Hi all. I’m currently looking into alternatives to our current Saas chat solution and was wondering if it is viable to self host Matrix, or should I just go with a hosted solution from one of the ones listed on the Matrix page.
What have your experiences been so far? What would your recommendations be?
Moving from purely my own rolled distribution to the recommended Ansible pathway has basically made running matrix with all the bells and whistles a no-op. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/
This is what I run, too, and it’s fantastic.
I have my own Ansible recipe, but yeah, highly recommend
I also looked into this option and was wondering how it might collide with our existing Ansible playbooks, as Ansible itself is not declarative and some tasks might overwrite existing functionality.
Late to respond but it really depends on if there is overlap and they use containers and specific systems job names so I wouldn’t expect it to collide at all. I use my own playbooks as well as this one without any problems so far and I’m multiple years in.
Its possible, but only Synapse is working without various compatibility issues and you need to setup or rent a quite powerful server if you plan to participate in large public rooms.
That’s a valid point. Initially we were thinking of running without federation, just to avoid that someone creates a public room by accident and have all the internal communication out there.
I’m not sure if this is a valid fear, as I haven’t looked too deep into the permission options yet.
That’s not the problem I meant.
Matrix has an odd internal data representation of rooms that results in very high CPU, memory and storage use when joining large public rooms on other servers like matrix.org.
If you plan to mostly use it for internal communication and only have outside users join rooms on your server then the system requirements are relatively modest.
But usually there is always at least one user that tries joining large outside rooms and that tends to crash matrix servers on low end VPS pretty hard.
But if you are only looking for an internal chat system there are actually better options than Matrix.
Got it. Thanks.
Zulip looks like a good alternative for us due to the available integrations which we also will take for a spin. And there is always XMPP of course, but I’m not a huge fan of it as all the Clients seem rather outdated.
What other better options would you consider instead of Matrix? Happy to hear your suggestions ;)
If you have some time you might have a look at the soon to be releaaed xmpp based https://prose.org
Rocketchat, Nextcloud talk and Mattermost are also options, but Zulip is probably a good choice.
Element was giving us lots of trouble with my self-hosted Synapse instance. It regularly tossed keys so everyone was either getting locked out or everything, even their own stuff, was getting marked as undecryptable.
I haven’t gotten Dendrite working but apparently it’s a lot better on resources.I don’t know the situation, but that’s what happens if the user logs out on all devices without key backup being set up.
I’d recommend conduit if you’re self-hosting, especially on limited resources. Very easy to set-up and fast, and although not on feature-parity with Synapse, it does now have Spaces and threading support which is huge
Will have a look. Thanks.
