Slack is the massively popular communications and management tool that is designed for teams to help enhance and facilitate their requisite conversations and to speed up the whole collaboration process immeasurably.
It’s the favored alternative to email for many companies whose need for quick communications and desire to abandon long email chains makes it super useful. Slack has a ‘channels system where a channel can be created, say for a specific project, and can then be used by all the invited members to post messages, files and documents and react to one another posts.
You can be in multiple channels in any one time and you can leave it open in the background of your computer, relying on the notification system to let you know when you have been ‘mentioned in a channel. It’s a really simple, clean solution to digital collaboration and an app that I would very much recommend.
That being said, since the inception of Slack, there has been a lot of further additions to the corporate team communications and management application field (sorry for that mouthful!) So, it is certainly worth exploring what alternatives have arisen to Slack and what further capabilities have been enabled in this field. So, without further ado, let’s jump into 7 appealing alternatives to Slack.
Discord is an application that will look familiar if you have used Slack. It runs on a nearly identical channel-based system, where you can communicate with one another and be a member of multiple channels.
Interestingly, Discord is most heavily adopted by PC gamers, who use it as a communication tool run in the background of multiplayer games. The upshot of this is that there is a really good voice channel system that you can jump in and out of as needed at any point. Discord has the fun added benefit of bots and commands that can be woven into your experience. So, for example, if your projected related to generating new sales and you wanted to look at the annual sales report for the previous year, you could generate the command ‘!sales2018’ which, when typed, would immediately give the type-r a copy of the report to look at. A really modern and progressive app that is no less useful as a business tool in spite of its gaming origins.
Optimized communications tech? You can be sure to find Google not far behind. Hangouts are a really intuitive response to the demand for live response service, particularly for business needs. Hangouts allow you to do just that, hang out in a chat until people join.
Yu can join and leave video and voice calls at the click of a button. Furthermore, each Hangout is shareable with a link meaning that it’s super easy to invite additional people to get involved with the action.
This is a collaborative platform that can involve your company, customers, stakeholders, teams, sponsors and so on. You can use it to communicate with anyone at anytime. It helps companies make decisions faster with accurate data.
Orangescrum also has a clear area for goals and directives which makes operations easier. It can provide for real time monitoring of key deliverables and milestones as well as enable coordinated project planning.
Cisco Spark is more of a messaging app, but still a useful one, nonetheless. Again, it offers a more easily integrated video and voice chat solution in comparison to Slack, which has focused primarily on text chats.
It’s a simple familiar layout, with good functionality on smartphones and tablets which anyone working in a modern company will tell you is less good, more vital.
Hive is an excellent solution for all of you busy bees (get it?) out there who are more organizational oriented than is perhaps suited to the simplistic style of Slack.
Hive gives you all of the information you want to have in front of you on one screen, adopting an easy to maneuver format that will have you and your team organized and up to date in no time. It also has great integrated functionality, easily combining with Google docs and a range of other file-sharing programs that you might already be using for your teams.
Glip is one of the heavy hitters when it comes to alternatives to Slack for this kind of collaboration app. It’s an immensely popular program that boasts unlimited storage, something which ought to have a great appeal to you, especially since most corporate teams have the need to share all sorts of things from spreadsheets to videos through the system itself.
Like most of the options already mentioned, Glip also gives you solid team messaging and project management options as well, to keep your team flowing. The meeting and calendar functions are equally impressive and useful.
Chanty is a really nice looking and smart alternative to Slack. Again, it adopts a channel system with a choice of public, private and one-to-one channels. It also has a really useful system for organizing files, projects, links and chats into one consolidated area in a folder.
This feature is called Team book and is an area which creates a good opportunity to keep your team even more organized than some of the alternatives will let you. The app in general will be preferable for people in small or medium-sized teams to ensure that your page doesn’t get too flooded.
The final option has probably got the best name, a name which inspires a sense that that is where all of your staff will be on after you use this app.
Samepage is a dense application with an enormous range of things that can be done. It can get a bit over-complex or cluttered at times but it generally, with good organization, is a super powerful tool for working with large teams. It has a built-in word processor on top of all of the other trimmings.
A company-wide application of Samepage is something which could pretty feasibly work if gone about correctly.
So, despite the fact that Slack is certainly an excellent tool and something which you would do well to take a look at, you can see how many other options there are. Each different option has the potential to be perfect for your team, you just need to take the time to examine all of them and pick what you think matches.