Mattermost vs Pidgin
When comparing Mattermost vs Pidgin, the Slant community recommends Pidgin for most people. In the question“What are the best Skype alternatives?” Pidgin is ranked 12th while Mattermost is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Pidgin is:
Pidgin not only supports IRC, it also supports plenty of other services such as AIM, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ and plenty of others. This way, you can have all of your conversations in the same app and won't have to deal with multiple chat windows being open.
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 Support for a wide range of additional chat services
Pidgin not only supports IRC, it also supports plenty of other services such as AIM, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ and plenty of others. This way, you can have all of your conversations in the same app and won't have to deal with multiple chat windows being open.
Pro Free and open source
Pidgin and its code is completely free and open source. Pidgin has no ads and no features behind a paywall.
Pro Cross platform
The Pidgin instant messaging client is cross platform, working on Linux, Windows and OSX.
Pro Convenient notification features
Like other quality IRC clients, Pidgin features notifications that the user can set in order to have a variety of things happen when the users is mentioned, such as an audio cue or changing the system tray icon.
Pro Highly customisable with plugins
Pidgin not only has a large plugin library built-in, but also an array of third party plugins for a variety of functions.
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 Miserable IRC font controls (as of 2.13.0.17)
Does its best to avoid putting sensible default font controls in any place where you can get to it. And when it does grudgingly change it, based on system preferences (not local preferences), it does so in an inconsistent and unpredictable fashion.
Con No native VoIP support
While there are plugins there is no built in support for VoIP in Pidgin which is time consuming to implement instead of being baked in from the jump.