Mattermost vs. Zimbra by Synacor

Mattermost is definitely appropriate for a growing company with team members spread out across the u.s. and Canada. It’s given me the ability to have access to anyone with the information I need or the ability to develop friendships, working relationships with people I otherwise wouldn’t have access to

Incentivized

I consider Zimbra Email & Collaboration a viable alternative to the major American cloud email platforms. In a scenario where data protection and privacy are critical, especially in an on-premise environment, Zimbra is a very suitable solution. It is also capable of offering a comprehensive set of tools and additional features (tasks, calendars, contacts, briefcase) in an integrated manner.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The management of incremental mail backup. It is very simple, and the administrators of my company recover information quickly.
• The management of the distribution lists is structured. This allows easy distribution of mass information.
• The web application is very complete and intuitive.

Incentivized

• Basic features like custom status, collapsed reply threads are JUST rolling out - kind of slow for a workplace chat app.
• I don't really get the idea of Playbooks and Boards - there are better, dedicated tools for stuff like this and it's not so easy to turn off.

Incentivized

• User web interface could be more friendly, but it is enough for daily use. It could be renewed and has to consider some usability concerns. Improving usability would significantly improve users' satisfaction.
• Message backup recovery is not a simple activity.
• As an administrator, some of the features work better using the command-line interface.
• The webclient uses ajax requests in almost every event. Because of that you may need a fast internet connection to have a good experience. You can switch to HTML version but it will limit what you can do.

Incentivized

Mattermost works perfectly within our company as a way to communicate seamlessly. I have had no issues with the product and continue to use it often while on and off site. The mobile app allows me to continue to communicate with my team even when I don't have my laptop with me.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The web usability of the solution is adequate, with all functions integrated into a single interface. However, it is important to note that in the desktop environment, it lacks its own application and relies on ActiveSync synchronization with reference solutions like Outlook or Thunderbird. Some features, such as the briefcase, will be excluded. The same happens on smartphones.It is also common for competing solutions to include integrated chat or video call tools, which Zimbra lacks. These shortcomings are among the most frequently requested by users.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

This went as expected. No surprises or major hurdles.

Incentivized

Overall, we were satisfied with the implementation. We perhaps should have spent more time consulting with Zimbra or others regarding best practices but as we got to know the system better we were able to make changes relatively easily after the fact.

Incentivized

Unlike Slack and Discord, Mattermost is self-hosted and focused on security. I used Discord before for community management and much simpler and less secure operations. Slack is great, but the fact that is cloud based takes out a lot of its independence.

Incentivized

• We were originally a Groupwise shop before changing to Zimbra in 2008. Zimbra, from an end-user standpoint, pricing, system administration, and management is a far better system.
• We use Google Apps for our students. We did not find it to be suitable for faculty and staff due to its lack of shared accounts.
• We are moving from Zimbra to Office 365. Office 365 offers just about all that Zimbra had, though its web interface is inferior to that of Zimbra. It does offer us greatly reduced costs though, and high availability. If Zimbra were to have a fully HA environment, we may have stayed with them.

Incentivized

• The platform is adaptive to storage data center outages in case our cloud storage provider goes away, Mattermost still works with our local database. However, files couldn't be shared. We can switch storage to local temporarily; that's a benefit. Later it all syncs up to main storage.
• When our team switched to Mattermost from paid solutions, we had much savings and access to unlimited past messages and storage quota (we use our cloud storage provider)
• We have better visibility of our tools and other products running adjacent to Mattermost due to integration capability. We use it for notifications/ updates sent from other products.

Incentivized

• Improved internal communication and dissemination and distribution of messages and corporate objectives.
• The creation of an internal network of employees is something that gives us security and confidence.
• Having a private and exclusive messaging system differentiates us from the competition and from other companies.