When comparing Mattermost vs Facebook Messenger, the Slant community recommends Mattermost for most people. In the question“What are the best Skype alternatives?” Mattermost is ranked 15th while Facebook Messenger is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose Mattermost is:
You don't need to rely on someone else's servers, you can host Mattermost on your own server.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Can be self-hosted
You don't need to rely on someone else's servers, you can host Mattermost on your own server.
Pro One-line Docker install
With Docker set up, you can install Mattermost with the following command:
docker run --name mattermost-dev -d --publish 8065:80 mattermost/platform
For other cases, installation instructions can be found here.
Pro Similar to Slack
Almost all features of Slack are available in Mattermost.
Pro Free - OpenSource
You can download and use it as free for self-hosted server.
Pro Mobile apps for android and iOS
Pro You can change theme
Pro Desktop app for MacOS, Linux and Windows
Pro Browser notifications
Pro Mark-Down support
Yes, it supports markdown.
Pro Chat head for quick access
Only for android platform though!
Cons
Con No easy End-to-End Encryption setup
Con Features not available out of the box
Difficult to setup the many features it offers. The easy docker installation is for the application only, not it's feature sets. Requires a license for full-set of features.
Con Centralized
Con Poorly made iOS app
Built natively using React it suffers from unresponsiveness, input lag, and sometimes broken services. Coupled with a bad user experience.
Con Poorly made Android app
The Android application is just a badly wrapped web-view which does not perform well and has no form of offline caching whatsoever.
Con Self-Hosted
This doesn't work for every type of company. Mainly great for those concerned with privacy, security, compliance and control of your data/information.
Con Owned by Facebook
Con Cluttered user interface
Messenger has so many features accessible from one page that it is often difficult to find what you're looking for.
Con End-to-end encryption only in "Secret" conversations
If you want e2e encryption, you need to start a secret conversation.
Con Not very customizable
With so many features in one app, it's very possible you might not be a fan of at least one of them. Too bad you can't disable anything in settings.