The Rocket.chat experience, the feedbacks from the community
Hey everyone,
after using Rocket.chat for a few days we summarised the feedback from the community and our administrative feedback for ease of reading and to let us retrieve them later during the next test run(s).
The feedbacks from the community
The community reported back that with adding more and more channels it felt way less organized due to the web and app behaviour. Even though Rocket.chat comes with native mobile apps, the community found them lacking in terms of QoL functionalities and carrying more bugs than the web interface
Overall, the community deemed Rocket.chat to be way too deep into the enterprise and soulless corporate side of things, more than being a community tool, while also preferring the previous test (Discourse) instead of the current test. Generally speaking, the community felt that the best solution wasn't probably a single app or service but rather a combination of at least two services, one for community building and one for quick communication (textual, voice, video, this last not being a dealbreaker)
The feedbacks from the staff
What we found positive from the behind-the-curtains side of things is that Rocket.chat is self hostable, not too difficult to maintain and easy to setup and quite lightweight infrastructurally.
What really didn't click with us (or clicked negatively) is that most of the settings are paywalled behind a subscription and said subscription has to be paid even for self-hosted instance. The first setup require mandatorily a subscription/registration to the starter plan (free up to 50 users), with no way to skip it. The community plan (which we're currently using after downgrading) allow us to have only 5 plugin/integrations; we installed Giphy and Jitsi during the test run and many others are just proprietary/big tech plugins. We couldn't enable push notifications for our instance because Rocket.chat requires a subscription to use the Rocket.chat official gateway even for self hosted instances OR let you build a custom android/iOS app (whitelabeling) which is a huge tech commitment;
Generally speaking, the overall UX is more similar to Matrix (Element, etc.) than Slack and seems being more enterprise oriented than community oriented, differently from the previous test (Discourse)
Next steps
In the days ahed we will proceed to the next test run, that will be described in the next blog post.
Stay tuned for more updates
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