project planning and milestones.Screenshot of Connections: Unites the entire technology stack through a single point of collaboration.