Slack vs. Sococo

I think Slack works really well in office settings, or even for any group of people who need an easy way to communicate with each other through organized channels. It may not be the best for those who intend to use it as a social media type app, it is more geared towards business use.

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.

• Automated Notifications: Integrated tools like Jira, Trello, and Google Drive to receive automated notifications and updates directly in Slack, improving visibility and efficiency within the team
• Message Encryption: Slack encrypts the messages in transit and at rest, ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information and making our IT team's life much easier.
• Reminder Bots: We used Slackbot to set reminders, automate follow-up actions, and provided information based on user queries.
• SurveyMonkey Integration: Integrated our Slack with SurveyMonkey to distribute surveys and collect feedback from team members, streamlining the feedback-gathering process which was a huge support to our HR and Admin team.

• 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

• The only thing I can think of is that it is easy to create too many channels. This has more to do with the team using Slack and less to do with Slack itself. maybe some direction on Slack's part on how best to utilize channels would be helpful.

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

As useful as Slack has become within our company, I feel fairly confident we will continue to use Slack as a communication tool. They continue to improve their software and add value to its use within our office. Customer service delivers, which is an absolute must. Looking forward to how they improve.

Incentivized

As long as you use the basic chat features and nothing more, it really is super easy to understand and use. Once you want to take advantage of some of the more advanced features and capabilities, that's when things get complicated. Anyone who has use SMS or a chat program before will be able to figure out the basics though, so rolling this out should be relatively straightforward and not required exhaustive training. Teaching chat etiquette is something else though.

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

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 the superior offering for what we do and who we communicate with. The other programs offer basic features, but Slack continues to innovate and is business-first, which is very helpful for our small team. The feature set and integrations are better in Slack than other offerings we have evaluated

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

• We have a story when one guy mentioned in a our site group with tag @here about his wedding, he didnt know that @here works only for people who are online, so most of the people missed the message, slack is not the best place to update about the important things
• Slack helps to solve and be updated if you have an internal problems and you want to know how the solving goes

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