Best Free Slack Alternatives in 2023: The Top Slack Competitors That You Will Love
Communication is the key to personal and career success.
For a proper product/service delivery, communication between the team plays a vital role. Miscommunication between the team highly impacts productivity.
“A survey directed by HR Magazine on 4000 workers brought about 46% individuals accepting that there was indistinct guidance to them constantly, consequently affecting their productivity.”
In this digital era, it has become very difficult to manage the emails, and conversation on long calls, thus there is a need for instant messaging apps for smoother conversations between the team.
One such tool is Slack.
Slack is an open-source instant messaging application that allows the team members to collaborate in one place. Supporting all platforms like Desktop, Web, Android, and iOS, you can share the documents, screenshots, etc. Thereby smoothing conversation between the team and ultimately boosting productivity at work.
Initially, to start with these tools you have to make a channel and add the team members to it. Here, the members can send messages which would be displayed to all other team members. Also, this tool supports private messaging between team members.
What You Will Learn:
Why Slack?
Slack offers various features that are required for smoother conversation at the workplace.
Some of them are:
- The project can be divided into different channels, with different team members, clients, etc.
- All the conversation made between the team is properly organized.
- Team members can join and leave the channel at any time.
- You can search for any conversation made, even if you leave a channel all the conversation made, are present for future references.
This handy tool can also be integrated with Github, Salesforce, Jira, Google Dialog Flow, etc
Why Look For Alternatives?
Every good product that is built has some downsides too. The same is the case with Slack. There are some points where this product lags.
The main drawback is security. Every messaging app should follow the end to end encryption of the sent messages. This means that no third user should be able to view the messages sent apart from the sender and the receiver. Slack lacks this feature.
Slack does not provide encryption keys at their servers, thereby allowing other people to peep into your conversation.
Its free edition supports storage of only up to 10,000 messages. Even with a small team size, this limit can be reached in no time.
Although slack is widely accepted as an inter-team discussion instant messaging app, some of the downsides of this app, compel a user to look for its alternatives.
List of Top 10 Alternatives to Slack Team Collaboration Tool
In this article, we have listed the best Slack Alternative Software for your reference.
Let us go through them one by one in detail!
#1) Rocket Chat
Price: Free to USD 30$ for a year.
Rocket chat is an open-source team chat application, having various features like audio/video conferencing thereby easing the collaboration with the team.
Features:
- Audio & Video Calls and conferencing.
- Screen Sharing
- E2E and SSO encryption.
- Real-time translation to over 50 languages.
- It can be tailored for endless customization.
Website: Rocket Chat
#2) Hangouts Chat
Price per user: USD 5$ to USD 25$ for a Month.
A product from Google, hangout chat is yet another tool that can be considered as an alternative to Slack. This tool enables the user to work on their documents, slides, and sheets on their device even when the internet is not available.
Features:
- Voice and Video Calling.
- Collaborating with all g-suites (Docs, sheets, presentations).
- Store and share your files.
- Security features like 2-Step verification and Single Sign-On.
- You can use shared calendars, to view the availability of your team members.
Website: Hangouts Chat
#3) Matter most
Price per user: Free to USD 39$ for a year.
Matter most is an open-source team chat software. It is available on Windows, mobile, web thereby bringing all the conversation between the team in one place.
It comes with three different editions, of which one is open source and the other two are developed for commercial purposes.
Features:
- It can be integrated with most of the available DevOps tools like Jenkins, Git, etc
- All the conversation made between the team is properly organized.
- It also offers screen sharing and audio/video calls.
- Matter most supports multiple languages.
- You can also customize the notification received over mobile, desktop and web.
Website: Matter most
#4) Ryver
Price: USD 49$ for 12 users to USD 99$ for unlimited users for a Month.
Rvyer is not just a team chat application, but it has much more to offer which another tool in the market failed to provide. Apart from the group chat, Rvyer offers Task Management and Workflow automation as well, which means all the processes like task assignment, notifying team, etc can now be automated and thus save time.
Features:
- Task assignment and team notification can be automated.
- Dedicated task manager to track all your conversations.
- Screen sharing and audio/video calls.
Website: Ryver
#5) CA Flowdock
Price per user: Free to USD 9$ for a Month.
CA Flowdoc’s is just another alternative to Slack. All the project flows and conversation between the team members, made on this tool are very well organized in threads. All these threads are differentiated with colors so that one can easily identify the topic and start the conversation on the same.
Features:
- All the conversations are organized in threads.
- CA Flowdocs support 1:1 Flow so that the team members can start the conversation privately.
- Supports Video calling and screen sharing among the team members.
- Available at multiple platforms like Android, iOS, Windows devices, etc.
Website: CA Flowdock
#6) Flock
Price per user: Free to Rs 149 for a Month.
Primarily developed for team messaging, Flock also supports document sharing, video calling, and screen sharing among the team members. Flock also supports the integration of external apps like Google Analytics, social media accounts, etc.
As a Flock admin user, you can create both public and private channels. Where the public channel is open for everyone, and all the ideas and knowledge can be shared whereas private channel is meant for the team members and could be joined with an invitation only.
Features:
- Screen Sharing, Video calling between the team members
- Unlimited chat history.
- Integration of external apps like Google Analytics, Google Drive, Trello, Bitbucket, Dropbox, etc
- Various Business Tools like Reminders, Sharing to DOs, polls.
- Flock also manages your mailing list, and with that, you can send emails to all your team members in one go.
Website: Flock
#7) Fleep
Price per user: Free to 5 Euro for a Month.
Most of the team chat applications are confined to send messages to the team members only. But with Fleep, you can initiate the conversation with any Fleep user.
Even if a person is not a Fleep user, you can add their email address and the person will receive all the messages as the Emails.
Features:
- Supports conversation between team members and other people who are not in your organization.
- Supports file sharing.
- You can track your message if it has been seen by any other Fleep user.
- With Fleep You can also edit your sent messages.
- All the conversations between the team members and other users are stored at Fleep’s cloud server, thus you can access the conversation and files on any devices.
Website: Fleep
#8) Chanty
Price per user: Free to USD 3$ for a Month.
Unlimited chat history is the key feature of this app which sets it apart from other team chat applications. As a Chanty user, you can also control the roles of the other team members by limiting them access to a conversation which means you can control who can post to a conversation.
Features:
- Quick access button to get access to the entire history.
- Highlight the team members with quick mention keywords.
- You can turn any message to your task.
- Chanty also supports the integration of third-party apps like google drive, twitter, bit bucket, MailChimp, Jira…etc.
- Chanty also supports voice chat, voice calling, and screen sharing.
- With its AI-powered tools, it suggests the best answers to a message. Thereby ultimately saving your time from typing out long messages.
Website: Chanty
#9) Glip
Price per user: Free to USD 5$ a Month.
Glip offers a complete communication solution between the team members with its team chat software. It is loaded with features like video calling, file sharing, etc, which ultimately helps in making communication seamless.
Features:
- Supports file sharing from multiple sources like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Evernote, and Onedrive.
- Glip supports video calling, thus you are just a click away to meet your team member face to face to discuss your project.
Website: Glip
#10) Jostle
Price per user: Varies with users
Jostle is an Intranet-based team chat software, which means all the conversation between the team members is strictly limited to your organization.
Features:
- Jostle supports voice and video calling between the team members.
- Supports multiple languages.
- Available at multiple platforms like Android, iOS, Desktop.
- Supports integration of necessary tools like Google Drive, Twitter, Gmail, etc.
Website: Jostle
#11) Cisco Spark
Price: 24$ for 8 Users (Per Month).
Cisco Webex is yet another team chat application that provides all the essential features which a user may require to collaborate with the team members. All the messages sent and received are completely encrypted, hence you can be assured of the confidentiality of your discussion about your projects.
Also as an administrator of this app, you can also wipe out the data from the device if it has been lost.
Features:
- Cisco Webex supports video conferencing, and voice conferencing.
- As an administrator you can also block the other users from sharing the files, thereby maintaining the privacy and data policy of the company.
- All the messages are properly encrypted, and you also have the option to manage your own encryption keys.
Website: Cisco spark
#12) Hive
Price per user: Starts from $12 per user (Monthly)
As a team chat tool, Hive primarily focuses on project management. Thus, it is more of a Project Management Tool than just a team chat application. This tool also empowers the task assigned to your team members.
Features:
- As a Hive user, you can create your personal to-do list.
- With its powerful yet simple project management feature you can easily track the progress of your project.
- It supports integration with various other third-party tools like Github, Google Drive, etc.
- You can assign a task to your team members, and can also keep a track on the progress of the task assigned.
Website: Hive
Conclusion
Apart from these tools there are much more open-source and paid team chat applications available in the market. For more than 8 million individuals, these team chat applications have turned into the instrument they open before anything else to kick the workday off.
What’s more, it’s turned into the pioneer of the group coordinated effort industry, rearranging individuals’ work and boosting their profitability.