Mattermost free user limits#

Free deployments of Mattermost Team Edition are designed for small teams of approximately 50 users. When these deployments grow significantly beyond this size, limits help maintain server reliability while encouraging proper scaling.

User thresholds across releases#

From Mattermost v10.6, Team Edition user limits are enforced in 2 ways:

  • System admins see a dismissible banner alert when the user count exceeds the user warning threshold.

  • System admins see a non-dismissible banner alert and can’t create or add new users until the user count falls below the hard limit.

The following limits are designed to ensure your self-hosted deployment remains scalable, reliable, and optimized for teams, where 5000 users represents a “high upper limit” for deployments that are approximately 200 times the recommended size, which is far beyond the intended design of the product:

Version

v9.5 ESR

v9.9

v10.6

v10.10

User warning

10,000

5000

2500

1000

Hard limit

None

11,000

5000

2500

Error code: ERROR_SAFETY_LIMITS_EXCEEDED#

System admins see the ERROR_SAFETY_LIMITS_EXCEEDED error code in Mattermost logs, administrative tools, and in on-screen alerts when usage grossly exceeds the recommended thresholds for users in a safe deployment.

This error code is designed to help system admins in private networks that may be disconnected or “air-gapped” from the internet to identify and resolve issues quickly using internet connected machines to look up error codes and resolutions in online resources.

Plan ahead#

If your self-hosted Mattermost free instance is nearing or exceeding these limits, you must plan ahead to ensure uninterrupted collaboration. System admins can:

Note

Nonprofit organizations may qualify for free or discounted licenses via the Mattermost Nonprofit License Program.