When comparing Campfire vs Mattermost, the Slant community recommends Mattermost for most people. In the question“What is the best team chat software?” Mattermost is ranked 6th while Campfire is ranked 30th. 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 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 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.
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 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.