Item: Slack
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Slack

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Everyone in my organization uses Slack for direct-chat messaging and group messaging. There are many dedicated channels for various teams and departments, with varying memberships and privacy/access settings.
We use Slack for everything from real-time chatting to asynchronous messaging--the organization has never really used email at all for most purposes; it's just Slack.
In addition, some company-wide channels provide a way for leadership or focused teams to broadcast information to everyone in one dedicated location. For example, each time there are updates to our product, the Product team or engineers post a launch brief in a dedicated channel where everyone can see the updates.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Slack is great for direct, person-to-person text chats
Using group channels to broadcast info to multiple teams is very helpful, especially with the ability to reply to each message in a nested thread
The ability to easily copy and paste a link to almost any previous Slack message comes in handy quite often as well.

Cons

The search functionality vexes me quite often. There are a lot of ways to filter the search results but I frequently struggle to find historical messages I'm looking for even when I know that they exists in Slack.
The Slack huddle voice chat/video chat/screen sharing never works properly for me in Chrome for Windows, despite ensuring that devices are properly configured
Sometimes I get duplicate desktop notifications from Slack because I happen to have two different channels open in two different browser tabs. That's not ideal.

Usability

It does most of the things it's meant to do quite well, and everyone knows how to use it. That's partly because of intuitive design, and partly because it's ubiquitous.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Teams

I don't really know, my experience with MS Teams is limited. It's never been used in this organization, as far as I know, but I had another client that uses it so I've been in some Teams meetings.

Key Insights

Do you think Slack delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Slack's feature set?

Yes

Did Slack live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Slack go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Slack again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Snagit, Camtasia, Atlassian Loom

Likelihood to Recommend

Slack is great for team communications in general - person-to-person, or for group coms. It's kind of the gold standard - I spent several years freelancing, and 75% of my clients used Slack for internal communications. You almost never have to train new employees on how to use Slack - everyone just kind of already knows because it's so ubiquitous.

Slack Feature Ratings

Comments

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Slack - Its Slack. There is no other Slack.