Matrix gains ground in Europe’s public sector — but replacing Teams is another matter

Matrix-based messaging tools are gaining traction among European governments that seek to gain greater control over sensitive communications data and lessen their reliance on US technology suppliers.

The growing interest reflects a broader push toward open-source applications in Europe amid geopolitical uncertainty. Yet the costs and complexity of replacing established applications such as Microsoft Teams mean any shift away from proprietary software is likely to be gradual, with some organizations choosing to run Matrix-based tools alongside existing platforms.

Launched in 2014, Matrix is an open messaging standard for decentralized communications. Similar to email, the standard allows users to send messages between Matrix-compatible apps from different software vendors, including the open-source Element, Rocket.Chat, and Automattic’s Beeper.

Matrix began as an “interesting experiment” in creating a communications standard for the wider internet, but has since become “the poster child for digital sovereignty, especially in Europe,” said Matthew Hodgson, co-founder of the Matrix Foundation.

There are 65 “national- and international-scale” Matrix deployments being tracked in Europe, said Hodgson, who is also co-founder and CEO of Element, during a keynote presentation Wednesday at the Matrix Conference in Malmö, Sweden. He cited growing concerns that US technology suppliers could restrict access to services for political reasons, following the suspension of an International Criminal Court prosecutor’s Microsoft account last year.

There are already some notable deployments in the European public sector.

France’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM) was an early Matrix adopter, with the protocol underpinning its messaging app, Tchap, that’s used by more than 400,000 civil servants each month. Notable deployments in Germany include BwMessenger for the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr) and TI-Messenger in the healthcare sector.

As interest in Matrix broadens, other public sector organizations are at an earlier stage in their deployments.

European Commission’s Matrix rollout

The European Commission recently rolled out Element’s Matrix-based application, with the eventual goal of enabling secure internal communications for more than 40,000 employees.

The project began in summer 2025, with a proof of concept completed in December. The rollout of the desktop client to Commission laptops was completed in September 2026, with a mobile rollout planned.

The Commission is now working to encourage employees to use Element and gathering feedback to improve the application, said Diana Gheorghe, head of sector for Communication and Collaboration Services within the European Commission’s Digital Workplace Foundations team, during a presentation at Matrix Conference.

The aim is to improve the resilience of the Commission’s communications services and ensure business continuity. “We also wanted to have data control and ownership of the platform,” she said, while the deployment could also provide “contractual leverage” in procurement — an at-times-overlooked aspect of digital sovereignty, she added.

The deployment has presented some technical challenges, including difficulties with users finding colleagues across different servers. The Commission also opted to disable the live presence feature following performance problems.

Element is not intended as a direct replacement for Teams at this stage, however. It will instead “complement” the Commission’s existing workplace applications, Gheorghe said.

She cautioned against direct comparisons with Teams, which has broader functionality than the Matrix-based application: “It’s communication, it’s collaboration, it sits on a platform that has multiple features, so there’s no ‘one-to-one’ parity,” she said. It’s also important to manage expectations among employees accustomed to consumer messaging apps such as Signal, she said, and encourage them to assess Element on its own merits.

A recent Politico article highlighted reaction from European Commission employees to the Element rollout, which negatively compared it to Microsoft Teams.

Against the backdrop of heightened sovereignty concerns, the comparison with Teams misses the point of the deployment, said Dario Maisto, principal analyst at Forrester.

“The risk is material that an organization tomorrow morning is not able to open the Outlook solution, the Teams solution, the collaboration tools, whatever. The risk is material — it has happened already,” he told Computerworld.

“Employees should hopefully be aware of why they’re making trade-offs in terms of the applications that they’re using.”

Adoption of sovereign communications tools requires change management with support from senior leadership, rather than leaving responsibility solely to IT teams, Maisto said.

“There are some changes that you just need to push ‘top-down’ to the organization. This is a broader strategic problem,” he said. “This is not an IT problem, this is a board-level decision.”

Kenneth Edwall, an IT architect within Försäkringskassan, the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, said gaining greater control over communications matters more than matching the features of established applications.

“The idea is not that these solutions need to be exactly like Microsoft Teams,” he told Computerworld. “That’s not the driver — it’s the sovereignty part. Then we can live with not having the latest, coolest feature, because that’s not the driver.”

He acknowledged that there will inevitably be some resistance to new technology from employees that are accustomed to established tools such as Teams, Zoom, or Slack. At the same time, sovereign applications can make life easier for employees by removing uncertainty about whether a tool is appropriate for sharing sensitive information.

“I would say most users prefer that they know they can use this communication tool for almost everything they do during the day. This lowers the digital stress rather than ‘okay, here I cannot send sensitive information, so then I need to go to tool number two,’” he said.

Swedish agencies explore federated messaging

As with other parts of Europe, Edwall said that digital sovereignty has quickly risen up the agenda within the Swedish public sector. Försäkringskassan is a member of eSam, a program that supports digital transformation across 42 Swedish government agencies.

“I would say the last two years we have seen an increase [in interest]. We are seeing it within eSam, we see it within the healthcare of Sweden, we see it within municipalities as well,” Edwall said.

eSam is currently working with member agencies to connect Matrix-compatible applications in order to improve communiciation across government departments.

Five years ago, most eSam member agencies used Skype for Business, allowing employees at different agencies to communicate through the same platform.

But as Microsoft prepared to end support for older versions of Skype for Business, agencies began adopting a range of different applications. This raised concerns that their messaging systems would no longer be able to communicate with one another.

There are now three broad approaches among eSam members.

Many larger agencies use Teams alongside separate communications platforms for sensitive information. “They have Teams up to a certain extent and then they have a complementary solution,” Edwall said. Alternatives include messaging applications such as Element, Rocket.Chat and Mattermost, as well as videoconferencing tools such as Pexip and Jitsi.

Not all agencies have the resources or expertise to manage and maintain two platforms, however. Others have opted for sovereign communications systems rather than public-cloud services, while relying entirely on public-cloud offerings such as Teams or Zoom is less common.

Försäkringskassan’s Matrix-based SAFOS Chatt service is currently used by 19 Swedish public authorities, with interest continuing to grow, according to Edwall.

A lack of interoperability between the various applications presents potential security risks, said Edwall. When agencies use systems that cannot communicate directly, employees may need guest accounts on another agency’s platform, for example, creating governance challenges around managing access, such as when an employee leaves.

“The other thing is usability. If you are used to Rocket Chat and then you are invited as a guest in another tool, it may become a bit complicated,” Edwall said.

A recently completed proof of concept seeks to address this, with federation between two eSam member agencies running separate Matrix-compatible applications; Försäkringskassan on Element and Trafikverket on Rocket.Chat. The test demonstrated interoperability between the two applications, successfully meeting most of the project’s requirements, although some capabilities still need improvement.

eSam will publish a final report on the project in spring 2027, highlighting the work completed and providing recommendations members interested in undertaking further work to introduce federation of Matrix-compatible applications. Feedback from general directors and CIOs at eSam agencies so far has been very positive, Edwall said.

There are some questions about interoperability between applications without Matrix protocol support, he said. While it’s possible to implement “bridges” between some Matrix applications and Teams or Slack (Element no longer offers its Teams and Slack bridges to new customers), access to certain features is limited.

Other public sector organizations are also looking at federation.

For the European Commission, interoperability is one of the key reasons for using Matrix. The Commission is assessing the technical feasibility of federation across European Union institutions and member states, though no decision has been made on whether to implement it. “Federation, for us, is an unwritten story … At this point there’s no firm decision,” said Gheorghe, with considerations around security and regulations such as the GDPR.

During the Matrix Conference, Edwall participated in a live federation demo that connected Matrix applications at the Commission, France’s DINUM, Sweden’s Försäkringskassan, NATO, and the authority for Germany’s state of Schleswig-Holstein.  

This was a proof of concept that highlighted the potential for the federation more broadly across the European public sector.

Such a project is realistic from a technical perspective, said Edwall, as eSam’s work has demonstrated. “It’s only a few firewalls away to France and Germany, so it’s the same approach, the same philosophy. I think the challenge is going to be maybe, first of all, who should interoperate with each other and how open should it be and who is allowed in.”

A longer road to digital sovereignty

Interoperability is a key benefit of the Matrix protocol, said Forrester’s Maisto. “This is a huge differentiator when we talk of enterprise-scale solutions,” he said.

Maisto expects more organizations to adopt open-source sovereign tools, whether as primary or backup communications platforms. “There’s going to be more adoption, there’s going to be more awareness,” he said.

However, any change is likely to be gradual. “This is not a shift that will happen overnight,” he said. For some organizations, this could be a process that starts with a proof of concept, progressing to production deployments alongside proprietary tools, before an eventual full migration.

For those that wish to take this path, there are plenty of challenges to overcome. Not all public and private sector organizations have adequate IT resources to develop missing features or maintain open-source applications, for instance.

Then there are the existing investments in applications such as Teams. Many organizations invested heavily in migrating to cloud communications platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic, with some projects still underway. “If I’m still amortizing the cost of those migrations, those upgrades, those deployments, I’m not going to get started on a €10 million project anew,” Maisto said.            

He also pointed out that communications applications are just one part of a larger digital sovereignty challenge for organizations. “If I’m using the Microsoft productivity suite for everything else, how much does it help adding just the communication tool on a sovereign platform?” Maisto said.

“This is not just implementing an alternative to Teams. This is discovering a whole new world in terms of tools that have to be deployed. If we start thinking in these terms, we realize it’s not a shift that we can do overnight.”

Ensuring communications systems can continue operating is an important part of business continuity and makes sense for organizations to address, said Maisto. “It’s a great place to start. Just be mindful that if you start there, there might be a lot more to consider very soon.”ComputerworldRead More