The 4 best alternatives to Slack

Do you feel like Slack doesn’t have everything you need?
Do you want to improve how your team communicates but do not know what tool to choose? If you said yes then you’re in the right place. Here’s a list of the most popular collaboration tools and alternatives to Slack. Please note that we are not including Slack clones, e.g. Mattermost and Symphony, which don’t really change the Slack collaboration model.

Buj 

Buj is a collaboration platform that helps teams focus on priority communications, saving them from the distraction of an overwhelming volume of messages. It does this by leveraging AI, learning user priorities,  and an innovative collaboration model. Buj is centered around an AI driven feed that helps you focus on what really matters. In Buj you can privately and securely collaborate across teams and individuals about one topic.

In comparison to Slack there is no need to repeat the same information or files in multiple places. All relevant communication is done in the context of a topic or event. Cool differentiator we like in Buj is how it uses AI and user defined rules to deliver a prioritized and focused feed. Both tools have official Chrome extensions. While Slack’s Chrome extension essentially opens Slack for you, the Buj extension lets you create posts in Buj without leaving the site your on. Additionally the Buj Chrome extension automatically fills in the URL, screenshot, and title of the page you are on, allowing you to share with one click.

Both Buj and Slack offer 3rd party app integrations. Buj only offers integration via a webhook while Slack has an extensive library of 3rd apps in its. Features like search, audio & video calls, screen sharing, and usual messaging tools are available in both applications.

While Buj is in the early release stage (you can sign up at buj.cloud) there is no cost for using Buj. We expect that Buj will release commercially this summer. At which point they will add paid premium tiers.

Microsoft  Teams 

Sign up into Slack and inviting members to your workspace is super simple. In Microsoft Teams it’s a lot trickier. Just delegate this step if you can, otherwise there is a high chance that you might give up right there.

Both tools have many patterns for messaging. They support group chats with threaded conversations, as well as private messaging. All standard features for messaging like editing, deleting, pinning, mentioning, sharing files, etc are provided in most chats applications today. MS Teams provide more built-in options for formatting, in the same time Slack allows setting a reminder for a particular message via bots. For file sharing MS Teams has much more from what we need- you can share Office files and collaborate on them while right in the workspace. Slack doesn’t have built-in tools for that, so to edit a Docx. file, for example, you’ve got to download it and switch to another tab for editing.

Both apps have video calls feature with screen sharing. For true, in Slack you can do it via app only using Screen Video Recorder. In our opinion MS Teams are better here if we compare limitations - in MS Teams you can have a video meeting with up to 80 people in a call, while Slack limits you with only 15 participants (even in paid plans). In both tools, you can work with tasks, search within messages, files, and even within the content of the files you share.

Microsoft Teams is a great product and can meet most of your needs, but at least our team couldn’t fully enjoy and use it because of bad user experience.

Fleep 

What we like about this app the most is that you can send a message to any person in Fleep just with person’s email. It’s main idea is to fill in the gap between email and a team messenger. We found it very useful, especially our product team, to communicate at the same time with people inside and outside Fleep.

Fleep has a free package that doesn’t require admin controls and has all standard messenger’s features. Its also very easy to start & use, and moreover you can find nice unusual UI ideas.

The thing we found cooler than in Slack was unlimited message history and integrations - even in its free version. If your team is big or you need to share many files maybe 10K messages limit in Slack stops you from sending more funny videos to your teammates. Main idea of Fleep is based on improval of direct communication.

To say the truth we didn’t manage to build convenient teams communication with Fleep, even with advantages which were noticed Slack was more applicable to our teams. 

Ryver

Ryver was founded just in 2015 but became popular super fast. Its main idea is to mix team messengers and task management features in one app. Sounds exciting, lets dive deeper.

True, compared to Slack having a high quality task manager right inside your communication tool could be a miracle. We were very impressed with the number of  integrations - Ryver claims to integrate with 500+ apps via Zapier. You can get up to 100 integrations without any additional payments, that even for tech teams looks enough.

Nevertheless we faced many things that can possibly become a dealbreaker. Features for team collaboration, ability to search messages or people and notifications settings are not advanced yet. We were positively impressed by how easy and intuitive a registration process was but cannot say the same for app usability, it's possible to face some challenges with UX and UI.

Slack wins in this round, at least in our opinion. We would say it’s still a task manager with some messenger’s features. We assume its main reason why Ryver doesn’t have a freemium version, even for small teams. The tool is $49 per month for teams up to 12 users and $99 for unlimited users. 

Recommend you to try Buj. It has the most innovative take on collaboration helping get better productivity, and transparency. It's a simple, fast, secure, AI-powered application that has all you need to easily collaborate with your teams and data.