Mattermost vs Rocket.Chat

Both are self-hosted communication - custom communication systems projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are closely matched on maintenance health (91 vs 92). Neither is the safer bet on activity alone, so choose on features, licence and the stack you already run.
MattermostRocket.Chat
Health score 91/100 92/100
Commits (11 mo) 1768 2097
Commits (last 3 mo) 578 630
Stars 39k 46k
Latest release 25 Sept 2026 23 Sept 2026
Licence ⊘ Proprietary MIT
Built with Go, Docker, K8S Nodejs, Docker, K8S
Typical RAM 2 GB 2 GB

Mattermost

Platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle, can be integrated with Gitlab (alternative to Slack).

91/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 35/40
Releases 25/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 88% of tracked projects; popularity more than 94%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 162 commits 2025-11: 116 commits 2025-12: 87 commits 2026-01: 120 commits 2026-02: 133 commits 2026-03: 165 commits 2026-04: 199 commits 2026-05: 208 commits 2026-06: 190 commits 2026-07: 218 commits 2026-08: 170 commits

Rocket.Chat

Communications platform that puts data protection first (alternative to Gitter.im and Slack).

92/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 36/40
Releases 25/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 90% of tracked projects; popularity more than 96%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 168 commits 2025-11: 137 commits 2025-12: 303 commits 2026-01: 143 commits 2026-02: 203 commits 2026-03: 172 commits 2026-04: 167 commits 2026-05: 174 commits 2026-06: 199 commits 2026-07: 274 commits 2026-08: 157 commits

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted communication - custom communication systems.