We've been using Element/Matrix for quite some time now and are fairly happy with it for the most part. The only major hiccup was hosting providers, not the software itself, per se.
We originally signed up with element.io back when they were called vector.im. Service was good, but a year or two in they decided they wanted to focus on those sweet, sweet enterprise licences and the pricing changes were untenable for our little 15 person operation. (I bear them little ill will for this, gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but it was a real PITA at the time.)
We moved to etke.cc who have been quite good. They were responsive to my modest support requests, and apart from being initially a bit surprised we wanted an unfederated server (which to their credit they dealt with with alacrity and aplomb) it's been a service we've just used and not had to otherwise think about.
The only sticking point was there was no way to migrate our messages from the older service. If memory serves, this was due to a deficiency in either Matrix or Synapse due to changing domains (originally an element.io customer subdomian). So always your own subdomain if you can is the moral of the story, I guess. I don't know if the migration story has improved in the years since.
If we had to leave Element/Matrix for whatever reasons I would definitely look at Zulip based on the many recommendations I see for it here. I think back when we went with Element I was quite interested in Zulip, but there just wasn't any good hosting options at the time and we didn't want to go with self-hosting (time-sink vs $$-sink).
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We've been using Element/Matrix for quite some time now and are fairly happy with it for the most part. The only major hiccup was hosting providers, not the software itself, per se.
We originally signed up with element.io back when they were called vector.im. Service was good, but a year or two in they decided they wanted to focus on those sweet, sweet enterprise licences and the pricing changes were untenable for our little 15 person operation. (I bear them little ill will for this, gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but it was a real PITA at the time.)
We moved to etke.cc who have been quite good. They were responsive to my modest support requests, and apart from being initially a bit surprised we wanted an unfederated server (which to their credit they dealt with with alacrity and aplomb) it's been a service we've just used and not had to otherwise think about.
The only sticking point was there was no way to migrate our messages from the older service. If memory serves, this was due to a deficiency in either Matrix or Synapse due to changing domains (originally an element.io customer subdomian). So always your own subdomain if you can is the moral of the story, I guess. I don't know if the migration story has improved in the years since.
If we had to leave Element/Matrix for whatever reasons I would definitely look at Zulip based on the many recommendations I see for it here. I think back when we went with Element I was quite interested in Zulip, but there just wasn't any good hosting options at the time and we didn't want to go with self-hosting (time-sink vs $$-sink).