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Add to SafariWhen comparing Campfire vs Rocket.Chat, the Slant community recommends Rocket.Chat for most people. In the question“What is the best team chat software?” Rocket.Chat is ranked 7th while Campfire is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose Rocket.Chat is:
Rocket.Chat is available for free. It's licensed under the MIT license with source code available on [GitHub](https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat).
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Supports optional 128-bit SSL encryption
Pro Guest access
You can invite people to join conversations even if they don't have a Campfire account. Campfire will generate a link to share and the guest will only need to enter their name to join the conversation.
Pro Easy conferencing
When you need to make a conference call, all you need to click is "Start A New Call" and Campfire instantly embeds a phone number and password code in the message thread.
Pro Mobile apps
Campfire supports only iOS, but third party apps can be used for Android. There are also other third party apps that build upon Campfire and extend its functionality.
Pro Embeds images
Images that are uploaded in the GIF, PNG, or JPEG formats are represented as thumbnails in the chat room.
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.
Cons
Con Future of Campfire is uncertain
37signals have "changed direction" away from Campfire, focusing on Basecamp. They've ruled out shutting it down, but at this stage it's uncertain whether it'll be spun off as a separate company, sold off, or run in maintenance mode without any new features.
Con No private one-on-one conversation possibility
Con Does not show who's online
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.
