A Full Slack Information for 2024

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

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

What’s Slack?

Slack is a cloud-based collaboration instrument that serves as a central hub for crew communication. It was initially designed as a kind of electronic mail alternative that helped eradicate the confusion brought on by lengthy electronic mail chains usually utilized by collaborating crew members. Slack has since advanced right into a complete suite of options that facilitate each non-public and public conversations inside a corporation.

What’s Slack used for?

Slack is designed to be the nerve middle 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 personal message between two crew members, Slack gives a variety of channels, each private and non-private, to suit the communication wants of any group.

How a lot does Slack value?

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

Slack gives a 50% low cost for the primary three months of the Professional plan. It additionally gives 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 proscribed 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 gives a vast 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 needs to be enough. The plan contains SAML-based single sign-on, compliance exports of message historical past, and real-time Lively 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 approach that higher mirrors their organizational construction. This plan gives message and file sharing that’s HIPAA compliant.

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

Slack AI

As of February 2024, Slack gives an AI add-on plan, which provides automated summarization of conversations, a every day recap and a extra versatile search operate. 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 out there in English, Spanish and Japanese, with extra languages anticipated to return out later.

Key options of Slack

Group communication

Slack gives quite a lot of communication and collaboration options, like huddles, which gives audio and video calls and the flexibility to share screens.

Slack permits for group or non-public messaging by means of its channels function. These channels might be department-specific or project-specific, offering a centralized place for related crew members to collaborate.

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

Video capabilities

Slack gives a built-in video chat function. Whereas not as feature-rich as specialised video conferencing instruments like Zoom, it gives a fast and straightforward approach for crew 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 by means of a no-code strategy, making routine processes extra environment friendly. With Slack’s Workflow Builder, customers don’t want technical abilities 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 among Slack’s most compelling options is its user-friendly interface and total simplicity. That simplicity has contributed to Slack’s fast growth 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 listing function that may be dropped into channels to indicate how a challenge is progressing.

Lists began to roll out on June 6, 2024 and will likely be absolutely out there in paid plans “within the coming months,” Slack mentioned in a press equipment.

How do you employ Slack?

Slack is accessible by means of numerous platforms. You need to use it through an internet browser or obtain its desktop utility, out there for Home windows, macOS and Linux. Cell apps are additionally out there 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 purposes. Customers can arrange “triggers” to fireside shortcuts with out having to manually ship a message to carry out the identical motion each time.

Record of Slack shortcuts

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

Slack has many extra shortcuts you possibly can discover from inside its desktop app by urgent Cmd + / on macOS and Ctrl + / on Home windows and Linux.

SEE: For extra tips about Slack, try 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 prime Slack integrations?

Slack gives a plethora of integration choices, reducing throughout the classes of analytics, communication, buyer help, design, developer instruments, advertising, challenge administration and extra. Standard integrations embody:

• Jira: Ideally suited 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 part of and even file Zoom conferences straight from Slack, making it handy for distant groups and groups that rely closely on video conferencing.
• GitHub: Builders can hold observe of code adjustments, pull requests and points with this integration, making it simpler to handle software program initiatives.
• Trello: This integration permits challenge managers and crew members to handle Trello playing cards, replace due dates and transfer playing cards between lists inside Slack. Try 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 job administration platform into Slack, letting staff know when somebody has tagged them or when an task is of their arms.

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

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

Nevertheless, it additionally qualifies as a contemporary challenge administration instrument by means of its concentrate on real-time communication, making it a favourite for dynamic groups that require instantaneous 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 massive enterprises.

What are Slack’s most important rivals?

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 permits 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, try our Microsoft Groups cheat sheet.

Zoom

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

For extra data, try our Zoom cheat sheet.

Twist

Slack’s unbiased competitor Twist payments itself as a “communication instrument 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 out there for $5 per person, per 30 days.

See how Twist compares to our listing of one of the best digital collaboration instruments.

Bitrix24

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

Mattermost

Mattermost is a collaboration platform designed particularly for protection, authorities and significant infrastructure enterprises. With infrastructure meant for resilience, it gives 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 approach that’s compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the medical data privateness regulation within the U.S.

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