When comparing Medium vs Rocket.Chat, the Slant community recommends Rocket.Chat for most people. In the question“What are the best Social Networking Platforms?” Rocket.Chat is ranked 5th while Medium is ranked 6th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Clean, beautiful pages
Medium has clean, minimalist pages with pictures and great typography.
Pro Excellent readability
There are no distractions and with a clean layout and great typography, reading Medium articles is a pleasure.
Pro Zero setup required
As soon as you sign-up for the service, you are ready to start writing.
Pro Clean writing experience
Medium takes away all the clutter without taking away any necessary features for a better writing experience. And it doesn't require knowing Markdown to write, all tools are WYSIWYG.
Pro Great inbound channels to acquire bigger audiences quickly
Has a great network based on tags and search for "Suggest an article" as a similar read to others and for specific categories. Allows you a much bigger audience quicker than most platforms.
Pro Unintrusive yet powerful community interaction
Allows for finding new, related content.
Pro Great post editor
A WYSIWYG editor that does not get in the way at all. It is invisible most of the time and only appears when you select something.
Pro Bookmarking
Medium allows bookmarking articles and following collections as well as users.
Pro Paragraph based commenting
As Medium encourages long-form writing they've re-imagined how comments should work accordingly. You can leave comments for every paragraph separately, so you don't have to reference a specific part in a comments section at the bottom. Technically, the feature is called "notes."
Pro Recommendation system
Intended for appreciating a post, allows easier discoverability of an article by other readers.
Pro Photo upload and display is aesthetically pleasing
If you post photos as part of your blog, the interface on Medium is one of the best for both inline uploading as well as display in the post itself.
Pro Built-in analytics
Medium shows how many people have opened your post and how many have read through it. And how many people have recommended your post.
Pro Collaborative if you want it to be
You can send a draft out to other people and have them edit and leave notes on it.
Pro Google Analytics support
They can enable this for you upon request.
Pro Excellent Post editor
With so many built-in features and flexibility to use, I would recommend Medium first amongst all.
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 Medium can use your content however they want
Your content can be used royalty-free by Medium according to their Terms of Service.
Con Not self-hostable
Con Cannot customise domain address
From April 2018, Medium has removed the ability to set a customised domain on new accounts.
Con Proprietary
Con Limited customization options
In order to create a dead simple way to use the service, possibility to customize your blog was sacrificed. Medium publications, however, do allow a limited amount of customization.
Con Non-intuitive, non-threaded comment system
Con Freemium philosophy
Con Export is limited
The only export option is HTML. If you want to migrate away from Medium for some reason, it might be very difficult to do so.
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.