Rocket.Chat

What Rocket.Chat does

Rocket.Chat is a communications platform written in TypeScript on the Meteor framework. For internal teams it offers channels, teams, threads, direct messages, mentions, reactions, pinned and starred messages and full-text search. It also has an omnichannel module that brings customer conversations from a website widget, SMS or WhatsApp into the same workspace, which sets it apart from most team chat tools. Apps from the Rocket.Chat Marketplace, or ones you build with the open source Apps-Engine, extend it further.

The vendor targets organizations with strict data protection needs, including government and defense, and supports self-hosted, private cloud and air-gapped deployments.

Security and encryption

Administrators can switch on end-to-end encryption for private rooms and direct messages. Each user then saves an E2EE password that is shown once and not stored on the server; it is needed on every device to decrypt history. The documentation warns that encrypted messages do not appear in search, cannot be audited and may be unreadable to bots that do not support E2EE.

Since version 7.11, Rocket.Chat includes a native implementation of the Matrix protocol, so a workspace can federate with other Rocket.Chat servers and Matrix homeservers without running Synapse. Federation is marked as a premium feature, and the docs note that Rocket.Chat’s roles do not map cleanly onto Matrix power levels.

Editions and licensing

Everything outside the ee/ directories is MIT. Code inside them is under the Rocket.Chat Enterprise Edition license, which allows production use only with a valid subscription. Since version 6.5 every new workspace starts as Starter: free, self-hosted, up to 50 users, with many premium features under usage limits. Teams that pass 50 users can either buy a premium plan (Commercial, Government or Defense) or drop to Community, the MIT edition, which allows up to 100 concurrent users and 10,000 push notifications a month and covers core messaging only, with video calls through Jitsi or BigBlueButton. Rocket.Chat says Community is not suitable for business-critical production use.

Self-hosting Rocket.Chat

Recommended methods are Docker, Podman and Kubernetes with Helm; Launchpad offers a guided Kubernetes setup. Node.js is bundled in the official image, but MongoDB (8.0 or later for Rocket.Chat 8.x) must be installed and upgraded separately to match each release. For a Starter workspace without high availability the docs suggest 2 vCPUs and 4 GiB of RAM for Rocket.Chat and a three-member MongoDB replica set. High availability, microservices and air-gapped installs are premium options.

Migration from Slack is covered by an importer for Slack exports and by SlackBridge, which mirrors messages between the two during a transition.

Hosted version

Rocket.Chat sells premium and dedicated cloud hosting under a service level agreement. The free Starter and Community options are self-hosted only.

Limitations

The free editions are tightly capped, and the MIT-licensed Community edition is described by the vendor as basic. MongoDB adds an operational dependency that must be upgraded in step with the application. E2EE is optional and breaks search and auditing for encrypted rooms.

Who it suits

Rocket.Chat suits organizations that want team chat and customer messaging in one self-hosted system and expect to pay for a premium plan. For a fully open source server without user caps, compare Zulip or Mattermost; for encryption by default, see Element.