Discord vs Mattermost

Discord is a communication platform, founded in 2015 in San Francisco by Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, organized around servers: shared spaces with text channels, voice channels, video calls, forums, stages for live audio events and threads. It began as a voice chat app for gamers and has grown into the home of developer communities, open-source projects, creator fan bases and the user communities of many startups.

Server owners configure roles and permissions per channel, use AutoMod and bots for moderation, and connect integrations through webhooks and the developer platform, which also supports apps and activities inside Discord. Voice and video run with low latency, screen sharing works for streaming and support, and forums keep questions organized. Discord is free for nearly unlimited use; Nitro subscriptions add larger uploads, HD streaming and cosmetic perks, while server boosts unlock better audio quality and more customization for a whole community.

Companies use Discord for community support, developer relations and beta programs rather than internal work chat, where Slack and Microsoft Teams dominate with search, SSO, compliance and admin controls. Weak search, the permission model and a consumer-oriented interface can make it hard to run as an official business tool, and access depends on local regulation: Turkey, for example, blocked Discord in October 2024. Slack suits internal teams, Circle and Discourse suit structured, searchable communities, and Telegram suits broadcast-style groups.

Mattermost is an open-source collaboration platform for technical and mission-critical teams. It started as an internal chat tool at a game company and is now developed by Mattermost, Inc. in Palo Alto. Organizations deploy it on their own servers, in private clouds or in fully air-gapped networks, which is why defense agencies, governments, banks and critical infrastructure operators use it.

The core is Slack-style team messaging with channels, threads, direct messages, file sharing, search, and desktop and mobile apps. On top of that come Playbooks for repeatable processes such as incident response, and integrations with GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Jenkins and other DevOps tools through webhooks, slash commands and plugins. Free self-hosted editions cover core messaging, though since version 11 (October 2025) the Entry edition shows only the latest 10,000 messages and Team Edition is capped at 250 users; Professional adds SSO, advanced permissions and guest accounts for a per-user fee; Enterprise adds compliance exports, data retention policies, high availability and advanced security.

Mattermost fits organizations that cannot put their conversations in a vendor-hosted cloud, and DevOps teams that want chat tied to their tooling. The trade-off is user experience and ecosystem: the interface is behind Slack, there are far fewer third-party apps, and self-hosting needs operational effort. Slack and Microsoft Teams are easier if data residency is not a constraint; Rocket.Chat is another open-source option, and Element, built on Matrix, adds federation and end-to-end encryption.