Rocket.Chat experience

The release management is horrible. Regular regressions (sometimes also within patch releases), only fixed two feature releases later instead of in a patch release if you're unlucky. No mention of those regressions in the release notes, you have to trawl through the open and closed bug reports opened since the last upgrade. That may take hours and then you have to decide whether you break usability or stay on an old version. You can't stay indefinitely on an old release if you want push notifications in the app, though. Those push notifications will be cut off 6 months after the first release of a minor version if you stay on that minor version regardless of patchlevel. Official Docker images are not always available if you're looking for the latest patchlevel of still-supported older releases.

The upgrade procedure is somewhat reliable. Always make backups of your database and of the installed Rocket.Chat version. A version rollback is documented to be impossible once the database has been accessed by the newer version and I had to rollback after an upgrade more than once. Server snapshots FTW.

Warning messages about deprecations (e.g. for certain MongoDB versions in the backend) do not correspond to the documentation.

Warning messages in general stack up, even if the warnings are identical. If a warning "doesn't disappear" after dismissing, it's because you're seeing another identical warning in the same place. Such warnings can stack 20-high or more, creating a click orgy to dismiss them.

The security model is weird: Installed Rocket.Chat apps on mobile devices will still receive push notifications including the full message text after the user is logged out in the app. (This may be time-limited, but I only waited a few days before logging in again.)

If you're not willing/able to pay for enterprise and want to use the self-hosted community edition, the following restrictions will bite you:

Federation is an enterprise feature, i.e. you don't get it in the self-hosted community edition, so participation from people registered on other servers is not possible.

You have a push notification limit of 10,000 push messages per month. That sounds a like lot, but for a community of 50 people in a chat room with only a single phone each, you reach the absolute limit for the whole server after 200 messages in that chat room. Apps on mobile devices will still receive push notifications including the full message text even after they are logged out, possibly even after the mobile device doesn't exist anymore (commenters in the Rocket.Chat forum seem to disagree on whether that counts towards the total message limit). You can't find out which chat or which account is causing all the push notifications and exceeding the limit. If you don't have access to the Rocket.Chat central services console, you can't check how many push notifications you already used. No, you can't buy additional push notifications, you have to move to the Enterprise version if you want that. No, you can't use your own push gateway without recompiling the Rocket.Chat mobile app and uploading it to the various app stores.

If you become admin of a server which has been registered with Rocket.Chat central services (mandatory for push notifications), not having access to the email address used for registration means you can't log in to their central services console. You can get that fixed via support, but only if you buy the enterprise version. You're stuck if you only have the community edition.

On the positive side, Rocket.Chat had better usability (and easier administration) than Slack and Matrix back in 2021. Back then, we chose Rocket.Chat for those advantages and we're thankful for what we got. However, the Matrix world has evolved quite a bit, whereas Rocket.Chat stagnated. Currently, we're migrating to Matrix for our community.