These days, it is inevitable to stay out of the reach to technology! The reason? People, processes, businesses and all daily routines associated with them are highly in connect with the technology for the quick and smooth running of complex tasks. Technology and business have to always go hand-in-hand! With the digitization of almost every process under the sun today, it has become simple and easy for businesses to provide great service for the people with it.

Say, for instance, many big players of the e-commerce market today run their operations at their on-premise servers with the help of technology, the self-hosting delivery model to hold the heavy load of processes, data, and for handling secured customer payment transactions. Besides business, organizations like Governments, Defence, Banking, and large enterprises look forward to having a secured self-hosted internal collaboration tool within their departments, teams, ministries, etc., to ensure safe information-exchanges.

At this juncture, talking about the two high-trust team collaboration tools would not be an exaggeration to make you convince with an above preface. Eager to know what they are? They are Troop Messenger and Mattermost, the leaders of the self-hosting delivery model that allow hosting on-premises. Having said that, Troop Messenger have started stealing the show over Mattermost recently in self-hosting, besides its SaaS version.

A brief about both:

Troop Messenger, a secured self-hosted team collaboration application has been specially designed to address the diverse communication needs of data privacy-conscious industries with the delivery of seamless and simple on-premises deployment process. The tool with a powerful feature-stack than any other big player in the market, including the Mattermost, has received rave reviews from its international clients.

Mattermost, an open-source messaging platform also ensures high trust messaging like the former, which allows developers to create ChatOPs, communication development environment and more with full code audibility and control. Moreover, it allows direct access to source code including UI text files, APIs, drivers, integrations which eventually allow building everything right from the login page branding to White-labelling mobile apps.

Deployment: Which is the simplest?

Though there seem to be more demerits in the Self-hosted model than SaaS hosting. But still why big-sized organizations prefer to host applications/software in their local servers? The well-heard answer to this question should be its data privacy and security.

Why would any data-sensitive entities like Governments, Armed forces, Defence, Space agencies, Large business want to host and run their digital operations over any public cloud, despite knowing the possibility of third party intervention, when there is a sophisticated and highly secured self-hosted application delivery model available with Troop Messenger? And its counterpart Mattermost?

Host them on your local servers for full-level data control thereby ensuring security and privacy to your data. More or less, the deployment process goes similar to both Troop Messenger and Mattermost. They allow you to host them over a diverse set of operating systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac. Deploy on your private networks to safely exchange conversations within your intranet. The major steps involved in the deployment process of self-hosting goes like this;

• Docker Install
• Database Setup
• Load your application Docker
• Start your application Docker Server
• Navigate to your IP address
• Complete the DB configuration with MYSQL host – User and Password details.
• Grab Docker Container
• Stop Docker Container
• Start Docker Container

We have had our hands-on Mattermost deployed at our servers to test-run the application, but felt there were more steps involved to get it worked, than Troop Messenger’s deployment process. So, Governments and all data-sensitive industries out there, deploy Troop Messenger now to have massive and secured team conversations.

User Interface: Which has more clear navigation?

The ultimate place where we land on for work conversations to happen after successful self-hosted deployment and registration are on the app user interface, whether it could be Troop Messenger or Mattermost.

Our teams have used Mattermost for a while to understand the ease of navigation and concluded with few observations. Though the UI looks simple and clean, they could not get convinced with the user experience part. Say, for instance, in Troop Messenger, you can easily find all the users/groups/orange members list of the organization on the left side of the application UI. From here, you can directly choose or search for one with Global Search filters and start conversations. Whereas the same seems to be tedious with Mattermost. You need to click on the “+” icon of the direct messages to view the user’s list and then select one to start conversations.

The placement of public and private channels on the left side panel of Mattermost seems to be more interesting than Troop Messenger. Though “ADD” button is shown on the left-top-right corner to create groups. The use of the word, ‘Groups with the group logo would be more desirable for first-time users to avoid any confusion.

Ultimately, it is not less to say that Troop Messenger provides simple and easy conversational experience to all its users with the chat supportive features of preview files, image scrolling, unread message filter, favorites filter, advanced filter group that filters images, videos, files, URLs, location, and contacts separately for quick access of information. And, it’s working towards fine-tuning of UI to look more pleasing in its next version release.

Feature-Stack: The real competition

Now its the time to talk about the real essence that lies within every team collaboration tool: the great feature list. Undeniably, Troop Messenger has state-of-the-art unique functional features that no other team chat software has, which includes Mattermost too.

However, whether an application deployed SaaS or Self-Hosting, the features remain the same

Unlike in Troop Messenger, Mattermost doesn’t have the crucial collaboration features of Voice call, Video Call, Audio Messaging, and Screen sharing built within the application. One needs to integrate from third-party apps to communicate across. Apart from the discussed features here, Troop Messenger comes with next-level features like;

Burnout( a confidential private chat window for conversations),

• Forkout
• Read Receipts
• Advanced filter group
• Logout from all devices
• Suggest users
• Analytics Reports
• Text Search
• Global Search and more

Pricing

Coming to the commercials. Service providers offer various billing options like monthly or yearly billing plans. A few of them just levy minimum charges for unused days. A business owner has many affordable and flexible payment choices to choose a good instant messaging tool for his/her teams.

And as we move on to Mattermost and Troop Messenger pricing; the former comes with two types of plans; Enterprise E10 priced at $3.25 user/month when billed annually, and Enterprise E20 priced at $8.50 user/month when billed annually. It allows users to experience a free 30-day trial of Enterprise E20. Troop Messenger, on the other hand, offers Premium Plan priced at $1; Enterprise priced at $5 and Self-hosted delivery model at $5+.

I now leave it you, whether you opt the Enterprise edition of Troop Messenger with all the advanced features @$5/user/year or Mattermost Enterprise E20 @$8.50.

Conclusion:

Still thinking more? Try Troop Messenger, your best self-hosted team collaboration business tool for secured information-exchanges. Governments and its associated entities; put your massive concurrent user collaboration in safe hands with the multi-layered security features of Troop Messenger. Your data! Your Control.