Microsoft Teams Alternative

I run a business with about 10 employees, and we’ll probably be growing pretty quickly over the next few months.

We currently use Microsoft Teams, but notifications have become a problem. Some users just don’t get them consistently. I’ve tried the usual fixes and checked all the settings, but it’s still hit or miss. I cant work with that. The outlook integration, and smooth video meetings are a plus, but not worth the issues.

I’m fine with self-hosting since we already have a VPS that I manage, but I’m also open to SaaS.

Here’s what I’ve looked at so far:

• Slack = Seems like the best product overall, but it’s too expensive as we grow. The free plan’s message retention and limited admin controls also won’t work for us long term.
• Mattermost = My concern is that the free self-hosted version uses Mattermost’s Test Push Notification Service, and I’ve seen mixed reports about notification reliability. I don’t want to leave Teams because of notifications and end up with the same problem.
• Rocket.Chat = Looks good, but the server requirements seem pretty heavy and I don’t want chat eating up resources needed by our other apps.
• Pumble = The free plan looks almost too good. My main concern is privacy/data handling since it’s hosted and free.
• Zulip = Looks interesting, but the 10-user push notification limit on the free self-hosted version would be a problem pretty quickly.

I’m open to anything, self-hosted or hosted. Mostly interested in hearing from people who actually use these for a business and how reliable they’ve been, especially with notifications.

If there’s another option I’m missing, I’d like to hear about that too.