Night Light is a part of GNOME Shell, so you have to be running GNOME, not MATE to use it.
I’ve used redshift for years and it works great. What happens when you try to run it? I think some people have trouble because by default redshift will try to find your location automatically and that doens’t always work. You can add your location to your redshift config file, but I just set my location in the command line, which I add to startup applications:
redshift -l 48.858:2.295
(I changed the coordinates to the Eiffel Tower, not my home 
)