Mattermost vs Slack vs Element

Pick up to 4 tools and see their free plans, entry prices, platforms and limits in one table. Every fact comes from each vendor's own pages, checked 7 November 2026.

Compared on	Mattermost Contact sales Visit Remove	Slack Free plan · from $7.25/user/mo Visit Remove	Element Free plan Visit Remove
What it is	Self-hosted team messaging and workflow platform for security-sensitive organizations	Team messaging built around channels, with huddles, canvases and workflow automation	Secure messaging and calls built on the decentralised Matrix standard
Free plan	No	Free plan keeps 90 days of message history, allows up to 10 app integrations, and limits huddles and Slack Connect external messages to 1:1	Element Server Suite Community is free of charge for non-professional deployments and evaluations, for 1 to 100 users, and you run it yourself
Cheapest paid plan	Not publishedMattermost pricing	$7.25/user/mo billed annually (Pro)Slack pricing	Not publishedElement pricing
What it covers	Not stated	List prices. Slack also lists a 50% promotional price for the first 3 months on monthly Pro billing for teams that buy online within 7 days of creating the workspace. Members active in a 28-day period are billed.	Not stated
Free trial	A 1-hour trial environment is offered from the Try Mattermost menu; no longer trial terms were stated	None stated	None stated
Platforms	Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Self-hosted	Web, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android	Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Self-hosted
Integrations (vendor's figure)	Not stated	Over 2,600 apps in the Slack Marketplace	Not stated
Open source	Yes, self-hostable	No	Yes, self-hostable
Good for	Government and defense teams that must keep chat on their own infrastructure Engineering and security operations teams running incident response in chat Regulated companies that need retention and audit controls	Teams that want channel-based conversation with a large set of connected apps Companies that need to message people at other organizations through Slack Connect Workspaces that want to automate approvals and routine requests without code	Government and public institutions that need to host and control their own messaging Organizations that want federation between servers and vendors Individuals or small groups that want an encrypted chat app
Watch out for	Prices are not published; the pricing page directs buyers to sales Licenses are sold as prepaid annual per-seat subscriptions, with each server needing its own license Marketing focuses on high-security sectors, so it may be more than a small team needs	The Free plan keeps only 90 days of message history and 10 apps Group huddles and group external messages need a paid plan Single sign-on needs Business+ and above	Paid prices are not published; the pricing page sends buyers to sales The pricing page describes self-hosted deployments only, so a hosted option was not confirmed Running a server means you manage it yourself on the free tier
Made by	Mattermost	Slack Technologies (Salesforce)	Element

Entry prices are the cheapest paid plan, as each vendor publishes it; “What it covers” says what that price is per (a user, a channel, a brand, a number of contacts). The sources are listed on each tool's page.

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