Slack is a powerful and intuitive collaborative messaging platform for the workplace that makes email feel woefully antiquated. It puts every chatting feature you can imagine into an attractive and customizable interface, making it seamless to communicate with individual coworkers or larger groups across your organization. You even get audio and video meeting capabilities, along with thousands of integration options. The app can now even use AI to develop workflows for action items under discussion and summarize long chat discussions. While it carries a premium price, Slack earns our Editors' Choice award thanks to its accessible, friendly design and unbeatable collection of messaging capabilities.
Slack's perpetually free plan is quite generous. It allows you to set up a custom workspace and take advantage of all core messaging features, such as creating channels and sharing files. This tier supports 1:1 meetings and external messages, 90 days of message history, and up to 10 integrations. You should try the free version before you start paying for a monthly subscription because it very well might be sufficient for your group's needs. Just keep in mind that you can manage posting permissions only for your workspace's main #general channel.
I tested the Pro plan ($7.25 per user per month, billed annually), which removes the limitations on app integrations and messaging history, and introduces group meetings (Huddles) and external messages. This plan unlocks AI-generated summaries of channels and threads, along with action items, key takeaways, and transcripts from meetings. Canvases (collaborative whiteboards), customizable sidebar sections, lists, and templates (organizational spaces for projects and processes) become available here, too.
The Business+ plan ($15 per user per month, billed annually) allows you to control posting permissions for all channels and introduces more AI features. For instance, you can ask the AI to generate a workflow that involves tasks you chatted about with your team, get summaries of shared files, and search for details about conversations and files using natural language. Slack will even provide a daily digest of activity on the channel from the previous day. This level also guarantees a four-hour response time for customer service inquires. An Enterprise+ plan (contact the company for pricing) includes Slack Atlas (an employee directory), along with plenty of extra AI and security features.
Slack's Pro plan is more expensive than Microsoft Teams' standalone Essentials plan ($4 per user per month, billed annually), but Teams makes you pay extra ($30 per user per month) for Copilot AI features. You also need the Teams Premium add-on ($10 per user per month, billed annually) to unlock the service's best AI and customization features. Of course, Teams becomes a better value if you pay for the Microsoft 365 Business Standard plan ($12.50 per user per month, billed annually), since it includes both Teams and desktop versions of the company's office suite apps.
