Back in 2017, we wrote our own little review on Slack vs Stride (which also mentioned Facebook Workplace). This was big news at the time and we were pretty excited about the new technologies and what we as users may gain from it. Now, less than a year later, this happens.
Which of course means that our old post is no longer valid, it is now out of date. But we do have something new to add here.
News from 2018: Slack buys Stride.
This means that both Atlassian’s HipChat & Stride (that we didn’t end up trialing after all) will be shutting down and the two companies will work together to migrate all of its users over to Slack.
You’ve probably heard of Slack. We’ve only partly moved from using Asana, but never really got into it as a full-time application.
What we love about Slack:
- Flexibility. You can post all kinds of stuff and make it stand out
- You can invite users (clients or friends) from outside to work on your project
- Plugs into a huge amount of third party applications, excellent for collaboration and a big time saver
What we don’t love:
- As usual, it’s the price, even though free for 10,000 messages, you quickly realise that you run out of space and need to search for old
- It’s gone down a few times too many over the past month, but this is generally fixed quick (although could be quite annoying at the time)
The one we’ve been using as of 2018 is Rocket.Chat. It’s a lot like Slack, but it’s actually free (as long as you host it on your own server, set it up and support it). As the team grows, so do the costs, so our development partners have made the switch and we are liking it so far.
Google, of course, has one and it’s called Hangouts Chat. Even though we use G Suite and it’s a part of it, we never even tried it. Mostly because, as far as we know it’s only for your team (ie those on your domain). But we like to invite guests/clients to work on projects with us.
And Google UI is horrible, so even if there are better options there – try and find them!
And now Microsoft, not to lack behind, has their own Microsoft Teams. The story is here quite similar as with Google, the UI isn’t great and it looks like an internal only chat app, which isn’t ideal for us. Aside from that, we are not on Microsoft 365 and probably can’t even use this. Or maybe we can, but it’s not very clear at this stage.