It's also not very good- both the desktop and iOS clients (that I use) are horribly slow to load, clunky, and require multiple (laggy) clicks just to get to a notification of a message. I'd much rather pay for something else, on-prem and open source be damned.
The Mattermost iOS app works best on a fast connection. To accommodate slow connections, we're adding React Native (same technology as Facebook) to get competitive with Facebook's iOS app performance over time.
Overall, we created an open source, self-hosted alternative to proprietary SaaS communication for organizations that want to minimize security, lock-in, and privacy risks.
We're constantly improving, thanks to hundreds of people around the world contributing to the project.