Mattermost

Slack is the industry standard for managed instant messaging (IM). A good alternative would be to self (or cloud) host an open source IM such as Mattermost but as always it would be a good idea to do a cost benefit analysis between the solutions.

Some of the main things to consider:

• Having a good SDK for plugin creation
• Having good integrations with existing tools ( @{JIRA}|tool:154| , @{GitHub}|tool:27| , @{OpsGenie}|tool:1185| , etc.)
• Cost
• Maintenance and administration
• Covers all your businesses use cases

Recently we finished long research on chat tool for our students and mentors. In the end we picked Mattermost Team Edition as the cheapest and most feature complete option. We did consider building everything from scratch and use something like Pusher or Twilio on a backend, but then we would have to implement all the desktop and mobile clients and all the features oursevles. Mattermost gave us flexible API, lots of built in or easy to install integrations and future-proof feature set. We are still integrating it with our main platform but so far the team, existing mentors and students are very happy.

Why we piggybacked on the open source Mattermost for Uber's chat needs, which we open sourced as uChat ( GitHub : https://github.com/uber-uchat/ -- contributing some of our changes back to Mattermost as well in the process.)

With operations in over 620 cities, it was paramount for us to identify a chat solution that would enable Uber employees to reliably communicate on desktop and mobile regardless of where they were in the world. To accomplish this, we established a few core requirements. To start, we needed something that could scale to support our growing employee population and, as a byproduct, control costs. We also needed a platform that could easily integrate with a variety of internal engineering, business, and operational tools.

While we evaluated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and many other popular chat clients, it became clear that there was no turnkey third-party solution able to meet Uber’s core requirements.

So after testing multiple off-the-shelf alternatives, we built uChat, our custom in-house messaging platform, by leveraging open source platform Mattermost and Puppet Labs , the Uber standard for deployment configuration management. In this article, we discuss how in just three months our team transitioned the company to a new solution capable of reliably delivering over one million messages per day to tens of thousands of users, all in one unified chat environment:

https://eng.uber.com/uchat/

I use Zulip instead of Slack, Mattermost, or RocketChat because of its first class threading. One week after switching to Gmail (in 2004) I realized I was never (willingly) going to use an unthreaded email product again. I had that same experience the first time I saw Zulip.

Zulip is also fully open-source, with a well-maintained (e.g. 90+% test coverage, fully static python), easily extensible code-base. In many companies, your communication platform (chat or email) is the center of the workplace -- no one asks for a chat integration into their calendar, they ask for a calendar integration into their chat. A fully open-source codebase means you can customize Zulip to your needs, and are never at the whim of a corporate maintainer who can't or won't fix simple bugs, or who will charge you tens of thousands of dollars for making minor customizations.

It is no secret that we use Mattermost at Faelix — after all, it is a product we already support to be able to offer it to our customers. And like many network operators we use Oxidized to track and log changes to our routers and switches, even when those changes are made by automation tools.

As part of our move to using more ChatOps within the business I wanted to get visibility of network changes within our network operations channel in Mattermost. A quick and dirty script achieved this. Mattermost