Top 10 Group Chat software

Latest news about Group Chat software

2023. Discord updates its bot with ChatGPT-like features



Discord is launching a set of new AI experiences to a number of servers. The messenger is updating its Clyde bot with OpenAI ChatGPT technology that will allow users to have extended conversations with the bot. You can type @Clyde in a server to chat with Clyde in any channel. You also can ask Clyde to start a thread for a group of your friends to hang out. Discord notes that Clyde can recommend playlists, and access GIFs and emojis like any Discord user. You can ask Clyde to do things like send you a gif or share five interesting facts about cats. The company is testing and iterating the product and believes that it will become a fundamental part of the Discord experience.


2023. ByteDance’s Slack-like tool generated $100M in 2022



Feishu, ByteDance’s workplace collaboration app, surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year. Feishu, which has an international version called Lark, is an all-encompassing work communication messenger with handy features from automatic notetaking for video calls and shared calendars to collaborative documents. In late 2021, the workplace tool became one of the firm’s six individual business groups, meaning it was given the same strategic importance as other BGs at ByteDance, which include TikTok, Douyin, Dali (the education BG), BytePlus (B2B AI and data infrastructure) and Nuverse (video games).

2022. Microsoft Teams targets Facebook Groups with new Communities feature



Microsoft Teams launched a new “Communities” feature on Android and iOS device. Users can now create and organize groups with their sports club, event planning committee, parent-teacher association or any other group in their community. The feature gives users access to group calendars, event scheduling, meetings, document/photo sharing, video calls and chat. The Communities feature in Teams includes a “new events experience” that allows users to add events to their community calendar, as well as invite guests, track attendance and chat with attendees through direct private messenger. Communities is now rolling out in the free version of Microsoft Teams. At launch, it’s available on mobile only; however, the company noted it would arrive on desktop soon.


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.


2022. Flip, a chat and HR app for frontline workers, raises $30M



Flip, which makes a communications app for frontline workers to chat with each other, to get communications from management and to carry out HR activities like swapping shifts, has raised $30 million. There are a number of other apps in the market targeting the same sector of the world’s workforce, and the same use case around communications: they include Workplace from Meta, Teams from Microsoft, Crew (now owned by Square), Blink, Yoobic, When I Work, Workstream and many more. In fact just today Snapshift, another frontline work app focused mostly on the HR side of the opportunity, announced funding too.


2021. Twitter acquires messaging platform Quill



Twitter has acquired Slack-like messaging app Quill with an eye toward improving messaging services, including direct messages. Quill will shut down, but its team will join Twitter’s Experience org. At that point, Quill will be turning off its servers and deleting all data. Active customers will be issued full refunds. The platform was built for work conversations but with controls over some of the features that make Slack a distracting time suck. Its structured channels allowed for more focused conversations than the traditional reverse chron chat thread, and message threads could be split and moved into separate conversations.


2021. Blink, a productivity app aimed at frontline workers, raises $20M



Apps catering to frontline workers are seeing a surge of interest in the market these days, as businesses finally start to wake up to using tech to better connect with these employees, and investors eye up an interesting and new growth opportunity in enterprise IT. In one of the latest developments, Blink — a startup and app of the same name that provides a platform for frontline workers to use and engage with the various IT services used by their organizations, as well as with each other — has picked up $20 million, a Series A. Blink’s particular approach has been to try to create a user interface, and functionality, that caters both to asynchronous activities as well as real-time information, the idea being that front-line workers are most likely not going to be looking at the app continuously throughout the day, so the priority for making sure important things surface when they do is especially higher.


2021. Microsoft Teams gets 3D animated avatars



Microsoft announced 3D avatars for those Teams meetings where you don’t want to be on camera. Those animated personalized avatars are part of what Microsoft calls “Mesh for Teams,” which combines the company’s Mesh platform for powering shared experiences in virtual reality, augmented reality and elsewhere, with Teams and its built-in productivity tools. It’s still the same meetings that should’ve been an email, but different. To access Mesh for Teams, you will be able use anything from a smartphone to a VR headset or a HoloLens. Microsoft says businesses can also create their own spaces — or metaverses, because that’s the term we use now — within Teams, where people can virtually mingle and collaborate.


2021. Google Workspace opens up spaces for all users



Google Workspace has opened spaces in Google Chat for all users. Spaces integrates with Workspace tools, like the calendar, Drive and documents, to provide a more hybrid work experience where users can see the full history, content and context of conversations, regardless of their location. Instead of starting an email chain or scheduling a video meeting, teams can come together directly in a space to move projects and topics along. Here are some new features users can see in spaces: one interface for everything — inbox, chats, spaces and meetings; spaces, and content therein, can be made discoverable for people to find and join in the conversation; better search ability within a team’s knowledge base; ability to reply to any message within a space; enhanced security and admin tools to monitor communication.


2021. Yoobic raises $50M for its chat and communications app aimed at frontline and service workers



Slack set the standard in many ways for what knowledge workers want and expect out of a workplace collaboration app these days, but a lot has been left on the table when it comes to frontline workers. Yoobic, which provides an app for frontline and service workers to manage tasks, communicate with each other and management, and also go through training, development and other e-learning tasks, has picked up $50 million. Yoobic works with some 300 big brands in 80 countries altogether covering a mammoth 335,000 locations in sectors like retail, hospitality, distribution and manufacturing.


2021. Messaging app Wire raises $21M



Wire, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app and service, has raised a $21M. While Wire started as a consumer app, it never managed to attract hundreds of millions of customers like other messaging apps. So now the company focuses on large customers, such as big corporations and government customers with a ton of potential users. Five G7 governments are currently using Wire. Right now, Wire has 1,800 customers. In addition to working on Messaging Layer Security (MLS), Wire has been focused on improving conference calls and real-time interactions. The company believes messaging apps and real-time collaboration apps are slowly converging. And the startup wants to offer a service that works well across various scenarios.


2021. Microsoft updates Teams with new presentation features



Microsoft Teams will get a new PowerPoint Live feature that will allow presenters to present as usual — but with the added benefit of seeing all their notes, slides and meeting chats in a single view. And for those suffering through yet another PowerPoint presentation while trying to look engaged, PowerPoint Live lets them scroll through the presentation at will — or use a screen reader to make the content more accessible. This new feature is now available in Teams.


2021. Rocket.Chat raises $19M for its open-source approach to integrated enterprise messaging



Rocket.Chat that’s aiming to build an integrated open-source Slack alternative has raised $19 million. Rocket.Chat positions itself as something of an all-in-one superstore for any and all communications needs, with organizations putting their own services together in whatever way works for their purposes. It can either be hosted and managed by customers themselves, or used as a cloud-based SaaS, with its pricing ranging between free (for minimal, self-hosted services) to $4 per user per month. its basic platform looks a little like Slack. But if you are using it for omnichannel communications for customer service, for example, you can build a platform within Rocket.Chat where you incorporate communications from any other platforms that might be used to communicate with customers.


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. JANDI (the Slack of Asia) raises $13M



As Slack ramps up its investment in Asia, Toss Lab, the South Korea-based creator of enterprise collaboration platform JANDI, is preparing to become a more formidable rival and raising $13 million Series B. JANDI is the top collaboration platform in Japan and Taiwan. It serves companies ranging from small to mid-sized businesses to large enterprises with thousands of employees, and its clients include LG CNS (the Korean conglomerate’s IT services subsidiary), Korean tire manufacturer Nexen Tire and Lexus. Toss Lab says its revenue has grown more than 100% over the past three years.


2020. Microsoft updates Teams with new automation and scheduling tools



Microsoft has unveiled a slew of updates for its Teams collaboration and communications platform. For users, most of the important updates are around meetings in teams, where you’ll soon be able to schedule, manage and conduct virtual appointments through the Bookings app, for example. On the scheduling side, Teams is also getting new capabilities in the Shifts app, including new triggers and templates to enable auto-approvals for shift requests, for example, when a manager’s approval isn’t needed. Microsoft will also soon enable a new feature that makes it easier to integrate Power Apps and Power Automate business process templates into Teams, and Power BI users will soon be able to quickly share reports to Teams with the click of a single button.


2020. Leverice - team messenger that’s taking aim at information overload



Leverice - is a new team messenger and collaboration platform that’s aiming to compete with b2b giants like Slack by tackling an issue that continues to plague real-time messaging — namely, ‘always-on’ information overload. This means these tools can feel like they’re eating into productivity as much as aiding it. Or else leave users stressed and overwhelmed about how to stay on top of the work comms firehose. Leverice’s pitch is that it’s been built from the ground up to offer a better triage structure so vital bits of info aren’t lost in rushing rivers of chatter than flow across less structured chat platforms.


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.


2020. Microsoft updates Teams communications platform with targeted messaging



Microsoft announced a handful of new capabilities coming to its Microsoft 365 platform that are designed to improve communications among care teams and facilitate low-friction telehealth visits with patients. Chief among the new tools already rolled out to providers is targeted communication within both the mobile and desktop versions of Microsoft Teams. Individual staff members can be assigned different tags based on their roles, departments or whatever other groupings might apply. With these, groups of employees can received targeted messages within the chat platform.


2020. Flip raises $4M to pounce on the growing sector of employee messaging – TechCrunch



Flip, a Germany-based employee messenger app, has now raised $4M. The startup offers companies a platform that connects and informs employees across all levels in a legally compliant manner. The application is based on a GDPR-compliant data and employee protection concept, which was validated jointly with experts and works councils of several DAX companies. It also integrates with many existing corporate IT infrastructures. The startup has now secured customers including Porsche, Bauhaus, Edeka, Junge IG Metall and Wüstenrot & Württembergische. Parts of Sparkasse and Volksbank are also among the customer base. Deutsche Telekom is also a partner.


2020. Microsoft Teams is getting push-to-talk feature



Microsoft is adding a new Walkie Talkie feature to its Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams. Available in preview in the coming months, the feature will turn smartphones or tablets into a walkie-talkie that will work over Wi-Fi or cellular data. It’s primarily designed for “firstline workers,” employees who face customers and run day-to-day operations inside companies. Microsoft is positioning this as a more secure way of using a traditional walkie-talkie. Microsoft is embedding the feature at the center of its navigation bar inside Microsoft Teams, suggesting that’s a highly requested feature that will be used by a lot of companies.


2019. Messaging app Wire raises $8.2M


Wire, an enterprise-focused end-to-end encrypted messaging service, has quietly raised $8.2 million. Besides, it moved its holding company to the US from Luxembourg and is planning to introduce a freemium tier to its existing consumer service — which itself has half a million users — while working on a larger round of funding to fuel more growth of its enterprise business — a key reason for moving to the US. For now Wire is keeping the rest of its operations as is. Customers are licensed and serviced from Wire Switzerland; the software development team is in Berlin, Germany; and hosting remains in Europe.


2019. Slack investor Index Ventures backs Slack competitor Quill



Quill, a new Slack competitor that offers “meaningful conversations, without disturbing your team, has raised a $2M seed round. The company has created a no-frills messaging product. Still in beta, Quill plans to encourage fewer, more focused conversations with a heavy emphasis on threads. Investor Index Ventures, for its part, appears to be doubling down on the growing workplace communications software category. The firm first invested in Slack, which completed its highly anticipated direct listing earlier this year, in 2015. Slack went on to raise hundred millions more, reaching a valuation of over $7 billion in 2018.


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. Facebook Workplace dives into enterprise video content management


To capitalize on Facebook’s growing focus on video in its consumer service, Facebook Workplace has undertaken several steps of its own into video. It’s releasing a special app that can be used on the Portal, Facebook’s video screen; and alongside that, it’s announcing new video features: captioning at the bottom of videos; auto-translating starting with 14 languages; and a new P2P architecture that will speed up video transmission for those who might be watching videos on Workplace in places where bandwidth is constrained. It’s a way for Workplace (and Facebook) to differentiate the experience and use cases for the product to businesses, which might already be using Slack but might consider buying this as well, if not migrating away from the other product altogether.


2019. Beekeeper raises $45M to become the ‘Slack for non-desk employees’



Beekeeper, the Switzerland and U.S.-based startup that provides a mobile-first communications platform for employers that need to communicate with blue-collar and service-oriented workers, has raised $45 million in Series B funding. Targeting non-desk employees, including those working in hospitality, manufacturing and retail, Beekeeper’s mobile-first platform is designed to replace more arcane communication methods, such as pen and paper and consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp.


2019. Slack competitor Facebook Workplace has raised its prices for the first time


After three years of life and 2 million paying users signed up, Facebook Workplace is changing its pricing tiers. Up to now, Facebook has taken a very simple approach to how it charges for Workplace, unique not just because of it being a paid service (unlike Facebook itself, which is free), but for how it modeled its pricing on the basic building block of Facebook-the-consumer product: a basic version was free, with an enhanced premium edition costing a flat $3 per active user, per month. Now, the standard (basic) tier is getting rebranded as Workplace Essential, and will still be free to use. Meanwhile, the premium tier is being renamed Workplace Advanced and getting charged $4 per person, per month. And Facebook is introducing a new tier, Workplace Enterprise, which will be charged at $8 per person, per month, and will come with a new set of services specifically around guaranteed, quicker support and first-look access at new features.


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.