Mattermost

Team chat your compliance team can sign off

Slack charges per user per month and its free tier hides your own message history after ninety days. Teams bundles chat into a licensing scheme you already pay for and a cloud you cannot audit. Mattermost is the open source alternative: channels, threads, calls and integrations with your complete message history in your own database, on UK infrastructure. Node deploys, manages and supports Mattermost as a production service, flat-priced however large the team gets.

What Mattermost is

Mattermost is an open source collaboration platform built around the model Slack made universal: channels for teams and topics, threads for keeping discussions tidy, direct messages, file sharing, search, emoji and reactions, with desktop apps, mobile apps and a web client. Anyone who has used Slack or Teams is productive in Mattermost within minutes.

It goes beyond chat. Voice calls and screen sharing are built in, playbooks turn repeatable processes like incident response into checklists that run inside channels, and boards give teams lightweight project tracking next to the conversation. Webhooks, slash commands, a full API and a large integration ecosystem connect it to the tools your team already uses.

The difference from the SaaS incumbents is where it runs. Mattermost was built to be self-hosted and is trusted in government, defence and financial services for exactly that reason. Your messages sit in your own database, on your own infrastructure, under your own retention policy, which is why Node can run it for you in the UK rather than routing your internal conversations through a vendor's cloud.

Why self-hosted Mattermost instead of Slack or Teams

No per-user fees: Slack's per-user monthly pricing turns headcount growth into a chat bill, and at the time of writing a mid-sized company can easily spend more on chat than on the infrastructure it runs its business on. Self-hosted Mattermost has no seat licence: a managed deployment from Node is one flat fee at any team size.

Your history is not held to ransom: Slack's free tier hides messages older than ninety days behind an upgrade, at the time of writing, so your own institutional memory becomes the upsell. Mattermost keeps your complete history in your own database, searchable forever or retained exactly as long as your policy says.

Your data stays in the UK: internal chat is where the unguarded conversations happen: customers, staff, finances, incidents. With Mattermost managed by Node, all of it stays on UK infrastructure under an Article 28 data processing agreement, not in a US cloud subject to another jurisdiction's disclosure rules.

Compliance is configuration, not negotiation: retention schedules, access control and audit are settings on a system you control, not features scattered across a vendor's enterprise tier. For regulated organisations, self-hosting collapses a page of due-diligence questions into one answer.

No lock-in: messages live in PostgreSQL or MySQL in open, exportable form. If you ever move, the archive moves with you, which is more than can be said for a decade of conversation trapped in a SaaS workspace.

Built for more than conversation

Channels, threads and calls: everything a team expects from modern chat, including built-in voice calls and screen sharing, without adding another vendor to the stack.

Playbooks for repeatable work: incident response, release checklists and onboarding runbooks execute as structured workflows inside channels, with status, ownership and a timeline for the post-incident review.

Integrations and automation: webhooks, slash commands and bots connect Mattermost to your monitoring, your CI and your business systems. Paired with n8n, alerts, approvals and notifications from across your stack land in the channel where the right people already are.

Works next to your other apps: Mattermost is a natural companion to the other open source applications we manage: helpdesk tickets, document updates and project changes can all notify the team in real time.

Keycloak and single sign-on

Every application in a Node tenant joins your own Keycloak realm, so staff sign in once with corporate credentials and use Mattermost alongside every other app we run for you. Admins control access centrally: MFA and session policies apply consistently, and a leaver removed from the identity system is out of the chat, the helpdesk and everything else in the same moment. For a system that holds your internal conversations, that control matters. It is part of how the Node platform is built.

How Node runs Mattermost for you

We operate Mattermost as a fully managed service, not a server you have to babysit.

Deployment: we deploy Mattermost in a production configuration with a managed database and file storage, connect it to your Keycloak realm for SSO, and configure retention and access policies to match your compliance requirements.

Upgrades and maintenance: Mattermost releases on a regular cadence. We test and apply upgrades and security patches and keep your instance current without interrupting the conversation.

Monitoring and support: we monitor availability, performance and notification delivery, take verified backups of the message database and file store, and our team is available when the platform your team runs on needs attention.

Your infrastructure or ours: hosted on Node's UK infrastructure or deployed into your own environment, on-premises or in your cloud accounts, with the same managed service either way.