Industry leader...with a matching price tag
March 10, 2016
Industry leader...with a matching price tag
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Slack
We use slack as an instant messaging platform across our company. Each team throughout the organization has their own slack channel where the team can discuss things and others in the company can raise questions to the entire team. We also have automated slack accounts (called slack bots) which communicate the status of various systems throughout our infrastructure to interested parties.
- Reduces the number of emails sent and received.
- Very easy to create new groups of users based on interests, job roles, problem triage, or for virtual meetings.
- Chatroom style conversations.
- May different Slack Bot integrations to other enterprise tools.
- Fairly easy to create your own Slack Bots.
- Fair amount of control on the number and "loudness" of alerts and notifications.
- Desktop / phone / browser apps.
- Push notifications to phone if messages go unread for a certain amount of time.
- Desktop app uses a lot of system memory.
- Cost per user is a quite a bit higher than competitors.
- Fewer meetings and much less frequently needing to walk to someones desk to ask them a question.
- Less email and email chains.
- Greater visibility into what other teams are working on.
- Expectation to respond to communication is faster vs. email.
Slack is definitely the marketplace leader for chat / digital communication. Overall Slack has done a very good job of making communication and collaboration easy and non-disruptive. The biggest feature that sets Slack apart from the other tools is the clean interface and automated Slack Bots. We evaluated HipChat as an alternative due to Slack's much higher per user price tag, but found the interface to be less refined and missed the Slack Bots.