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Add to SafariWhen comparing Rocket.Chat vs Element (formerly Riot), the Slant community recommends Element (formerly Riot) for most people. In the question“What is the best chat software?” Element (formerly Riot) is ranked 3rd while Rocket.Chat is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Element (formerly Riot) is:
You're not confined within Element's or even Matrix garden, and you don't have to make users of other networks switch to Matrix.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Rocket.Chat is available for free. It's licensed under the MIT license with source code available on GitHub.
Pro Native apps for all major desktop and mobile platforms
Rocket.Chat has native apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.
Pro Supports a wide variety of authentication methods
In addition to the usual email / username + password combination, Rocket.Chat supports authenticating via Facebook, Github, Gitlab, Google, Linkedin, Meteor and Twitter accounts.
Pro Understands markdown better than Slack does.
Links work properly, for instance, with square brackets followed by parentheses.
Pro Very active and helpful community
Pro Video conferencing support
Rocket.Chat supports video calls.
Pro Bridges to other networks
You're not confined within Element's or even Matrix garden, and you don't have to make users of other networks switch to Matrix.
Pro Markdown support
Code snippets in chats can be highlighted with Markdown.
Pro Simple interface
Element has a very simple interface, adding the ability for more inexperienced users to use it.
Pro VOIP and Videoconferencing
Pro Supports encryption
Element allows for fully encrypted text, voice, and video chatting.
Pro Widgets support
Want to watch that flick at YouTube and discuss it at the same time? Have Grafana graphs stacked above your DevOps team chat? Collaboratively edit Google Docs and chat over without switching applications? This is possible with Element.
Pro Decentralized
An open network for secure, decentralized communication.
Pro Self-hosting and federated network
Pro Libre/open source
Pro Search
Search messages in your current room, or all the rooms you're in. Not subject to a message history limit like Slack.
Pro Cross platform
Web browser
Linux
OS X
Windows
Android
iOS
Pro Large existing community
With public rooms for many people, and you can create your own and let people from the community join.
Pro Etherpad real-time document collaboration
An easy to activate integration that allows multiple authors to edit a document simultaneously.
Pro File Sharing
Pro Supports text, voice, video
Cons
Con Developer support is non-existent
Can't even create a clean Ubuntu VM with a working developer install. Unresolved dependencies; fails to build. Docs are terrible; actual devs don't respond to questions; error messages are near-opaque. DO NOT RECOMMEND.
Con Web client loses images
In chat rooms with images, before very long, images start to become empty boxes. Useless to pass around visual information
Con No theme customization
Con No chat audit for enterprise
Con Poor security implementations / protocols
Con Centralized
Con iOS app is poorly made
The iOS application is not native, being just a browser container. This means that the UX is quite poor, slow, buttons unresponsive. At this moment they do not provide a decent experience.
Con Android app is poorly made
The Android application is just a badly wrapped web-view which does not perform well and has no form of offline caching whatsoever.
Con Privacy settings are absent
Privacy settings for the server are absent, for instance, you don't have the ability to disable registrations, there's no way to control access to the chat.
Con Features not available out of the box
Con No web browser support
Con Email required for registration
Con No way to block new registrations
Without the ability to disable registrations, there's no way to control access to the chat.
