Riddle stopped using Slack – Here’s why

Riddle has always embraced the “work from anywhere” philosophy. While we have regular brick and mortar offices in Saarbrücken, Germany, we also allow our employees to work from anywhere they like. When we started out GDPR was no where in sight and no one really cared which tools were used to collaborate in a remote team. That has all changed by now and strict regulations in the EU concerning where data is hosted and which tools are used to share data are now in place.

Unfortunately, to be fully GDPR compliant it is necessary to host tools like internal chat, email and document collaboration in-house. Goodbye trusty Google Drive, Google Docs, Slack and Gmail.

Instead of using these popular services, we replaced Slack with a self hosted version of Mattermost – a very similar app in functionality, but as we can run everything on our own servers, it is fully GDPR compliant. Instead of Gmail we now run our own mail server and we replaced Google Drive and Google Office with a self hosted version of Nextcloud.

The same is true for other tools like Google Analytics of course. Instead of sending data to Google, we run a self hosted version of Matomo to ensure that no piece of data leaves the EU and is shared with third parties.

While not all these tools are quite as good as the original (it is hard to beat Google office for example), some tools like Mattermost are totally comparable to the cloud hosted original.

The pain in moving everything to a self hosted solution was quite big, but in the long run we are also saving a lot of money as most of the self hosted tools are either much cheaper or even completely free to use.

Any questions about Mattermost or Riddle? Please feel free to drop us a line at hello@www.riddle.com/blog. Thanks!