Slack is a wildly popular team-chat and collaboration app that solves three main problems – team communication, collaboration (file sharing and integrations) and most importantly, staying up-to-date (notifications). However, it’s not always the best solution for your work communication and you may want to consider Slack alternatives.
Why Use Slack Alternatives
Users have a love-hate relationships with Slack. Of course, Slack is an excellent tool but it’s features, come at a price. Many refuse to use Slack exactly because of its price tag. Also, Slack offers way more features than your company may want to deal with, ending up notifications from the endless list of Slack apps pouring into your workspace daily.
Here are some of the reasons why you should consider a Slack alternatives:
- The constant bombardment of incoming messages and notifications can be overwhelming on Slack.
- Non-technical users find it challenging to use and retain Slack
- Slack is priced at $8/user/month which may not be affordable for small businesses
- Slack can be distracting since larger channels suffer from noise after a certain point which can start diminishing productivity.
- Slack does not provide encryption keys on their servers
Whatever your reason, there are plenty of communication tools out there your team can benefit from. To help you find other options, we have put together a list of the best Slack alternatives for you.
Top 10 Best Slack Alternatives for 2019
Hangouts Chat
Hangouts Chat is Google’s messaging platform which has direct messaging, threaded conversations and bots that have deep integrations with G Suite services. It allows your team of up to 8,000 members to easily communicate through the use of a chat room and direct messages.
In Hangouts Chat, you can also send private one-to-one or group messages within the tool. You can also integrate Hangouts Chat with Asana, Box, and Zendesk and 50+ other third-party platforms.
Pricing: $5/user/month
Top Features:
- Voice and Video Calling.
- Collaborating with all g-suites (Docs, sheets, presentations).
- Store and share your files.
- Security features like 2-Step verification and Single Sign-On.
- You can use shared calendars, to view the availability of your team members.
Fleep
Unlike other Slack alternatives, Fleep is an open network developed for project communication, so you can initiate a conversation with any Fleep user. All you need to know is the person’s email. Therefore, the app connects the gap between an inbox and a business messenger.
With Fleep, you can create, assign, search and track tasks with Fleep’s native task management tool. It also features an unlimited message history as well as unlimited integration in its free package.
Pricing: Free plans, business plan for €5/user/month
Top Features:
- Support dialogue between team members and other people who are not in your organization.
- Support file sharing.
- You can track your message if it has been seen by any other Fleep user.
- With Fleep You can also edit your sent messages.
Chanty
Speaking of Chanty, its unlimited chat history feature sets it apart from other team chat applications. It is a free, simple, and intuitive team-chat app that organizes all your files, links, tasks, and conversations into folders in a feature called TeamBook.
Different from Slack, Chanty Chanty is faster and more affordable. It also allows you to turn any message into a task, assign it to your teammate and get notified when it’s done.
Pricing: Free plan up to 10 people. Paid plans start at $3/user/month
Top Features:
- Quick buttons to get access to the entire history.
- Highlight the team members with a quick mention of keywords.
- You can turn any message to your task.
- Chanty supports a ton of apps through Zapier.
- It also supports voice chat, voice calling, and screen sharing.
Rocket Chat
Rocket.Chat is open-source, which means— it is designed for anyone who wants to host their own chat service. Besides chat functionality, it has some other great features like audio/video conferencing thereby easing the collaboration with the team.
Rocket.Chat also provides a real-time automatic translation of more than 50 languages as well as voice messages and end-to-end encryption.
Pricing: Free
- Audio & Video Calls and conferencing.
- Screen Sharing
- E2E and SSO encryption.
- Real-time translation of over 50 languages.
- Rocket.Chat can be tailored for endless customization.
Skype for Business
Skype is an all-around communication platform and has been one of the great tools for team communications. Currently owned by Microsoft, Skype lets you share your screen, audio, and video along with the text.
As a Microsoft product, Skype is fully integrated with all MS Office products along with third-party applications. It also allows you to call actual landlines and mobile phone numbers.
Pricing: Free with Office 365, starting from $8.25 /user/month
Top Features
- Simple to understand User Interface.
- Seamless Integrations.
- More affordable starter plan for businesses.
- Desktop interface for system admins
Yammer
Yammer is a great premium team communications tool that looks pretty much like a private Facebook feed just for you and your team. Currently owned by Microsoft, Yammer lets you integrate and collaborate easily with other Microsoft products.
With a powerful context-based search feature and support for all major platforms, Yammer makes it easy to organize your team’s discussions, files, and updates on a particular topic.
Pricing: Free for educational organizations, Paid plans start at $3/user/month.
Top Features
- Keep docs, photos, and videos in context by adding them to conversations.
- Safely collaborate with contractors, customers or sister companies.
- Groups as lists of users
- Social network functionality
MatterMost
MatterMost is an open source team chat software that you can customize completely based on your company’s needs. Mattermost is much better than Slack in threaded discussions, a highly-coveted feature available in this app completely for free.
MatterMost comes with three different editions, of which one is an open source and the other two are designed for commercial purposes.
Top Features
- MatterMost can be integrated with most of the available DevOps tools like Jenkins, Git, etc
- All the conversation made between the teams are properly organized in MatterMost.
- MatterMost also offers screen sharing and audio/video calls.
- Matter most supports multiple languages.
- You can also customize the notification received over mobile, desktop and web.
Pricing: Free to 39$ for a year.
Ryver
Ryver is another excellent team communication and team management app that makes a power move combining team communication and task management features in one app.
Apart from the chat, Ryver offers Workflow automation as well, which means all the operations like task assignment, notifying team, etc can now be automated and thus save time.
Top Features
- Task assignment and team notification can be automated.
- Dedicated Task manager to track all your conversations.
- Screen sharing and audio/video calls.
Pricing: 49$ for 12 users to 99$ for unlimited users per month.
CA Flowdock
CA Flowdock’s is just another Slack alternative. Flowdock is a team chat tool where all the project flows and conversations between the team members are very well organized in threads.
In Flowdock, you can make video calls through appeair.in, and have access to more than 100 integrations.
Top Features
- In Flowdock, all the conversations are organized in threads.Team members can start the conversation privately.
- It supports video calling and screen sharing among the team members.
- Available on multiple platforms like Android, iOS, Windows devices, etc.
Pricing: Free to USD 9$ for a month.
Jostle
Like hangouts, Jostle is another excellent Slack alternative which is cloud-based intranet tool, which means all the conversation between the team members is strictly limited to your organization.
Jostle Supports decent integration tools like Google Drive, Twitter, Gmail, etc.
Top Features
- It supports voice and video calling between the team members.
- It supports multiple languages.
- Jostle is available on multiple platforms like Android, iOS, Desktop.
Pricing: Varies with users
Also See: TeamWave.com – Integrated CRM, Project Management & HR platform.
I believe there are many more reliable alternatives to Slack. For example, Utopia is a p2p all-in-one application that allows you not only to successfully communicate, but also guarantees anonymity, but also complete security of personal data. Plus, it’s completely free, which saves money. It is also indispensable for remote work.
Wait, I used this app too. I didn’t think that ordinary users already knew about it, it seemed to me that this application is used only by geeks cracked on their safety, like me. =) Probably with the release of the mobile version even more people will learn about it.