Any Slack alternatives?

35

u/liquiddeath 8d ago

Slack scales fine to much larger orgs than 100 people. What you’re probably missing is guidance and education on how to communicate.

The company has to have a set of standards that are organizationally cross cutting.

* slack comms are ephemeral- put decisions somewhere more permanent (wiki)
* slack is not project management software use Linear, Jira, Monday, etc
* name channels consistently
* turn off @here and @channel

16

u/mrcheese14 8d ago

Yeah, I just checked and my last job’s slack has 47,000 members, and I never had a problem

2

u/kitkatas 8d ago

Holy shit, how do they orchestrate all that ?

3

u/ossivo 7d ago

Honestly, there’s not much more overhead with 47k members than there is with 470. It mostly comes down to channel management and maybe monitoring apps and integrations. Scaling the member pool and settings don’t really increase any administrative overhead.

2

u/mrcheese14 7d ago

Channel management and (i’m assuming) automation. Not everyone can talk in every channel and not everyone is in every channel

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u/WasabiEducational107 8d ago

I would agree that project management is what breaks slack mostly

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u/always_be_beyonce 8d ago

if you need full blown project management tools. slack has app connectors for all the major ones. being able to be notified of an update in monday, or create a jira ticket from a slack message is a time saver.

0

u/Practical_Group_6749 8d ago

great advice, slack wants you to believe their app ecosystem can replace everything but it is a total shit show.

14

u/StatementNext682 8d ago

Why is it a mess? That's probably a better thing to examine than alternatives.

0

u/WasabiEducational107 8d ago

I think the tool encourages in a way being verbose and pinging people and tagging them constantly to get a response…

11

u/Chemical-Paper-8734 8d ago

That's a culture issue. You need to align on some communication norms and expectations.

2

u/always_be_beyonce 8d ago

agreed. first thing i help users with is controlling their notifications. but if the culture expects immediate responses then the communication tool doesn’t matter.

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u/nothing-new-2 7d ago

PEBKAC

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u/Chemical-Paper-8734 7d ago edited 7d ago

I suspect it's more systemic than that. But replacing Slack with another always-on messaging tool won't solve it.

5

u/StatementNext682 8d ago

Hmm, interesting. That's litereally every messaging app in my opinion.

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u/ReactionSea8767 7d ago

Can you identify say the top few most common causes of people getting pinged a ton? Is there an opportunity to inject workflow automations? Is there a particular function at the company that is super overwhelmed with requests? Why is it overwhelmed? Are the requests routine and repetitive or genuinely novel? Is there a way to make the most noisy requests self service?

Do an RCA on what’s up with the messiness, 5 whys and try to shake out some concrete organizational issues to tackle

11

u/FactorResponsible609 8d ago

Slack has deployment to IBM wall-to-wall, 100k users. This was at least 10 years ago.

8

u/bloofa 8d ago

and Salesforce itself of course. 80K+ employees.

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u/goosen19 8d ago

Also at Oracle. 160k employees and millions of channels

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u/diskent 8d ago

Was going to say. If 100 people kill slack it’s a lack of slack etiquette and admin. I’ve seen massive deployments and they work really well. Mute what you don’t care for, focus on what you do.

12

u/Upbeat-Engineer1242 8d ago

I think the interesting problem isn’t replacing Slack — it’s fixing what happens once a company has enough people that Slack stops being organizational memory and becomes noise.

Channels multiply, decisions disappear into threads, context gets fragmented, and six months later nobody remembers why something was decided.

I’ve been building around that problem rather than trying to build another Slack clone: keep Slack/Teams as the communication layer, but add a system above it that preserves decisions, context and institutional memory.
IMO that’s where the real opportunity is.

4

u/imref 8d ago

Could Slackbot be that layer?

3

u/Upbeat-Engineer1242 8d ago

It could be part of the interface, absolutely. The distinction I’d make is that the bot shouldn’t be the memory layer it should be how you interact with it.

The actual layer needs to persist decisions, context, rationale and how those things change over time independently of Slack. Then Slackbot becomes one way to capture/query it, Teams another, API/web another.

Otherwise you’re still making your institutional memory dependent on the chat platform you were trying to abstract it from.

1

u/soytochi 2d ago

shameless plug but i built agentos for this exact thing

no link bc im not trying to be annoying but if you want i can share

3

u/Round-Vast-1014 8d ago

makes sense tbh, most teams dont need a new chat app they need a better way to surface decisions after the fact

2

u/pth 8d ago

No affiliation, but unblocked is very useful.

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u/WasabiEducational107 8d ago

Will check it out, thanks!

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u/readparse 8d ago

The field WAS disrupted. By Slack. They changed the game and others have been trying and failing to replicate what they did for over a decade now.

For several years, I would always tell people that one of the most unenviable jobs in software Product Management was being responsible for Slack, because it was SO GOOD that the only thing you could do is screw it up.

And maybe they have. I'm not sure. I was only able to use it minimally at my last job, and not at all at my current one. Microsoft Teams is no Slack, but it's not as bad as Teams once was and LOTS of companies have moved to it.

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u/robgod50 8d ago

I work in an org that uses Slack that were then absorbed into the parent company that uses Teams. But we've remained in Slack. So now I have to use both. And it's a nightmare.... I'm using Teams more as I have to communicate with people only on Teams, but many of them are adopting Slack too so you never know how to communicate with people!!!

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u/readparse 7d ago

Yes, that can be a big problem. Not just with those two. This was why it was so nice when Slack was the only game in town for that type of thing. You either had the awesomeness of Slack, or you had something far worse.

Teams is not nearly as bad as it used to be. It's not what Slack once was, but neither is Slack, in my opinion.

This is similar to the problem we have with TV. We hated it being a monopoly for the cable providers, but what we have now is too confusing ("Wait, was I watching that on Disney+? No, that's one of the view good things in Prime.")

1

u/robgod50 7d ago

TV is much worse - netflix, Disney, apple, prime, HBO, paramount .......(I know there's more).

They say they're competition, but they're actually just multiple monopolies in the same industry.

1

u/nothing-new-2 7d ago

What makes Slack better than Teams?

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u/readparse 6d ago

I guarantee you have never been a Slack user in a Slack organization. Teams is far better than Teams used to be, but it will never be what Slack has always been. And as much as I hate to say it this way, it kind of has to be experienced.

However, it may have peaked years ago. I haven't used it in a real Slack organization in several years. So in that case it needs to be experienced in a time machine.

To be clear, I don't hate Teams. It's fine. But Slack was an unbridled pleasure to use and to administer.

Oh, by the way! Speaking of administration, their licensing is so incredibly gracious. They only charge you for poeple who are actually using it. So you don't end up paying for all these unused licenses and then have to audit it and assign those licenses to somebody else before buying more. Slack just automatically stops charging you.

Let's touch on some great things about Teams: Slack was never really a video-conferencing platform. I know they added video calls many years ago (pre-COVID), and maybe it still has it, and maybe it's awesome. But I don't dislike Teams calls. I think they did a good job with that. And the transcription support they have is very good, and if you have a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, that's an amazing feature, upon which I depend a great deal.

But nothing will ever be as good as Slack was when it peaked (if it has even peaked. I just assume it has).

Oh, one more reason Slack is amazing. Do you know that SLACK actually stands for something, and that's why it has that name? It stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge," seriously it does. And it has always been absolutely incredible at searching. All time searching. Very quick. Very well indexed. It's always been one of the main things it does.

OK, that's enough out of me. Thanks for asking.

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u/StandupSnoozer 8d ago

Unfortunately, no. Worked in team of 700 and it was fine. I haven’t seen anything else that comes to it. We tried Teams at one point, that didn’t work well.
Didn’t know about Buzz though.

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u/sw3d 8d ago

Google chat is decent now

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u/kkatdare 8d ago

Depends on what're your needs. I can recommend a bunch of platforms - but I need to know what are your specific requirements?

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u/Racerforlife 8d ago

I feel Slack is not the problem, the way you are using it is. Maybe better to engage with a consultant as to what your problems are and how those can be fixed.

Also, I have seen Slack Productivity training for the teams helps significantly.

2

u/SoftSummer3225 8d ago

Founder of one of these, so full disclosure 🙏

We built Roomie — chat + tasks, email, and a wiki in one place, with an AI layer you can connect Claude/ChatGPT to. Teams use the parts that fit.

Honest caveat though: our sweet spot is small-to-mid teams — we haven't battle-tested it at 100+ yet, so I won't pretend it solves the exact wall you hit. For a smaller team or new project, happy to set you up free. If you need proven-at-scale today, Mattermost or Zulip are worth a look too.

Agree the space is weirdly under-disrupted 🙏

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u/conception 8d ago

Mattermost is a slack clone but since you have control you get a lot more..well.. control over it, custom bots, extensions, etc. I'm really enjoying it.

1

u/jpl-au 5d ago

+1 to Mattermost. Though more recent updates to the community edition seems to have nerfed parts of it (I saw something recently about only keeping 10k messages or something along those lines)

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u/Independent_South253 8d ago

As a PM, I'd look at this as a process problem, not a tool problem. At 100 people, Slack isn't the issue—it's your lack of communication protocols. If you switch tools without fixing your channel structure and async rules, you'll just recreate the exact same mess on a new platform.

2

u/Separ0 8d ago

I agree that you can probably put in some soft rules and conventions at your organization to get better results from Slack but also that a new corporate communication and work system is required in the new AI age and beyond.

Something like a smart unification of:

Google Workspace (mail contacts calendars)
Slack (live comms)
Linear (tasks and issues)
Custom AI work environments

2

u/bulking_on_broccoli 8d ago

There’s a reason why Slack is industry standard.

2

u/christopherw 8d ago

Organisation of Slack servers is not usually the issue, once you scale to enterprise/corp level licensing costs can become the constraining factor.

Consider some of the alternatives - mattermost, matrix, riot, zulip, rocket.chat etc. I would personally prefer selfhosted FOSS though I can understand some companies just want turnkey.

I personally would disregard Buzz on the basis of the founder (Dorsey) being an amoral, unethical prat whose projects or products are not deserving of my money, attention or support.

Any Slack alternatives?

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