Rocket.Chat Reviews

by In Search Of A Song

Been using RocketChat on iPad for several months. You would think a chat forum would be a pretty basic thing to get right. I guess it’s not. As you scroll through posts in RocketChat, instead of a smooth view it frequently skips ahead or back. The effect being that as you are scanning the posts, whatever you were looking at suddenly jumps off the screen when something new either loads at the bottom of the scroll or something moves off at the top of the screen. It’s disorienting to say the least. Seems to be based on whether posts have images or not but I can’t be sure. It’s RocketChat devs job to figure that out. I do know that the user experience is very annoying and frustrating. Makes it easy to lose your place and then you have to keep scrolling back and forth every few seconds to find what you were halfway through reading. Really disappointed with RocketChat and do not recommend.

by This Portion Is Unnecessary

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here, but this application is less of a rocket and more of a slingshot. Status update doesn’t change when attempting to change from visible, ghost, away, offline. Adding pictures and gifs is unnecessarily difficult (not a big deal but it’s part of our communication style now a days). Alerts and messages don’t always come through even with alerts on. It’s encrypted... only plus. Please make this better, this is what my company chose to use and it’s rough.

by TheChaba

1. Chat scrolling is super choppy. As people contribute the screen jogs up and down as you scroll making it very hard to read
2. Finding the “ last read” red line is a pain. Have a button to hit to go to the last read section of the chat instantly. No one has time to scroll for minutes to find it, especially in a stock room chat where time is $$

Fix those two fundamental problems and rating goes to 5

by Abbie Wilson

Would be an awesome app if it wasn’t so slow. If we have just a couple of people in a chat, I can’t literally type out my whole comment before it shows up on the screen. Takes almost a minute after I’m done for it to appear and I can click to send the comment. If someone else is tying while you’re typing, good luck being able to type. After the update I figured it would be fixed, it wasn’t. It seems they don’t really care how it runs for some reason.

by Jimmy Knuckles

RocketChat is good for almost everything. The main problem is that it will “selectively” not display new messages. This has serious consequences when you type a response and see your response, and others have typed their responses and you don’t see them until you either force quit or some sort of refresh happens on the main page. It will also often place messages out of order if this behavior occurs within a room.

This is insanely frustrating to have to continually fiddle with RocketChat (going out and back into rooms, force quitting, etc) to simply see chat room messages.

by Patient Researcher

In a large chat, live, this jumps entire screen involuntarily downward about every 3-10 seconds making following and participating a frustrating experience while online on wifi/cell signal. There needs to be a setting / mode to minimize to eliminate this screen instability please, when I am far ahead of the live comments being submitted far below where I am in the chat. Example, you have say a 15-30 line response to read from a colleague and you keep losing your spot—CONSTANTLY—as screen keeps jumping down like a bad robot. Good app otherwise. Thank you for working on this.

by DubHop

RocketChat when I first downloaded it was perfect, everything worked as expected. One day out of the blue push notifications stopped working. I’ve uninstalled/reinstalled 3 times and verified all settings, still no success.

When I reinstall, it asks me for push notification acceptance and even though I allow them, nothing. It’s really impacting how people on my team can interact with me when I’m on the go.

by Johnmarki

When the Version 3 update came I finally got push notifications working flawlessly. Since I’ve updated to the most recent versions notifications are broken again. RocketChat is only as good as the notification system. I give it 4 stars because it’s a huge step forward in version 3. But with the broken notification system my team and I have resorted back to texts until they fix it.

by Nickian

this app is amazing open source software. The number of features and control you can have with your own server is great. My only complaint with the iOS app so far is that none of my LiveChat conversations appear here. I would love to access that on mobile. Generally, I wish this app would laser focus on getting a few important features and UI/UX pieces rock solid before spending time on so many other experimental features.

by Rblackfox

The layout and look are really nice! But accessing directories listings, a key component of new communities I build, is missing. The complete navigation of the web app must be the same as in the mobile app. Until that happens I will never recommend RocketChat to a client for real world use unfortunately. Users need to be able to search and join channels in RocketChat . Get that nav complete and fix a few of the video/photo uploads you have a really nice platform!

by Finitetime

Great little app for both iPhone and pc. Lot’s of cool and fun features rivaling Slack and other paid solutions.

However, one minor gripe that sticks when it bites: RocketChat both on iPhone and desktop will sometimes go to lunch without any indication you are missing messages. The only relief is the solace a quick rebirth of the apps already short existence fixes the problem, “Have you tried rebooting it?”

by SebaLukic

The only issue and the biggest one that I have with RocketChat is that it doesn’t notify me, or at least give me an option to be notified when in a specific chat room. I can miss so many messages and it can be frustrating going through all of those messages. Give us an option to choose if we want to be notified in a specific chat room, not only if we are tagged.

by Adrien456123

Doesn't sync read status between iOS and desktop (macOS). Also overall the experience is not very fluid (ex. sending a picture takes a significant amount of time).

Other than that it's a great tool and it works, so give it a try and see if you can live with these minor flaws. I can :)

by J K R 1234567890@#$&

There are 2 feeds that keep pushing their conversations on me that I have in two different ways tried to get stopped and no solutions.

So far I am only interested in a single chat and I get really annoyed when the post count shows I should check the feed I like only to find the other feed I do not care about.

I will rate it again when a feature to remove unwanted feeds is added.

by Sanna_Tized

Great to connect and I love all the different ways to personalize it and have individual convos and general masses convos. Love that’s it’s more then messaging but also audio, video, and calls. Wish I could add a name for every user- like a “nick name” but just for me to see. Just so I can more easily remember who’s who

by Alexsaintx

Rocket Chat is hands-down the best Open Source alternative to Slack. My tabletop gaming group needed the flexibility of hosting our own chat server, and after surviving the ruin of HipChat and exile from River, we decided we were done with hosted services, both “free” and “for pay” alike. Now we have total control over our server, the freedom to invite as many players as we like, and the knowledge that our creative content is safe.

The upgrade paths from early (pre-1.0) versions to 2.4 are strenuous, but well-documented. And there now exist turnkey server setups for hosting providers like Digital Ocean. Mobile is also well-supported, making Rocket the obvious choice for organizing all manner of volunteer and creative communities.

by Dreamerv3

Element seems to integrate Jitsi or at least not bug the user to download a separate app. At least think about making the integration smoother and more stable, maybe compile the Jitsi app into yours for ease of use (as a developer I cringe at the build pipeline necessary to make that work) actually that would be pretty epic, and blow most of you competitors like mattermost away, it would even compete with discord’s open source up and comer fosscord.

by AlixanderWill

I setup a server for my work team, and this tool is incredible. Highly customizable if you have a good dev on your team and incredibly useful! It's like Slack but for a fraction of the price, way more control, and no limits!! Even with development cost, it's still way cheaper than a 5 man team on Slack. And open-source!!! I'll never use anything else!

by Bugs181

I’ve tried them all! Slack, gitter, discord, etc... Rocket chat is amazing for one simple fact... You own your data! Self hosted solutions are the way to go. With all of the cloud providers for cheap, it’s a small price to pay for privacy, security, and not being locked into one vendor. Even worse if those companies go out of business or decide to randomly start charging users. Now, you don’t have to worry about that!

by Noiz Ivy

We had already implemented Rocket for within our company when we were live in an office and it was instrumental to work flow. Once we went virtual it became best way to manage multiple work conversations and it is smooth and easy. Only complaint I have is in the mobile version. The flow is hard to keep track of and notifications are spotty at best.

by BWheetley

Overall this is a pretty nice chat app. There has always been an issue where I rarely get push notifications. Also the last couple updates have broken my ability to upload photos. I’ve deleted and reinstalled but that didn’t fix it.

by Jk234ert

Not bad in most situation, but RocketChat crashes frequently when I open it and directly navigate to a “chat”. This is a bit annoying that I have to wait for the data refreshing in the main chat list page, then choose the chat I want to dig into.

by Harrybenson

The new UI sadly wastes a lot of space in the channel list due to big avatars and lots of padding - I wish there was an optional compact/condensed channel view similar to what the previous version looked like so I wouldn’t have to scroll so much. When you choose to “group by favorites” and also “group by type”, the favorites aren’t grouped by type. Apart from those issues, there have been a lot of improvements. Being able to pick an app icon and choose between themes is neat.

by Lkr 666

Took one star off because the admin interface is not optimized to work on mobile. As the admin of multiple servers, it's a bit of a pain to use that part of RocketChat .

Other than that RocketChat is great for conversations and very responsive, much better than the desktop app.