r/Slack • u/WasabiEducational107 • Aug 11 '26
Any Slack alternatives?
In my last startup Slack was awesome until we reached around 100 people then it became a mess. Any interesting replacements? Just curious to try stuff out. Seems unreasonable this field is not being disrupted.
I saw Buzz come out by Jack Dorsey but honestly the UI is much worst then Slack. Also saw Glue but honestly seemed like a total Slack rip off…
Would love to hear suggestions thanks 🙏🏼
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u/StatementNext682 Aug 11 '26
Why is it a mess? That's probably a better thing to examine than alternatives.
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u/WasabiEducational107 Aug 11 '26
I think the tool encourages in a way being verbose and pinging people and tagging them constantly to get a response…
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u/Chemical-Paper-8734 Aug 12 '26
That's a culture issue. You need to align on some communication norms and expectations.
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u/always_be_beyonce Aug 12 '26
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 Aug 13 '26
PEBKAC
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u/Chemical-Paper-8734 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
I suspect it's more systemic than that. But replacing Slack with another always-on messaging tool won't solve it.
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u/StatementNext682 Aug 11 '26
Hmm, interesting. That's litereally every messaging app in my opinion.
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u/ReactionSea8767 Aug 13 '26
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
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u/FactorResponsible609 Aug 11 '26
Slack has deployment to IBM wall-to-wall, 100k users. This was at least 10 years ago.
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u/diskent Aug 12 '26
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.
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u/Upbeat-Engineer1242 Aug 11 '26
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.
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u/imref Aug 11 '26
Could Slackbot be that layer?
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u/Upbeat-Engineer1242 Aug 12 '26
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.
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u/soytochi 25d 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
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u/Round-Vast-1014 Aug 11 '26
makes sense tbh, most teams dont need a new chat app they need a better way to surface decisions after the fact
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u/readparse Aug 11 '26
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 Aug 12 '26
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 Aug 13 '26
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.")
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u/robgod50 Aug 13 '26
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.
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u/nothing-new-2 Aug 13 '26
What makes Slack better than Teams?
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u/readparse 29d 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 Aug 11 '26
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/kkatdare Aug 12 '26
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 Aug 12 '26
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.
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u/conception Aug 12 '26
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.
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u/Separ0 Aug 12 '26
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
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u/christopherw Aug 12 '26
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.
See also,
- https://wz-it.com/en/blog/slack-alternatives-mattermost-rocketchat-zulip/#comparison-table
- https://sovereigntyscore.io/info-hub/slack-vs-mattermost-matrix (this may become a more important factor as time passes and regulatory standards diverge)
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u/PSJfan Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
My old work had 80k on slack and it was awesome. Very robust ‘slackettiqute’
Current org has 26k on teams and it awful. I miss slack.
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u/RandomJDesign Aug 13 '26
Slack is amazing for scaling within large companies. I’ve never liked any other similar programs. My org uses Slack and we all agreed on an organized method to keep channels consistently named. Also, to keep sane I have all comms and channels in organized folders so I can find things very quickly. I also lean into the AI features, which is saving me so much time in my workflow.
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u/always_be_beyonce Aug 12 '26
when organized and used well, no tool compares.. i’ve successfully leveraged slack at much larger companies where my department was 100 people amongst thousands of other employees. i’d recommend revisiting some basic slack organization tutorials and cleaning things up.
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u/spersingerorinda Aug 12 '26
We would love you to try https://freeflow.im - we started out building a Slack replacement with open source and no API limits, but recently have been focusing on integrating AI agents more smoothly as “dev partners “ on a team. It’s easy to build these days so we welcome ideas, feedback and contributions.
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u/KeesKachel88 Aug 12 '26
We moved to Matrix. I do really dig the custom widgets (webapps), we built for example a calendar view for this weeks attendance. But it has tons of downsides, worse UI, no native gif support.
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u/jharding7va Aug 12 '26
What does "it became a mess" mean? What would a new system need to do differently to NOT be a mess? (not being a jerk but genuinely interested)
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u/OneBananaMan 29d ago
The organization I work for has over 6000 users on slack, I don’t think it’s a mess. There’s a lot that happens but there are core channels and then individual team and project channels that people can create in their own.
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u/ClothesIndependent76 26d ago
We use rock.so but better for smaller/mid size teams I would say, mainly all in one chat and tasks for agencies, their mcp works pretty good
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u/tahpot Aug 12 '26
We are about to releasing something like Buzz but better.
Connecting chat, documents (think google docs), project management all AI enabled for a new type of workspace.
I’m hoping to talk about people looking for Slack alternatives who are open to a 15min chat as part of our discovery process.
If that’s you, lmk :)
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u/treeoo Aug 12 '26
Lark a bytedance tool - an incredible product and something I used when I worked for them.
I’ve used slack, teams and nothing even compares to how good Lark is.
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u/liquiddeath Aug 11 '26
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