When chat history matters most

We’ve seen increasing interest in our ESS Community distribution from those looking for a free-use replacement of Mattermost Entry.

Back in October 2025, Mattermost announced limitations as from Mattermost v11 for both of its free-use tiers (Mattermost Team Edition and Mattermost Entry). The chat history limitation of 10,000 messages for Mattermost Entry has caused a lot of frustration, especially considering it’s a self-hosted solution.

Now, we totally understand the need to ensure a sustainable business model. Indeed we’ve had plenty of our own bumps and bruises as we’ve tried to find the right balance, providing open source implementations of Matrix as the original upstream vendor while trying to ensure commercial downstream implementations contribute to development costs.

However rather than arbitrary usage limitations, in our model our rule of thumb is that features which prioritise end-users should go in our FOSS and free of charge software. So core functionality such as chat history, voice and video calling and end-to-end encryption are left uninhibited in our free-user tier, while enterprisey features that prioritise the organisation over the end user are the ones that sit in the subscription version (ESS Pro). That means the likes of Mobile Device Management, antivirus, border gateways, group access management, auditing, compliance, certifications, professional technical support and SLAs are in the paid product.

At a glance, here’s the main differences between ESS Community and Mattermost Entry.

Sources: Mattermost, Element

A very quick overview of ESS Community

We’ve been getting great feedback from those that have installed and use ESS Community.

We launched ESS Community back in Spring 2025. It is an AGPL-licensed FOSS and free of charge server-side Matrix distribution. More on Matrix in the next section, but essentially it’s the ‘backend’ of a communications platform. It can be used in conjunction with any Matrix-based frontend, but our assumption is people will tend to opt to use it with Element’s apps (or, more formally, Element’s frontend clients). Indeed ESS Community is built to match the functionality in the free Element apps. For instance, you get next generation authentication (Matrix Authentication Service using OIDC) and the Element Call backend required to experience the full Element feature set on Web, Desktop and Element X on Mobile. Indeed, ESS Community is a great way to migrate to Matrix Authentication Service (MAS).

So ESS Community supports messaging (think WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram), collaboration (think Microsoft Teams or Slack) and voice and video calling (similar to WhatsApp, Teams, Jitsi or Zoom). It provides a good all-in-one solution for secure, encrypted, self-sovereign messaging, collaboration and voice and video calling for small and medium sized non-commercial organisations. And because ESS Community federates exceptionally well, it’s a fantastic solution to bring multiple separate organisations together on a ‘casual use’ basis.

Matthew giving a demo of ESS at The Matrix Conference

The advantages of Matrix

As we said, ESS Community is a backend product suite to power Matrix-based communication, a decentralised open standard for communication which offers many benefits.

ESS Community enables self-hosting, which delivers freedom from Big Tech’s centralised and generally proprietary systems. It also benefits from the resilient decentralised network provided by the Matrix protocol as there is no central server to risk a global outage. Now of course your own server might be unavailable for some reason, but others using Matrix-based communications will still be operating which protects against a widespread network outage.

Just as important, and indeed the entire philosophy behind Matrix, is that your communications are beholden to no one. Being a decentralised open standard, all things Matrix-based should be interoperable. So if, for example, you tried ESS Community and didn’t like it you can easily change to use a different Matrix backend. Or perhaps you like the ESS Community backend but you don’t like the Element frontend clients. No problem, just use a different Matrix client. Want a Matrix deployment but not use any Element software? No problem, there’s plenty of alternatives to choose from.

The interoperability of Matrix doesn’t just apply to being able to swap components in and out of your own deployment. It also enables easy connectivity between separate organisations, similar to the way people inside an organisation using Google Workspace will use Gmail to email people inside a different organisation that uses, say, Microsoft Outlook.

An individual or organisation using, say, Element, can easily connect with someone else at a different organisation that uses another Matrix-based app such as Cinny, Fluffychat or Nheko. That organisation might happen to be using ESS Community too, or building straight off Synapse or some other alternative. 

Matrix is a vibrant open source project with a healthy and competitive ecosystem around it, so the choices available are literally endless and include self-built solutions. It also means, of course, that Matrix software (and the majority of code from Matrix vendors) is transparent and therefore available for inspection which is critical if you need to trust your communications platform.

On top of all of that, everything in Matrix is end-to-end encrypted by default.

Interoperable, sovereign communications

Element is the leading upstream vendor for Matrix, and is led by the same team that created the Matrix open standard. 

Being built on Matrix, ESS Community provides a strong foundation for interoperable, sovereign and secure communications. It’s Element’s official open source distribution for non-commercial Matrix deployments and is available without registration.

Most Matrix deployments use Synapse, from Element, as the reference homeserver implementation. ESS Community includes Synapse, but comes with other components to provide a complete distribution. It works ‘out-of-the-box’ on a single machine or existing Kubernetes cluster (no Kubernetes expertise is required) using the provided Helm charts. All of which makes installation and maintenance quick and easy.

The distribution includes Synapse, Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), Element Web, Element Call and Element Admin. It supports small to mid-size deployments but doesn’t include the scalability required for large deployments, or the compliance and enterprise features needed by public sector organisations. It can, however, serve as a small scale evaluation or a restricted proof of concept for formal workplace use.

ESS Community is a self-hosted communications solution for casual use by small to medium sized organisations. It’s not designed as a consumer product, or a self-hosted alternative to Discord (given it focuses on the featureset needed for Element’s public sector customers). While it supports any Matrix-based app, it’s tailored for use with Element’s apps.

It should also be noted that ESS Community does not come with any technical support from Element, although there is comprehensive documentation and community-based support in the ESS Community chat room.