A Full Slack Information for 2024

Quick details about Slack What’s Slack? Slack is a communications platform that gives a workspace for messaging, video calls, transcription and extra. Who developed Slack? Slack Applied sciences LLC, which is now owned by Salesforce. Pricing: Slack can be utilized free of charge. Slack enterprise plans vary from $12.50 to $15 per particular person.

Distant work and distributed groups have elevated the complexity of communications, as small particulars normally communicated face-to-face should now be remodeled into environment friendly digital interactions. Slack as a software is designed for this actual objective.

Slack helps groups handle communications from the smallest element to giant company-wide bulletins. Learn via this information to grasp what Slack is and catch a glimpse of what it has to supply.

What’s Slack?

Slack is a cloud-based collaboration software that serves as a central hub for staff communication. It was initially designed as a kind of electronic mail alternative that helped remove the confusion attributable to lengthy electronic mail chains typically utilized by collaborating staff members. Slack has since advanced right into a complete suite of options that facilitate each personal and public conversations inside a corporation.

What’s Slack used for?

Slack is designed to be the nerve heart of your office. It’s not only for chatting; it’s an intuitive platform for challenge administration, data sharing and even socializing. Whether or not it’s a company-wide announcement or a non-public message between two staff members, Slack affords a spread of channels, each private and non-private, to suit the communication wants of any group.

How a lot does Slack price?

Slack offers a number of pricing choices to go well with numerous wants. It affords a free plan with restricted options and three paid tiers: Professional, Enterprise+ and Enterprise Grid. Every tier affords extra functionalities, akin to limitless message historical past, group conferences and integrations.

Slack affords a 50% low cost for the primary three months of the Professional plan. It additionally affords steep reductions and offers for instructional establishments and nonprofit organizations.

Free

Slack’s Free plan is comparatively restricted in comparison with its paid tiers. As an example, message and file historical past is restricted to 90 days, and customers can solely add as much as 10 integrations, whereas these options are limitless for paid plans. As well as, collaboration options like huddles and dealing with exterior customers are restricted to one-on-one solely.

Professional

The Professional Plan is $7.25 per person per 30 days when billed yearly. For month-to-month, the speed is $8.75 per person.

The Professional Plan affords an infinite variety of integrations and contains customized retention insurance policies, person teams, Google Authentication and Apps for Domains sign-in, visitor entry and a configurable electronic mail ingestion service.

Enterprise+

The Enterprise+ plan prices $12.50 per person per 30 days, billed yearly, or $15 per person when billed month-to-month.

For many midsize organizations, the Enterprise+ plan ought to be ample. The plan contains SAML-based single sign-on, compliance exports of message historical past, and real-time Energetic Listing sync.

Enterprise Grid

Slack’s Enterprise Grid plan, focused towards organizations with 500 to 500,000 staff, permits for limitless workspaces and shared channels, enabling organizations to arrange Slack in a means that higher mirrors their organizational construction. This plan offers message and file sharing that’s HIPAA compliant.

Groups within the Enterprise Grid plan might want to contact Slack’s gross sales staff for a customized quote.

Slack AI

As of February 2024, Slack affords an AI add-on plan, which provides automated summarization of conversations, a every day recap and a extra versatile search perform. Slack AI prices $10 per person per 30 days. You’ll have to have one of many paid plans with a view to buy Slack AI.

Slack AI is offered in English, Spanish and Japanese, with extra languages anticipated to come back out later.

Key options of Slack

Workforce communication

Slack affords a wide range of communication and collaboration options, like huddles, which offers audio and video calls and the power to share screens.

Slack permits for group or personal messaging via its channels function. These channels might be department-specific or project-specific, offering a centralized place for related staff members to collaborate.

It additionally has a messaging function that delivers organized staff chat and a clips function that allows customers to conveniently file and share audio or video clips.

Video capabilities

Slack affords a built-in video chat function. Whereas not as feature-rich as specialised video conferencing instruments like Zoom, it offers a fast and straightforward means for staff members to provoke face-to-face conversations when wanted whereas additionally permitting screen-sharing and whiteboard capabilities.

Slack’s Huddles function makes face-to-face communication fast and straightforward. Picture: Slack

Workflow automation

Slack Workflows enable customers to automate a variety of duties via a no-code strategy, making routine processes extra environment friendly. With Slack’s Workflow Builder, customers don’t want technical expertise to automate processes; they will take a drag-and-drop strategy to easily and creatively automate their workflows. Any premium model of Slack has entry to Slack’s automation instruments.

Ease of Use

One in every of Slack’s most compelling options is its user-friendly interface and total simplicity. That simplicity has contributed to Slack’s quick development through the years, and the corporate has been profitable in not letting feature-creep complicate the general usefulness of the app.

New challenge administration function: Lists

In June 2024, Slack debuted Lists, a challenge administration function. Lists provides a visible, interactable, shareable to-do record function that may be dropped into channels to point out how a challenge is progressing.

Lists began to roll out on June 6, 2024 and will probably be totally obtainable in paid plans “within the coming months,” Slack stated in a press package.

How do you utilize Slack?

Slack is accessible via numerous platforms. You need to use it through an internet browser or obtain its desktop software, obtainable for Home windows, macOS and Linux. Cellular apps are additionally obtainable for Android and iOS.

What are Slack shortcuts?

Slack shortcuts are automated interactions between both completely different elements of Slack or Slack and third-party functions. Customers can arrange “triggers” to fireside shortcuts with out having to manually ship a message to carry out the identical motion each time.

Listing of Slack shortcuts

Whereas utilizing Slack could also be intuitive for a lot of customers, listed here are some widespread keyboard shortcuts price understanding to make repetitive processes quicker.

Slack has many extra shortcuts you’ll be able to discover from inside its desktop app by urgent Cmd + / on macOS and Ctrl + / on Home windows and Linux.

SEE: For extra recommendations on Slack, take a look at our 10 Slack ideas: a how-to information, and see how one can arrange key phrase alerts to make Slack extra handy for you.

What are some high Slack integrations?

Slack affords a plethora of integration choices, chopping throughout the classes of analytics, communication, buyer help, design, developer instruments, advertising and marketing, challenge administration and extra. Widespread integrations embody:

• Jira: Supreme for Agile groups, the Jira Cloud app for Slack permits customers to obtain notifications and observe points with out leaving the Slack interface.
• Google Calendar: As soon as put in, this integration updates customers’ Slack standing based mostly on their calendar entries and sends reminders, making it simpler to handle and talk their schedules.
• Salesforce: This integration permits for real-time knowledge sharing between Salesforce and Slack, streamlining the workflow for gross sales and customer support groups.
• Zoom: With the Zoom integration, assembly organizers can schedule, be a part of and even file Zoom conferences immediately from Slack, making it handy for distant groups and groups that rely closely on video conferencing.
• GitHub: Builders can preserve observe of code modifications, pull requests and points with this integration, making it simpler to handle software program tasks.
• Trello: This integration permits challenge managers and staff members to handle Trello playing cards, replace due dates and transfer playing cards between lists inside Slack. Take a look at our Trello versus Slack information to learn the way Trello compares to Slack.
• Asana: For challenge administration, the Asana integration permits challenge managers and their groups to create and assign duties and obtain notifications inside Slack. Learn our comparability of Slack and Asana to see how they differ as challenge administration instruments.
• Dropbox: Groups of every kind can share recordsdata and collaborate on paperwork by connecting their Dropbox accounts to Slack.
• Monday.com: The monday integration can ship alerts from the visible activity administration platform into Slack, letting staff know when somebody has tagged them or when an task is of their fingers.

The place does Slack match within the present collaboration software program market?

Slack places an excessive concentrate on streamlining typical communications customers might not even know might be streamlined, which has carved a distinct segment for the collaboration software. Beginning off as a possible electronic mail alternative, Slack is now an intuitive platform for staff communication and collaboration.

Nevertheless, it additionally qualifies as a contemporary challenge administration software via its concentrate on real-time communication, making it a favourite for dynamic groups that require on the spot suggestions and fast decision-making. Furthermore, Slack’s free plan and scalable pricing plans make it accessible for companies of all sizes, from startups to giant enterprises.

What are Slack’s most important opponents?

Options	Slack	Microsoft Groups	Zoom	Twist	Bitrix24	Mattermost
Messaging	Sure	Sure	Restricted	Sure	Sure	Sure
Video conferencing	Restricted (two-person max free of charge tier, as much as 50 paid)	Sure	Sure	No	Sure	No (audio is obtainable, and video instruments might be built-in)
File Sharing	Sure	Sure	Sure	Sure	Sure	Sure
Free tier obtainable	Sure	Sure	Sure	Sure	Sure	Sure
Beginning value for paid tier	$7.25 per person per 30 days, billed yearly	$4 per person per 30 days, billed yearly	$13.32 per person per 30 days, billed yearly	$5 per person per 30 days	$49 per group per 30 days, billed yearly (5 customers)	$10 per person per 30 days, billed yearly
HIPAA compliance	With Enterprise Grid tier and worker coaching	With Safety and Compliance Workplace 365 subscription and worker coaching	Sure, with acceptable worker coaching	Not essentially – organizations ought to assess their total privateness controls	With sure configurations of entry controls and worker coaching	With sure configurations of entry controls and worker coaching

Microsoft Groups

The Microsoft Groups platform is the first competitor to Slack. Groups goes past chat and video communication to incorporate file sharing, automation instruments and a centralized workspace. This allows challenge groups to entry and collaborate on duties inside one platform. And with the addition of visitor accounts and a free tier in 2018, Microsoft Groups is well-equipped to compete head-to-head with Slack’s freemium mannequin.

For extra data, take a look at our Microsoft Groups cheat sheet.

Zoom

The favored video conferencing software program Zoom has added Zoom Chat to their software program, which immediately competes with a few of Slack’s core options. This makes Zoom an alternate for these already on the platform who solely want mild chat options. Zoom Chat works equally to Slack with search capabilities, granular admin controls and safe file-sharing.

For extra data, take a look at our Zoom cheat sheet.

Twist

Slack’s unbiased competitor Twist payments itself as a “communication software for groups who consider there’s extra to work than maintaining with group chat apps.” It has an deliberately minimalist strategy, because it lacks a web-based standing indicator. A free tier exists, with message retention restricted to at least one month. The limitless tier is offered for $5 per person, per 30 days.

See how Twist compares to our record of the finest digital collaboration instruments.

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 combines messaging with a wide range of different organizational instruments, together with kanban boards, activity templates and CRM. Its communications instruments embody a clear UI and tabs for simply switching between conversations, calls and file sharing. A lot of Bitrix24’s collaboration instruments are free, with greater tiers including instruments for particular departments like Gross sales or HR.

Mattermost

Mattermost is a collaboration platform designed particularly for protection, authorities and demanding infrastructure enterprises. With infrastructure supposed for resilience, it offers HIPAA-compliant safety, granular management over knowledge and administration and different specialised safety boosts.

Who owns Slack?

Slack is owned by Slack Applied sciences LLC, which has been a subsidiary of Salesforce since its acquisition in 2020.

Is Slack HIPAA-compliant?

The Enterprise Grid model of Slack can retailer knowledge in a means that’s compliant with the Well being Insurance coverage Portability and Accountability Act, the medical data privateness legislation within the U.S.

There isn’t any one certification to find out compliance. Organizations can affirm self-assessments and verify their total digital footprint in opposition to the privateness rule itself when contemplating how a messaging software suits into their healthcare privateness operations.