Slack is #2 in Top 10 Group Chat software

Positions in ratings

#2 in Top 10 Group Chat software

Alternatives

The best alternatives to Slack are: Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Skype, WhatsApp, Mattermost

Latest news about Slack

2022. Slack adds persistent information layer to channels called Canvas



Slack has succeeded in large part in the enterprise by allowing people to communicate in a number of ways while integrating with many common enterprise applications. But what Slack has lacked until now was a way to share information about a project in a persistent way. If you wanted to find the content related to a project, you might start a channel to narrow it down, and share some documents, links and other information, but to find them again requires searching or a lot of scrolling. Slack recognized this limitation and decided to combine Quip’s collaborative tooling with Slack’s communication capabilities in a new tool Slack is calling Canvas. It sits alongside a channel’s conversation stream and gives people access to information such as data and charts, text, tasks, internal and external links, training videos and so forth.

2022. Slack gains new automation features, including conditional logic for workflows



Slack has announced the launch of new automation features designed to make workflows more shareable and discoverable. An expansion of the Workflow Builder tool Slack launched in 2019, the new capabilities allow users to send workflows to other Slack users and leverage “if-then” statements to create more sophisticated flows. Slack’s increased investment in automation comes as no-code development tools, which let users build apps and pipelines without having to learn programming, grow in popularity. Nearly 60% of all custom apps — including automations — are now built outside the IT department, according to a survey by 451 Research and FileMaker. Of those, 30% are built by employees with either limited or no technical development skills, the survey found.


2022. Slack is increasing prices and changing the way its free plan works



Slack, the chat platform that serves as an online watercooler for oh-so-many teams, is bumping up its monthly price and changing the way its free plan works. If you pay for the “Pro” plan by the month, the price will increase from $8 per user per month to $8.75 per user per month. If you pay for the “Pro” plan by the year, the price will increase from $6.67 per user per month to $7.25 per user per month. If you’re on the free plan, they’re changing the way/duration messages are saved. Previously, free Slacks would show the last 10,000 messages and 5 GB worth of uploads. Moving forward it’ll be based on time rather than amount, with Slack showing the last 90 days of messages/uploads regardless of how much or how little is sent.


2021. Salesforce announces first integrations with Slack



When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, you had to figure they had some big plans for the company. Today the CRM giant announced some initial integrations that should prove useful for Salesforce customers. For starters, the Sales Cloud gets dedicated deal rooms, where all of the parties involved in a complex sale, whether internal departments like finance and product people or external partners, can come together in Slack throughout the sales cycle and stay on top of the ebb and flow of all the sales activity. The hope is that by taking advantage of Slack’s ability to integrate external enterprise apps inside the application, working together they can find ways to speed up and automate various Salesforce tasks, making it faster and easier to use without switching context to make it happen.


2021. Slack now lets you DM employees in other companies



Slack is starting to roll out a new feature that lets anyone using the service DM each other. Slack Connect DMs will let Slack users privately message employees outside of their company. It’s designed for companies working with partners or clients, but you could even use it to message friends at other companies. This new DM feature builds on Slack’s work with Connect, which started appearing last year. Slack Connect is primarily designed to let businesses collaborate together through shared channels, and cross-organizational DMs is the next big part of Connect. DMs work by sending a special link to start a conversation and may require Slack admin approval depending on how your organization has set up Slack.


2020. Salesforce buys Slack for $27.7B



Salesforce, the CRM giant, is acquiring Slack in a $27.7 billion megadeal. The new deal also puts Salesforce more on par — and in competition — with its arch rival and sometime friend Microsoft, whose Teams product has been directly challenging Slack in the market. Microsoft, which passed on buying Slack in the past for a fraction of what Salesforce is paying today, has made Teams a key priority in recent quarters, loathe to cede any portion of the enterprise software market to another company. What really has set Slack apart from the pack, at least initially, was its ability to integrate with other enterprise software. When you combined that with bots, those intelligent digital helpers, the company could potentially provide Salesforce customers with a central place to work without changing focus because everything they need to do can be done in Slack.


2020. Slack introduces simplified interface as usage moves deeper into companies



Slack introduced the biggest yet update aimed at easing the user experience, making it more of an accessible enterprise communications hub. The company has been trying to address the needs of the changing audience over the years by adding many new features, but admits that has resulted in some interface clutter. Today’s redesign is meant to address that. Among the new features, besides the overall cleaner look, many people will welcome the new ability to nest channels to organize them better in the Channel sidebar. As your channels proliferate, it becomes harder to navigate them all. Starting today, users can organize their channels into logical groupings with labels.


2019. Slack adds workflow automation feature


Slack released Workflow Builder - visual tool that allows any Slack user to automate routine functions by creating custom workflows. In just a few minutes, you can have a seamless way to standardize how you collect requests from your team, report any outage in real time, get new team members up to speed with welcome messages… and loads of additional applications. Before you jump in to build workflows from scratch for your team, the easiest way to get started is to download and import one of our pre-built workflow templates: welcome teammates to channels with automatic onboarding messages, request information with custom forms, collect incident reports in real time.


2019. Slack speeded up its group chat for Windows and Web


Slack is launching a major update to its web and desktop today that doesn’t introduce any new features or a new user interface. Instead, it’s almost a complete rebuild of the underlying technology.Slack promises that this new version will use up to 50 percent less memory than before and that Slack will load 33 percent faster. Joining an incoming call will also be ten times faster now. A lot of these changes will be especially apparent to users who are part of multiple workspaces. That’s because the developers designed the new architecture with the assumption that many users are now part of multiple workspaces. Those used to take up a lot of memory and CPU cycles when you switched between them, as each workspace used to get its own Electron process in the old app.


2019. Slack integrates with email



Slack's latest feature allows users to message coworkers via email. The feature, which will be rolling out over the next couple months, is meant to give people who don't use Slack a way to keep up with conversations their coworkers are having inside the messaging app. When they’re mentioned by username in channels or sent a direct message, Slack will route those messages into their email inbox so they don’t miss out on important information while they’re getting themselves set up. Initially, the Slack to email messages will only be one-way, meaning the recipient can view the conversation from their inbox but won't be able to respond directly. But Slack says it will eventually allow people to messages via email as well.


2018. Slack acquires email assistant Astrobot



Slack has acquired Astro, the startup behind email assistant, Astrobot. The deal, which marks Slack’s largest to date, will go a ways toward helping the popular enterprise chat platform achieve its vision of fully integrating workplace mainstays like email and calendars into its channels. Astrobot is a Slack app that integrates email and calendars directly into the chat platform. Among other things, it lets users search both at once, without leaving Slack. The standalone Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, and Slack apps will be shut down on October, with signups for new users being disabled immediately.


2018. Slack is buying, and shutting down HipChat and Stride



Slack is buying, and shutting down Atlassian's workplace group chats HipChat and Stride (that are Slack's competitors). Both tools will be discontinued and users - migrated to Slack. Hipchat was launched in beta form back in 2009, long before Slack’s debut in 2013. It mostly ruled its space in the time in between, leading Atlassian to acquire it in March of 2012. Slack quickly outgrew it in popularity though for myriad reasons — be it a bigger suite of third-party integrations, a better reputation for uptime, or better marketing. By September of 2017, Atlassian overhauled its chat platform and rebranded it as as “Stride”, but it was never able to quite catch up with Slack’s momentum.


2018. Slack acquired routine automation app Missions



Slack has acquired Missions, the app that allows Slack users to build tools to automate simple routines without code. Missions’ technology lets people create workflows for tasks that they might normally have to talk about inside Slack and then carry out the process off-chat. With Missions, Slack hopes that users can help teams boost productivity by making things more simple for a variety of repeatable processes. Other potential areas for the app to help users include managing approvals and rejections in the hiring process, as well as internal ticketing.


2018. Slack added search filters



Slack’s search functions are getting another little quality-of-life update with the introduction of filters, which aims to make search a little more granular to find the right answers. The company also says searches are going to be more personalized. All of this is an attempt to get to the right files or conversations quickly as Slack — a simple collection of group chats and channels that can get out of hand very fast — something a little more palatable. As companies get bigger and bigger, the sheer amount of information that ends up in it will grow faster and faster. That means that the right information will generally be more difficult to access, and if Slack is going to stick to its roots as a simple internal communications product, it’s going to have to lean on improvements under the hood and small changes in front of users. The company says search is now 70 percent faster on the back end.


2018. Slack added Actions feature for deep integrations



Slack has introduced a new feature called "actions," which takes Slack's existing third-party app integrations to the next level. It lets developers hook their apps even deeper into the chat service so you can do more without ever leaving the app. Instead of the automated experiences developers can create now, actions lets you start using outside services directly from Slack messages. If your company uses the task management software Asana, for example, you can create and assign a new task right from your chats. Or, if you use Zendesk, you can create support tickets directly form a message.


2018. Slack’s Enterprise version added security enhancements



Slack has unveiled some new security and compliance features aimed at boosting the appeal of its Enterprise Grid product among IT leaders and admins. The Enterprise Grid was launched a year ago and offers centralized management of the team chat application on a company-wide basis and supports up to 500,000 users. Among the new features is the addition of a new Apps page to the Slack Admin Dashboard. This improves oversight of how apps are used and managed across every workspace in an organization, providing insight into who installed an app, for example, or what channels they are used in.


2017. Slack gets cool screen-sharing tool



The collaborative workplace platform Slack is adding one of its most requested features: screen-sharing tool. Slack previously allowed users on a call to share screens with other collaborators, but now, Slack users can also allow others to interact with the screen in a number of ways, including typing, drawing, and editing on the screen. Enabling this new interactive screen-sharing ability on Slack looks pretty simple. During a Slack call, you just need to hit the "Share control of your screen" button which will then give each participant on the call their own cursor. They can now type, edit, and draw on the shared screen.


2017. Slack raised $250 million at $5 billion valuation



Enterprise messaging service Slack is raising a $250 million round at a $5 billion valuation. Slack has almost a cult following in Silicon Valley, but much of its success will be contingent on whether it is able to convince large enterprises around the world to switch services. Slack has touted itself as an alternative to email, but it’s not a platform for communicating with people outside your company. A lot of people love Slack over other alternatives for its modern interface.


2017. Slack adds screen sharing



Slack now lets paid users to share live video of their screens during video calls. The feature will roll out on Slack’s latest Mac and Windows apps over the next few days. To use Slack screensharing, fire up a video call then hit the screenshare button. You can select your preferred screen if you’re using several, your webcam will deactivate, and Slack notifications won’t appear to avoid exposing any private info. Viewers will see all of your shared screen including your cursor so you can easily point things out. Slack’s native screensharing feature will compete with several integrations with third-party products it already offered, including Skype, BlueJeans, Appear.in, Google Hangouts, and Zoom.


2017. Slack launched Enterprise version of its group chat



Slack has launched Enterprise Grid — a new product aimed at large enterprises. It comes with a range of features that are essentially table stakes in the enterprise software market. IT administrators are now be able to manage and provision multiple large teams; and, in addition to the encryption that Slack already offers, add in new layers of security and identity management; set new security and compliance controls; and new HIPAA & FINRA compliance and data loss prevention integration. The initial customers include Capital One, Paypal and IBM. IBM is a particularly interesting name to see here, given that it sells its own collaboration product for large enterprises, IBM Connections, and it is also working on what appears to be its own AI business intelligence product, Watson Workspace. Other would be competitors include Workplace from Facebook, Microsoft’s Teams, Jive and Spark from Cisco. Pricing for Enterprise Grid — unlike normal Slack, where pricing starts at $8 and $15 per month for two tiers.


2017. Slack now allows to add comments to particular message



Workplace communications tool Slack has introduced threaded comments. With threads, users can pop out of the chaos of an ongoing chat and pin bits of conversations off to the side that they can address on a more regular basis. Users can jump in and out of their existing threads much like they do channels and direct messages, and when they want to share new comments back into a chat stream, they can do so by hitting a small checkbox at the bottom of their new message. The threads are located in the panel that pops out on the right side of your screen that has additional tools and resources for your existing rooms and direct messages. Starting a thread is as simple as clicking on a button next to a message in a room, much like you would add a reaction, and then it peels off into a new conversation within the right panel.


2016. Slack adds video calls



Collaboration messenger Slack is adding one more key feature - video calling. Group video calls, for those on paid tiers, can handle up to 15 people currently, Slack says. The new feature will be available first on Slack for Mac and Windows on desktop and Google Chrome in the next few days. Those on mobile will be able to join video calls but will experience them as audio only. Video calls in Slack will have an interesting add-on - emojis. A lot of people who use video and audio conferencing for calls with work colleagues will turn on the mute button so that their random coughs and sighs or other ambient noise will not interrupt the soliloquies of their coworkers. Now if they want to make quick responses to things they won’t have to fumble around for the unmute button: instead they can offer a thumbs up, or whatever is right for the moment.


2016. Google and Slack team up against Microsoft and Facebook



Recently Microsoft and Facebook launched their clones of popular collaboration service Slack (Teams and Workplace respectively). Of course for Slack it's a tough competition, so they found a partner in face of Google. The companies signed the strategic partner agreement and soon will tightly integrate their product. In particular, Slack will become available as an app in G Suite (formerly Google Apps), so admins will be able to turn it on/off for their users. And inside Slack you'll be able to preview documents via Google Docs editors, and sync access rights for files attached from Google Drive. Besides, Slack will get integration with the new service Google Team Drives (it's the recently launched team-focused version of Google Drive).


2016. Slack to be powered by IBM Watson AI



IBM and Slack today announced a partnership that combines Slack’s digital workplace with he cognitive computing capabilities of Watson. The goal is to use Watson's artificial intelligence (AI) learning engine to power offerings such as bots and other conversational inferences to improve the Slack user experience. Developers can use this enhanced cognitive functionality to tap a wide range of Watson services, such as Conversation, Sentiment Analysis and speech APIs, and build new tools for the platform.


2016. Slack deeply integrates with Salesforce



Enterprise chat app Slack is adding a "deep product partnership" with Salesforce - an integration that will make it much easier for businesses to share data across the two platforms, specifically around employee conversations and sales account information. The Salesforce integration will work essentially like many of those other Slack integraions - with a backslash and keyword “Salesforce” to bring data into the conversation. This partnership can also mean that Salesforce would like to acquite the collaboration service. The company had big ambitions for its own messaging app, Chatter, but it hasn't become very popular so far. Recall that according to rumors Microsoft is also interested in acquiring Slack.


2016. Slack launched



Slack unveiled a new feature called “Sign in with Slack”, which will let Slack users sign into and use other apps using their Slack identities. So, it will compete with Facebook and Google that share this market. “Sign in with Slack” could turn Slack into the identity provider for the enterprise. Rather than having to remember a login and password for every different workplace app, you’ll be able to just use your Slack login. The move takes advantage of the fact that everybody in a company needs chat. While other workplace apps might only be necessary for certain departments, messaging is the thread that ties a business together. The launch-partners, supporting Slack-identity include the cloud-based word processing and collaboration app Quip, Figma, Kifi, Officevibe, Smooz and Slackline.


2016. Threaded messaging is coming to Slack



Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced that threaded messaging — perhaps one of the service’s most important missing components — is finally coming in the next quarter. Slack had been using threading internally for months while testing what the best version of the tool would be for the service.  Adding threaded messaging, an important component in other services like Yammer, Citrix’s Podio and Convo, would level the playing field between collaboration services — and give Slack an opportunity to gobble up a much wider part of the field. Slack, as-is, is more like a tool for quickly building work-centric chat rooms with direct messaging integrated into it. Threaded comments would bring the service to another level, helping it become a more important part of the workflow and upending existing services.


2015. Slack launched App Directory and will be funding developers



Enterprise collaboration service Slack wants developers to build Slack apps beyond the 150 like Dropbox and Twilio that it’s now showing off in its new App Directory. Moreover Slack announced it’s teamed up with its investors, who happen to be the Bay Area A-list of VCs —  Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, KPCB, Spark, and Social+Capital. Together they’ve thrown in $80 million for a Slack-first fund. It will back enterprise software developers making Slack integrations part of their core product. Slack and its VCs want these developers to make Slack more useful and convenient with apps for doing all sorts of things in the workplace. The $80 million basically guarantees there will continue to be a healthy Slack platform. Competitors who copy its core messaging features can’t copy the developer ecosystem. That could give Slack an edge on HipChat and other competitors.


2015. Enterprise messaging service Slack introduced User Groups



Slack is looking to enhance the experience of how larger organizations function through the introduction of User Groups. The new feature allows notifications to be specifically sent to separate departments. Whether it’s getting the message out to a company’s engineers, customer service teams or marketing teams, user groups allows entire groups to be alerted about issues in a moments notice. Initiatives like this fit into Slack’s larger focus of allowing the platform to operate more effectively for larger organizations. In turn, this feature will only be enabled for Slack teams on paid plans.


2015. Slack adds emails to channels



Email remains ubiquitous and is quite useful for getting updates from pretty much every service on the Internet. That's why Slack is launching a new feature: all teams on the Standard or Plus plans can have email directed into Slack channels. If you don’t set this integration up correctly, your channels could turn into a clogged up shithole, so be sure to think about what emails you want to bring in and where you want them to be posted. Getting support tickets dropped right into a support channel means that your company can move into action faster. While you most certainly can’t reply to the email from within Slack, the alert alone is extremely valuable. What Slack is helping to kill is internal email, which is the bane of everyone’s existence at work.


2015. Slack integrated with Google Calendar



Slack, the popular office communication tool, will now integrate with Google Calendar, letting events automatically post reminders inside slack channels. After linking a Google account to Slack, you can choose any calendar and instruct it to post to certain Slack channels. For example, you could have events from your company’s development deadline calendar post reminders to the #dev channel two days before a product deadline. Or, on a more lighthearted note, you could have your company’s birthday or holiday calendar automatically post to #general so your whole team can celebrate together. The integration will also allow daily or weekly calendar summaries to be sent out to everyone subscribed to a certain Slack channel.


2015. Collaboration chat Slack gets a native Windows app



Popular group collaboration messenger Slack has finally released a Windows app. In case you’re unfamiliar, Slack is perhaps best described in an overly simple way: It’s a private chatroom for teams. Think Hipchat, but prettier and with the ability to integrate anything from Dropbox to Giphy with just a click. Windows app makes jumping in and out of Slack easier. It lets you run Slack in its own window, give it a home in your start menu, and gives you something to alt-tab to that isn’t one of the many browser tabs you might have open. It also means you get chat notifications that are more tightly integrated into the OS, the ability to jump between multiple Slack teams in one window (as opposed to a separate tab for each team), and neat tricks like the ability to tuck Slack into the task tray until you actually need it. Plus, it just feels a whole lot nicer.


2015. Slack aquired screen-sharing tool Screenhero



Slack, the workplace communication service, acquired Screenhero, a screen-sharing tool for teams, with plans to incorporate its features. Screenhero provides a range of collaboration tools, including voice chat, faster screen sharing between individuals and the option to have multiple mouse cursors interacting over various applications. The startup's six-person team will join Slack, and work to integrate and advance those features there. The Screenhero acquisition is Slack's second to date. It bought Spaces, a small startup also developing collaboration tools, in September.


2015. Slack launches a new plan for larger companies



Collaboration chat app Slack launched some new features that target teams needing help with single sign-on, compliance exports, a 99.99 percent uptime guarantee and 24/7 premium support. It's called a Plus plan, a new option priced at $12.50 per user per month. The companies that will benefit from the Plus plan have specific team management, security and/or compliance requirements, according to Slack officials. These are often larger organizations, they said. Before today there were two options with Slack: Lite, which was free and had some restrictions, and Standard.


2014. Slack is now a billion-dollar company



Slack, the enterprise collaboration chat platform, has closed a $120 million round of funding, and its valuation is now at $1.12 billion. The company says it now has 30,000 active customers. Slack has made a name for itself in the burgeoning work-collaboration space, which seems to be the next area cloud providers are concentrating on in the storage wars. This past year saw Google, Amazon and Microsoft dropping their storage prices several times and as of summer, those big three cloud providers started touting their work-collaboration features as a way to entice new users. And just so no one’s left out, Dropbox and Box have also been showcasing their own tools as well.


2014. Slack buys document-collaboration startup Spaces



Chat-based collaboration service Slack acquired the two-man, bootstrapped startup Spaces for an undisclosed amount. Spaces’ core product is a sharable document in which users can collaborate together with graphics, text, annotations and other work-related items; with Slack providing a chat platform that aims to centralize an enterprise’s work into one locale, the deal makes sense. Slack’s rise to startup stardom highlights the importance major cloud providers are putting on work-collaboration tools, like Amazon’s Zocalo product; Slack is also putting the pressure on Box and Dropbox who have both been boosting their workflow-management features in recent months.