Mattermost, which presents itself as an open source alternative to Slack raised $50M in series B funding. This is definitely something to get excited for.

Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration software that is mainly used for internal team communication. Enterprises, startups and even open source projects worldwide use it interact with colleagues and project members. Slack is free with limited features while the paid enterprise version has premium features.

Slack is valued at $20 billion in June, 2019. You can guess the kind of impact it has made in the tech industry and certainly more products are trying to compete with Slack.

$50 million for an open source project

Personally, I was not aware of Mattermost. But, when VentureBeat reported the story, it made me curious. The funding was led by Y Combinator’s Continuity with a new investor Battery Ventures and was joined by the existing investors – Redpoint and S28 Captial.

With the announcement, they also mentioned:

With today’s announcement, Mattermost becomes YC’s largest ever Series B investment, and more importantly, their largest open source investment to date.

To give you some specifics, here’s what VentureBeat mentioned:

The capital infusion follows a $20 million series A in February and a $3.5 million seed round in February 2017 and brings the Palo Alto, California-based company’s total raised to roughly $70 million.

If you are curious about their plans, you should go through their official announcement post.

Even though it all sounds good, what is Mattermost? Maybe you didn’t know about it, until now. So, let us take a brief look at it:

A quick look at Mattermost

Mattermost

As mentioned, it is an open source Slack alternative.

At first glance, it almost resembles the look and feel of Slack. Well, that’s the point here – you will have an open source solution that you’re comfortable using.

It even integrates with some of the popular DevOps tools like Git, Bots, and CI/CD. In addition to the functionality, it focuses on security and privacy as well.

Also, similar to Slack, it supports integration with multiple apps and services.

Sounds promising? I think so.

Pricing: Enterprise Edition vs Team Edition

If you want them (Mattermost) to host it (or want priority support), you should opt for the Enterprise edition. However, if you want to host it without spending a penny, you can download the Team edition and install it on your Linux-based cloud/VPS server.

Of course, we are not here to review it in-depth. However, I do want to mention that the enterprise edition is quite affordable.

Wrapping Up

Mattermost is definitely impressive. And, with a whopping $50M funding, it may become the next big thing in the open source community for users who were on the lookout for a secure and open source messaging platform with efficient team collaboration support.

What do you think about this news? Is it something exciting for you? Were you already aware of Mattermost as a slack alternative?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.