Slack vs. Sococo

Slack is well suited as another tool in our toolbelt to find answers to common questions and to find resources. it is less appropriate to be used to collaborate on a project in terms of being a project management tool

Incentivized

We tried Sococo as means of gamifying a natively remote office. It does the job but the tool suffers from a lack of integrations. You will run out of free minutes very quickly and the additional charges are too high to make business sense.

• Can create channels for small, medium, or even bigger team to relay important information/updates and whatnots.
• You can do one-on-one (huddle feature) if you're on-boarding a member.
• A platform that can be collaborated with other platform. Example a CRM to be linked with Slack for easier comms relay.
• The best feature for me so far is that you can mention a team member so he/she won't missed an important message you sent.
• You can directly message about anyone within the company.

Incentivized

• Visual layout - the virtual office visible was very helpful because it made the organization feel closer and as a whole, much more connected. Further, you can group departments in your layout, so it gave a good visual understanding of who was part of each 'department/team.'
• Sound - the sound quality was good overall in meetings, and I liked the realistic sounds for opening and closing an office, etc. It allowed for a real office feel, and this is especially important since a lot of companies offer the option to work from home now - this removes the 'disconnect' that usually exists when working from home.
• Communication options - it allowed for multiple ways to communicate and places to communicate - i.e., in the auditorium, lunchroom, conference room, or a smaller room. Very realistic and a variety in that sense.

Incentivized

• Undoubtedly Slack’s search function is powerful but sometimes it is difficult to find specific messages or files in very active channels with high message volumes. This needs an improvement.
• I have experienced notification issues on my phone. I am not receiving notifications and have missed important updates as a result. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app, but the problem still persists.
• The Business Plus plan does not include support for data loss prevention or offline backup providers.

Incentivized

• It would be great if it supported other major browsers. Not everyone has Chrome installed.
• The ongoing subscription cost is difficult to justify. This is the only reason we stopped using it.

Incentivized

Slack is wonderful, it is a tool that changed our perspective and our way to work. We used to use another one, which was purely and sorely designed to messages. Slack provides us that possibility and more, all the other functions that we daily use in our work routine, not to mention the fact that Slack has a wonderful design and it's really easy to use and adapt.

Incentivized

Applications can cause slowdown when onboarding because of the learning curve. Slack is user friendly and very easy to teach new users how to navigate the app. Installation is fairly quick, which also saves a lot of time when setting up new computers and users

Incentivized

It was easy to use but still needs lots of improvement to collaborate with other tools

Incentivized

Yes, the app works 24/7. I don't even recall having any period that we could not use since the implementation. Even the maintenance periods are barely noticeable and our work is not impacted by it when it happens.

Incentivized

Slack is a soft app, we don't have many issues with it. I recall one or two people complaining about something during our usage period, but I didn't have a bad experience. When the app is slow, usually the problem is with my computer or my internet. The app works just fine.

Incentivized

I've never had to contact support for Slack which is a great testament to its ease and use. Adding people outside of the organization takes a little getting used to, but ultimately allows for greater collaboration between FTE and contractors. There is no clear alternative to this software, so it's the best we can do for now.

Sococo didn't seem to have a strong support line. In comparison to other products, such as Microsoft Teams, it did not regularly check in with us. There should be opportunities to give feedback on the quality of the program periodically and if we had any issues. Sometimes, Sococo would crash, and we would 'restart it' but not know why it happened.

Incentivized

It always helps if you communicate to everyone in the organization how important it is to drop whatever other chat tools they are using and jump quickly to Slack. They will all fall in love with it.

Incentivized

Slack is vastly easier to use than Teams and far less convoluted. It also handles Trello and GitLab integrations in a way that is easy to read and digest (whereas Teams handles them in the most useless way possible). Every time I use Teams, something is broken or I can't find things. But Slack is on the ball. Always easy to use and to search. Plus better emoji syntax (um, Microsoft, people put stuff in parenthesis all the time; that doesn't mean they want it to be emojis). Anyway, I'd choose Slack over Teams any day, if given the option.

Incentivized

I prefer Sococo over Lync/Skype for a few reasons. I feel the user interface is slicker, better voice clarity, easier to hop between calls. And, all call members can go to a common chat room on their own accord instead of one person trying to invite everybody. I also feel that it's easier to share one's screen and swap between different shared screens with Sococo.

Incentivized

• I don't have hard numbers, but I can't imagine the level of mistakes that would go uncaught without the easy ability of multiple people being alerted to look at something in real time.
• Efficiency of communicating this way takes a lot of slog out of email, more focus on more important conversations and tasks
• It is on managers to define expectations on how long it should take someone to respond on Slack; it can feel immediate, which can be distracting to deeper work

Incentivized

• Morning meetings are much simpler with sococo than without. Small powwows with coworkers to work out little bugs are also a lot more enticing since setup is essentially nonexistent.
• It might be argued that the cost of sococo isn't worth the benefits of simplicity and ease of use.

Incentivized