I’ve been evaluating Mattermost for several teams and playing around with it on some some devel environments. I haven’t pushed heavily for adoption yet but was leaning that direction. I have some teams that are just starting that I don’t want to get stuck inside Slack or another proprietary system and a few others already there that may migrate someday. The rapid development as well as clear coding practices and workflow have suggested to me that Mattermost is the most promising open-source team chat system out there.
That idea was recently shaken by the unexpected open-sourcing of Zulip. I had seen that system before but wrote it off as just another walled garden. Now they have open sourced the entire stack including front end, back end, native mobile apps, etc. This is significant stuff.
Now my question is where does this put Mattermost? No longer at the top of the maturity stack as far as open source options are concerned…Zulip has been around a bit longer and is built out a lot further as far as features go. Native mobile apps and working integrations are really attractive to me right now.
Has the Mattermost crew evaluated tha source code base? Is there anything useful there to jump start Mattermost efforts? Is there any adjustment to the vision as far as what audience is going to be most targeted? Have feature priorities changed with a new player in the space? Has anybody else evaluated the pros and cons of Zulip, how hackable the code is going to be, how likely it is to see organized advancement from this point on, etc.?