# Rocket.Chat 14 Hacker News commenters recommended Rocket.Chat and 11 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Recommended as a self-hostable Slack alternative with easy packaging for quick rollout; critics report frequent outages, MongoDB upkeep trouble, and immature end-to-end encryption. ## Why people recommend it - Self-hostable Slack alternative (3 comments): "If you are looking for another self-hostable alternative to Slack, Rocket chat[0] is also worth looking at." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861784)) "Community chat: Zulip, Rocket.chat" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46985852)) "Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47019033)) - Easy first-class packaging for rollout (2 comments): "Mattermost, Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281192)) "Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282693)) ## What people warn about - Slow and prone to outages (2 comments): "add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771750)) "I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874410)) - Open-core business model concerns (2 comments): "There really is no winning in the org comms/chat apps space when it comes to OSS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45996001)) "are open-core military contractors these days" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46952491)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Slack](https://hackerapproved.com/p/slack.md): 248 recommend - [Microsoft Teams](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-teams.md): 228 recommend - [Zulip](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zulip.md): 143 recommend - [Chatto](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chatto.md): 55 recommend - [Mattermost](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mattermost.md): 40 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Rocket.Chat", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rocket-chat/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).