Way of organising channels

Currently there is no way of sorting or grouping the channels a user is in, except for completely hiding them. Over time, as the number of channels a user is in grows, the channel list gets messy and it becomes difficult to quickly find a specific channel.

My suggestion would be to add a feature which allows for

either organising the channels in directories or groups (every user can have a different layout and is able to organise in a way that fits best for them)
or the creation of subchannels which would allow the same functionality but globally, so all users have the same structure.

The exact implementation could look quite different than what I outlined above but should provide a way of organising many channels.

I couldn't find any similar issues, has this never been discussed before?

@engelgabriel

@engelgabriel Has any work been done regarding grouping of channels?

Have there been any progress?

+1 for subgroups, i.e....

Rooms(Groups)
       |__Channel 1
       |__Channel 2
       |__Channel 3

Direct 1:1 Chats

At this point I like the team concept of mattermost:
https://docs.mattermost.com/help/getting-started/creating-teams.html

Are there any news to this topic? It would be a great Feature and could help us a lot 😁

We also need Teams. Also there has to be Team Administrators, that have more permissions inside Team channels.

Yes this feature would be highly appreciated, any news on the progress ?

This is the last essential feature that prevents us from entirely switching to rocket.chat

What about groupings in the side bar by taxonomy tags. A channel could be listed only once under the first tag or listed multiple times under each associated tag.

Similar issue : RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#1299

This will be a nice feature. Currently we are using rocket chat for all our notifications for many teams. It will really be helpful if we can group the channels

Collapsible would be a must. The feature request is nearly 4 years old, any update yet?

+1

Why is this feature still not added?

Any updates?

It would be very nice if developers could comment the state here. It is not very helpful to see +1 from many customers for more than 7 years and no reply from developers. We are an enterprise customer and really need this feature (so a +1 from us as well).

We are an enterprise customer and really need this feature (so a +1 from us as well).

Please create a paid service desk ticket to show importance of that feature fir you.

@clevertree

@clevertree @adestis-ds and all

They're problably strugling to make profit and there's to many open source users, that's bad for their business. So they started to remove and limit features from the open source version and now are disabling push notifications and other things from who doesn't upgrade to the most recent versions (which has the new limitations imposed).

They're doing this at a slow pace and hiding it among other announcements, so most users problably have no knowledge of this until they need to use something that was there before and now shows a message about upgrade to the paid plan.

Things that were removed or limited:

No more home screen custom message/HTML
No more read receipt/info on messages
You can't create new permissions profile (type of user), but if you created before they continue to work (otherwise users would get very very mad)
You can't activate more than 5 apps from the marketplace (and some popular free apps now are paid, like polls, for example)
They ended the benefit of doubling the push notification limit for who donated 10USD montly here in their GitHub (but are not enforcing the limits yet as they need to offer a paid option to buy the push notification extra amount first)

Problably there's more things, specially for who uses omnichannel feature (not my case), these is what I noticedin these last year or so.

Rocketchat is a great app and I really admire their work. I'm from Brazil and I'm proud to have a brazilian startup like Rocketchat being successful. But they should offer more tiers/options for who runs it on-premises and don't need omnichannel and other things.

It's very strange that RC still doesn't have the functionality to group the contacts window by category or department. This is a much needed functionality.

I feel this issue needs another necrobump to stay on the radar...

Grouping channels would be amazing

Another option that seems pretty simple to implement is to add an additional “Label” field to the channel property. And add a “Group by label” option to the appearance. This would allow different channels to be grouped together.
Ideally, labels should be different for each user, but if this is difficult to implement, you can make them available for editing to the channel owner.

Oh wow, I tough it was me not being able to see a way to do this. So, it's still not viable?

Any updates?

Bump on this. I have many channels in my server and this is prior to bringing the team in to create discussions and direct messages. We really need a way to group chats into folder or sup groups.
I already have all chats belonging to a team so simply having them be a drop down under the team would be a huge cleanup. Same goes with having discussions down down under there owning channel

As this feature wasn't implemented in 10 years, having "planned" tag since 2019, it seems unlikely to come despite so many people really interested in it.
For me personally it's a dealbreaker. I prefer more future-proof solutions where I can keep my environment clean and organized. I'll probably revisit RC in the future if this ever gets sorted out because I really like the main concept and other features.

If anyone knows a custom solution or community workaround for adding this feature, be so kind and share it! - I could not find one.

Rocket.Chat 8.9.0, released on October 5, 2026, adds custom sidebar categories. Each user can create, rename, delete, and reorder their own categories, then move channels, discussions, and direct messages into them from the room menu or the room header.

That covers the first option in this request: a layout each user organizes for themselves. Shared subchannels that look the same for every user were not part of this release.

Custom categories are available on the Commercial, Government, and Defense plans.

Release notes: https://docs.rocket.chat/docs/rocketchat-release-notes

Closing this as delivered in 8.9.0. If the shared structure is still what you need, please open a new issue for that part so it can be tracked on its own.

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