The program stands out amongst the alternatives to Slack because it’s not only free of charge, but also, thanks to open source code, is easily customizable for developers within your company. For large companies that need tech support, there are also fee-based variants. In the basic version Rocket. Chat only provides the application, the hosting is done by each team itself.
Users only need to download the server and sensitive data can remain on their own server. For those that do in fact want a host, Rocket. Chat offers a free, scalable cloud service.
Rocket. Chat offers three packages – Bronze, Silver, and Gold. The price includes between 1 GB and 20 GB storage space an unlimited number of users.
Basic support is also provided with each package. To get priority support however, users must pay extra, also in the cloud version. For larger companies, the monthly fee is often worthwhile, but smaller companies may prefer the basic support.
Rocket.Chat offers the normal messenger features that every good Slack alternative should provide. Team and project-related chats are possible, as well as private messages. Private channels, as seen above, are closed channels with extra encrypted content that’s not archived. Additionally, Rocket.Chat adapts to different user types. The in-house company communication functions just as fluently as Rocket.Chat’s integrated B2C live chat on your website. You can add an unlimited number of users, guests, and channels. All messages are end-to-end encrypted. Two-factor authentication for file sharing provides additional security.
The developers are constantly working on the Rocket.Chat code, which enabled them to implement the API into the core software. Use Hubot and Webhooks to integrate the existing tools and other Rocket.Chat bots. The community recommends, for example, Jitsi Video Bridge to stabilize the existing video chat and connect the geographically distant chat partners. Further integrations include:
- Google Calendar
- DeadSimpleScreenSharing
- Azure Alerts
- BitBucket
- Jira
- PagerDuty
- Nixstats
- Travis CI
- Trello
- GitHub and GitLab
- Zapier
Rocket.Chat is ahead of Slack in terms of its voice and video call function. During a meeting, chat participants can easily join the conversation and get access to the screen sharing option.
The typical conversation chaos that comes about with long chats is organized by Threads and Hubot – though this is less mature than the Slack model, the slackbot.