Let’s talk about team communication tools for your workplace. Below are a few of the common apps you might have heard of, as well as a brand new player in the market.

This is not a detailed review or comparison, but more of an introduction of the big players in the market and more so, the launch of Stride by Atlassian.

Because we work with multiple teams, on multiple projects, with multiple clients — we end up using a lot of different tools, simultaneously.  Trying to teach a client to use a new tool has proven to be difficult, so if they say to us “do you guys use Slack?” — we say yes (and it’s true). Or we just stick to email, which works fine as long as there is just 1 person you need to communicate with and it’s a small project. And we track it all, ourselves, in Asana.

Everyone has heard of Slack. We’ve only recently started using it and slowly (or quickly) falling in love with it. After years of using Asana, this somewhat feels refreshing when working with teams on ongoing projects. Asana is great, but mostly for tracking your own projects or just working with your own team (ie. not external clients/teams).

Some of you might have played around with Workplace by Facebook. We have. But only for a day or two. The good thing about it is it has that familiar interface, so if you are trying to get your office to start using it, the learning curve may be not as steep. However, we quickly stepped away from it. And they don’t make quitting easy either, which is understandable, why would you want to make it easy? Make it hard, so people stay!

Hipchat by Atlassian is one tool we use for team communication. Are we happy with it? It’s OK. Not very user-friendly, it works, but we imagine this wouldn’t be the first option for most.

But today (or yesterday), Atlassian launched a brand new tool called Stride. According to a number of sources, this is meant to be a competitor (killer) to Slack.

In fact, as we try and find the URL for Hipchat, we notice that it now redirects you straight to Stride. Being not very happy users of Hipchat, for us this is, potentially, great news. Now let’s just wait and see how the transition takes place and what the new tool offers.

If you wanted to have a more indepth read into Atlassian Stride, here is a good overview by Techcrunch and another one by TheNextWeb.

Have you used it? Do you love or hate it? Share your thoughts with us, meanwhile, we’ll test it out ourselves.