# Matrix

257 Hacker News commenters recommended Matrix and 265 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (35 owners).

**Verdict:** An open, federated, end-to-end encrypted chat network that works as a Slack, Teams or Discord alternative with your choice of client, though critics cite encryption failures and hard self-hosting.

## Why people recommend it

- Open standard, choose your client (6 comments): "for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47024976)) "So in a sense, it is decentralized already, and it's only a matter of designing and building an interface to manage those packs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946838)) "personally I sort of prefer matrix because all these other protocols require apps whereas matrix can work on top of a browser" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352927))
- Ad-free alternative to Slack/Teams (4 comments): "My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902194)) "Matrix team is doing a solid job of running - Keep it up and keep eating the Slack/Teams marketshare up with competitive features and pricing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377371)) "No in-app purchases, hype generation, or kyhrt predatory designs, just the bare basics to get a functional chat app" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995979))
- End-to-end encryption by default (4 comments): "Matrix gives a similar experience with e2ee though, but you have to save a recovery key for the case you lose access to all your sessions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912201)) "has encryption being an enforced default for one-to-one mesasges (instead of XMPP's bolted-on after-the-fact extension)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46387367)) "The key is only necessary as a backup these days. You can share the key from one client to another which works well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47800393))
- Clients have improved a lot (3 comments): "Both Matrix the protocol and implementations like Element X have improved immeasurably over the last year or so." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902391)) "we fixed almost all known encryption in ~Sept 2024, and the new generation of clients fixes the slow sync issues" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110135)) "I use matrix with several non-technical friends. Its UI/UX has improved greatly over the last two years or so." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46956488))

## What people warn about

- Lost keys and undecryptable messages (4 comments): "technical (not PEBKAK) E2EE issues are rather common and can mean losing all of your messages at unpredictable and uncontrollable times" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378119)) "We've been happy Matrix users. Apart from less technical folks losing their encryption keys every now and then" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377872)) "Simply fixes some of the many ways that rooms can explode or be bricked. Zero confidence that room brickings are totally fixed once and for all." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377480))
- Self-hosting is complex and unwieldy (4 comments): "The protocol is too complex/ambitious and the company behind it doesn't have the resources to actually produce a good server nor client implementation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746980)) "I gave up after I upgraded my server from a SQLite backend to a PostgreSQL one with their conversion script which introduced errors into my DB." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114112)) "hosting Matrix is a nightmare -- as much as I admire what the Matrix crew is trying to do, the architecture is unwieldy and always has been" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497909))
- Clunky UI, hard for non-techies (4 comments): "Matrix is a superior concept to proprietary Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram etc but the implementation needs some help yet and UI is far behind." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038196)) "I loathe how difficult Matrix is for normal people though. It's a nightmare to find a client, get an account, connect to your server" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49503476)) "In the real world friends and family aren't running their own matrix servers. At most they are signed up for whatever random one came up first in the search results." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988672))
- Constant rewrites, half-finished clients (3 comments): "it's a known problem, with a known solution (finish ElementX and/or wait for other clients to catch up), and a weakness of an open ecosystem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069970)) "everything constantly being rewritten or replaced with something new that only implements half the features before the original thing is ever finished" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112553)) "issues with thier project organization forking and funding the last few years has made one of thier primary contributors give up on the project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46955751))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [XMPP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xmpp.md): 120 recommend
- [Jabber (XMPP)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jabber.md): 9 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Matrix", https://hackerapproved.com/p/matrix/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).