Rocket.Chat
Shares rank 9 of 11 team chat apps by recommenders
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.
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.
25 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 14
- criticize it
- 11
- approval share
- 56%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 14 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Self-hostable Slack alternative
“If you are looking for another self-hostable alternative to Slack, Rocket chat[0] is also worth looking at.”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Mattermost say they will not clarify what license the project is under” “Community chat: Zulip, Rocket.chat”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass” “Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do”
Comment from 14 Feb 2026 in “OpenAI Should Build Slack” Easy first-class packaging for rollout
“Mattermost, Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out.”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “Anthropic, Please Make a New Slack” “Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out”
Comment from 6 Mar 2026 in “Anthropic, Please Make a New Slack”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow and prone to outages
“add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.” “I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US” Open-core business model concerns
“There really is no winning in the org comms/chat apps space when it comes to OSS”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “Verifying your Matrix devices is becoming mandatory” “are open-core military contractors these days”
Comment from 9 Feb 2026 in “Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month”
Other team chat apps people recommend
The four most recommended other team chat apps, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slack | 248 | 387 | 39% | 12 | 10 yrs10 owners | — |
| Microsoft Teams | 228 | 701 | 25% | 13 | 1.5 yrs11 owners | — |
| Zulip | 143 | 58 | 71% | 11 | 5 yrs10 owners | Approved |
| Chatto | 55 | 13 | 81% | 5 | — | Approved |
| Rocket.ChatThis page | 14 | 11 | 56% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
19 of the 26 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“i'd probably use RocketChat or something like that”
“I have a lot of troubles with a small private instance of Rocket chat, all due to MongoDb stuff, versions, migrations and backups.”
“E2EE is early in development, lots of security issues at last check”
“Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out”
“Mattermost, Rocketchat and others have first class packaging for quick and easy roll out.”
“Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do”
“Community chat: Zulip, Rocket.chat”
“All the others are too expensive (Mattermost, Rocket)”
“It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.”
“are open-core military contractors these days”
“I thought it was fine, but I can't compare to the Mattermost app since I've never tried to use that.”
“I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts”
“Rocket Chat does look nice!”
“If you are looking for another self-hostable alternative to Slack, Rocket chat[0] is also worth looking at.”
“add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness”
“Last time I checked they were worse.”
“These don't offer the core UX of Discord”
“the open source Rocket.Chat”
“There really is no winning in the org comms/chat apps space when it comes to OSS”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.