Element

"Element bridges our org's internal communication tools"

Pros: Element provides our organization with an open source and user-friendly enterprise SaaS solution to bridge our internal communication tools. Additionally, it provides us with a platform for true end-to-end encrypted conversations.

Cons: Logging in to our SaaS instance through the desktop isn't super intuitive, as it requires the end user to manually input our server hostname.

"Very good value for an open-source product"

Overall: Overall, we received very good feedback from everyone using it - this is especially important since we migrated to Element from Microsoft Teams. The pricing difference was clearly a plus, when talking 200+ users. Note however that this is just a chat client - setting up the on-premise backing servers (this was in our case Matrix + Jitsi) involved extra technical steps; but the client setup itself is as basic as it can get.

Pros: It is a feature rich web client for the Matrix server. It's also updated frequently and new features are added all the time. It's easy to setup, this was also one of the reasons we chose it, as we need to be in contact with non-technical users. It has "rooms" functionality for grouping people, and these do support automation via bots. Most importantly, it supports end-to-end encryption, so we did not have to worry about the server used (note however that bots only work if end-to-end encryption is turned off for that specific room)

Cons: The chat functionality has all the bells and whistles, but the threading is a bit clunky. Sometimes, the messages remain unread, making it hard to keep track of what was read and what wasn't. This has been greatly improved with the latest updates from 2023, but it still happens from time-to-time. Element uses Jitsi for video call integration, meaning that a Jitsi instance should be deployed somewhere before using this feature.