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Gitter vs Slack: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this markdown code, we will outline the key differences between Gitter and Slack, two popular messaging platforms used for communication within teams and communities.

  1. Integration with Development Tools: One significant difference between Gitter and Slack is their level of integration with development tools. Gitter is specifically designed for developers and provides a seamless integration with GitHub, allowing users to easily access repositories, issues, and pull requests. On the other hand, while Slack offers integrations with various development tools, it is not as developer-centric as Gitter.

  2. Pricing and Limitations: Another important distinction between Gitter and Slack lies in their pricing and limitations. Gitter provides a free plan with limited features, which makes it an ideal choice for small development teams or open-source communities. In contrast, Slack offers more extensive features but follows a freemium business model, making it more suitable for larger organizations that can afford the subscription fees for advanced features and integrations.

  3. Community and Ecosystem: Gitter and Slack also differ in terms of their community and ecosystem. Gitter emphasizes a strong developer community, with an extensive list of public chat rooms dedicated to various programming languages, frameworks, and open-source projects. It provides a platform specifically tailored for developers to connect and collaborate. Slack, on the other hand, has a broader user base and a larger ecosystem. It caters to a diverse range of industries and communities, making it suitable for both technical and non-technical teams.

  4. User Interface and Design: The user interface and design of Gitter and Slack differ significantly. Gitter has a minimalistic and straightforward design, focusing on simplicity and ease of use. It provides a clean and intuitive interface, similar to traditional chat applications. Slack, on the contrary, offers a more modern and visually appealing UI, with a customizable interface that allows users to personalize their workspace according to their preferences. It provides a wide range of customization options, including themes and plugins.

  5. File Management and Collaboration: Gitter and Slack also have differences in terms of file management and collaboration capabilities. Gitter allows users to share files directly within chat rooms but lacks some advanced collaboration features, such as document editing in real-time. In contrast, Slack offers a more robust collaboration platform, allowing users to create and edit files collaboratively within the application itself. This makes Slack a more suitable choice for teams that heavily rely on document collaboration.

  6. Integration Partners and Marketplace: The integration partners and marketplace available for Gitter and Slack are another point of distinction. Gitter provides a limited set of integrations and plugins compared to Slack, which has a vast marketplace with thousands of integrations and apps. This extensive marketplace in Slack allows users to customize and extend the functionality of their workspace to better suit their needs, making it a more flexible and scalable platform.

In summary, the key differences between Gitter and Slack can be summarized as follows: Gitter offers seamless integration with development tools, a developer-centric community, and a free plan, while Slack provides a broader ecosystem, a more visually appealing UI, advanced collaboration features, and an extensive marketplace of integrations.

Advice on Gitter and Slack
Needs advice
on
MattermostMattermostRocketChatRocketChat
and
SlackSlack

I've used Slack for team communication but I'm looking for a new collaboration tool that allows advanced permissions.

  1. Enable/disable DMs.
  2. Private room, where only allowed members can communicate but still can't send DMs if it's disabled.

I'm considering Mattermost or RocketChat. Does anyone have experience with them? Otherwise, any recommendations?

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Replies (2)
Dmytro Shamenko

Depends on what you wanna achieve, Slack isn't ready to be installed on your private serves for example, so you may chose RocketChat/Mattermost over Slack. Which is also good in case if you wanna control upgrades, where the Slack way often can bring you something new which you don't like at all.

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Evgenios Skitsanos
Recommends
at

I have a background in ChatOps on Slack and Mattermost; one of my clients had a few concerns about how things were done on Slack, so I needed to find an alternative to migrate into. After some evaluations and trials, we agreed on Mattermost.

We had many integrations mainly driven by inbound and outbound webhooks, besides those standard ones like GitHub integrations and so on.

Also, it was crucial to keep the same look and feel so people could use their Slack themes as is.

Because data ownership especially when it comes to files sent within chat sessions is a big deal, I've made the following config:

⇢ Mattermost runs on computing instances on Oracle Cloud (you can run one or more instances and put the load balancer in front of your backend sets, otherwise you can go with OpenResty/nginx)

⇢ Chat data is stored in Oracle Cloud's MySQL Database

⇢ Files were stored on S3-compatible storage implemented using MinIO (https://min.io/), you need a minimum of 4 computing instances to implement a cluster.

⇢ OpenResty that I used for upstream load balancing was also responsible for handling webhooks and bots, written in Lua (OpenResty is nginx+LuJIT)

Mattermost is extremely well documented on its own website and on IBM ChatOps documentation, so installing and upgrading/updating it is a very smooth experience.

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Needs advice
on
SlackSlackDiscordDiscord
and
GitterGitter

From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."

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Replies (4)
Rebecca Driscoll
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration

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Arnaud Lemercier
Expert En Dveloppement Web Et Systmes Dinformations, Designer UX, UI, Co-grant at Wixiweb · | 4 upvotes · 198.9K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications

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Michael Ionita
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.

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Julien Tanay
Lead DevOps. Every day product hacker. at Dior · | 2 upvotes · 194.3K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

Our Discord Server is our n°1 community stop; we gather feedback from our users from here, discuss about new features, announce new releases, and so on.

We even use it for internal meetings and calls !

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Decisions about Gitter and Slack
Kamaldeep Singh

I still use slack, although I prefer discord. It can be intergrated with discord to work with clients who only want to use slack or even any other platform. API integrations are possible over at Discord.

The awful crappy dependency hell of a thing they call an API. Everything sucks. Slack is one of the worst messaging apps I have ever seen. It's incredibly slow and laggy.

Let me rant about everything I hate about slack. Even though I use it as an integration for another platform and will recommend it even though it's horrible as a whole. They are unstoppable towards companies who don't have people technically savvy enough to transition any other software.

It's so bad I am considering making my own mix of discord and slack.

Finding conversations you know you've had - but search is (Still) terrible, and if it was a direct message with a group of people, you have to remember exactly which group of people it was with

Search...absolutely awful. If they could figure out search, Slack would be unstoppable. it got better with ctrl f in conversations, but still isn't there

Badly arranged Chinese buffet of people, conversations, channels, files and links.. and search sucks too.. Break up the people into a separate window so I can have a buddy list ala Communicator or Skype. Give me some freaking organization and curation to the conversations - otherwise it's 1000 person cocktail party with everyone playing drinking games.

AGAIN! Search sucks. Spellcheck is still broken. Too many notifications.

Interface ist inconsistent between devices.

No way to forbid slack to touch my microphone settings (seriously, dont autoadjust my microphone level, it never works and i hate you so much for it)

Still no good screen sharing on linux.

The buggy red dot. Usually shift-esc will clear it (in itself a pain), but now even that hack won't help. The red dot number keep climbing even though I've read everything and used shift-esc.

I miss some features but I wish slack had a little more ability to organize, group channels, and navigate a little better.

user groups need work... If I search for a group, open it, I want to be able to not just see who is online from that group, but also a message button. I'm sick of searching that person, which closes user groups and if that person is actually AFK, I have to search for that group AGAIN and do it again... What a waste of time compared to other tools which are supporting this.

Date stamps needs to be more visible, or give us option in settings to make it more/less visible

Scrolling needs to be improved, I don't want random jumps there. Especially when time and date stamps are so tiny so it takes a while to get oriented again.

I used to really hate slack, but that's mostly because I have to use user groups a lot, most of the time I'm using slack it's to find someone who belongs to some group and message him... and that stuff is still pretty bad, even tho it was changed a bit...

oh and microphone settings... that hurts bad...

It's slow and laggy if you ever used a native program and got used to responsive user interfaces.

You can't remove someone from a call if they join by mistake

(or, to put it another way, if you start a channel call, you should be able to moderate it and remove those from it who are to meant to be there)

Video calls (using the "native" app on macOS) consume so much resources that the whole machine becomes unresponsive. A video call with the same number of people in a true native app is not a problem. So it's not the inherent bandwidth and processing power required. I mostly like Slack but for remote teams this is a problem.

You really want to know what I hate about SLACK...

The inability for the app to BLOCK DIRECT MESSAGING when outside work hours... I work for global company and I constantly get messaged after midnight by morons who think i am up at 3am

It has this Bullcrap Send Anyway function on messages which totally overrides my Do Not Disturb settings if said moron is blind of what time they are sending their damn message... I worked oncall before so the slightest him of my cell at night will wake me up...

Another annoyance on messaging... Idiots who message direct over chatting in the team channel for stuff that should be seen by the whole team working a ticket .... Or classic hey I opened a ticket not two minutes ago ' can someone look at this ticket pleaee' blah blah blah blah ... People who I don't know sending a random 'HI' and no other info about wtfh they are reaching out to me about ...

If SLACK wants to add a function to fix this I want control to block direct messages from anyone truly outside my direct team and line of management that is not a member of a group that can engage onCalls for issues ... I am so sick and tired of this I literally have to uninstall the app everyday to ensure no one bothers me after I am off work and then redownload it before the start of the next day... It's pathetic!

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As it is the communication tool chosen for the course, our team will be using Slack to monitor the course announcements from our instructor as well as to communicate with the instructor and industry partners. The tool for communicating within the team will be Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams enables the team to share documents and edit them synchronously(Google Drive is not an option due to one team member's location). Since it also provides a group chat feature, we chose to use it as our communication tool to avoid using too many softwares.

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Hirotaka Ishihara
Undergrad at University of Toronto · | 3 upvotes · 181.8K views

Communication We have chosen two tools for our team communication.

  • Slack

We choose Slack since all of us are familiar with this communication tool. We have a private channel for our team Sphinx for text messages. We added Github apps inside our private channel for repo update notifications. Furthermore, we could contact the subject matter experts within the workspace DCSIL directly for the issues we meet.

  • Microsoft Teams

We use Microsoft Teams for virtual meetings for its fast connection speed. In addition, the call feature in Slack is a paid feature, and we could have virtual meetings and share screens for free in Microsoft Teams.

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Remotor Consulting
at Remotor Consulting Group · | 13 upvotes · 122K views

Keybase is a powerful and secure team-organizing software. And because Keybase is so transparently good at what it does, Keybase is a foundational software that facilitates the future of work: effective, inclusive, secure Remote Teams.

Keybase is a free, end-to-end encrypted, open-source program with almost limitless flexibility. Each Keybase user or team is a unique cryptographic identity. Each message or interaction that a user has with a team or other user, is verifiable and digitally-signed. Custom combinations of users/teams/bots, can be designed to catalyze Remote Teams of all kinds, this process can also be automated. Keybase includes Git integration for versioning, bots from multiple platforms to facilitate audio/video-conferencing, a Cryptocurrency wallet, and many advanced privacy features to make you more or less traceable.

Services like Slack and Discord are centralized platforms that perform analytics on your behavior and can sell or leak this data to 3rd parties. Any audio/video features available within Slack or Discord, are bound to be less secure and less flexible than excellent alternatives such as Jitsi. Slack and Discord do have a fun, causal feel to them, which can potentially facilitate social engagement in certain conditions (also many users are already on these platforms).

Centralized and Proprietary team platforms such as Discord and Slack have a large market presence (at least in the USA) based on their first-mover advantage, name recognition, and network effects from size. However these products do not have the flexibility or power of Keybase. Keybase excels on its own excellence, and also has an open and active developer community.

Find us on Keybase: @remotorteam (Keybase username) @remotor.public (Public Keybase Team)

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Stefan Schuchlenz

We chose RocketChat over other communications suites like Cliq or Slack mainly because we can self-host it on our own infrastructure. Since we have quite some projects going on which demand that we stay in touch with a lot of different stakeholders, pricing was an issue, too. With RocketChat, we have a huge set of features basically for free, RC offers apps for all major devices and systems and overall, we're very happy with it. The only downside is the limited amount of apps and integrations, but we can make due with what we have available.

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Mohammad Hossein Amri
Chief Technology Officer at Planally · | 3 upvotes · 248.8K views

we were using slack and at the same time we had a subscription with office 365. after a while we hit the slack free limitation quota. and it got annoying. the search ability was useless in free tier. and more annoying whenever you search, it opens a webpage and doesn't do it in the app.

on mobile there were many cases that I didn't get notification of important discussions. rooms was the way to separate a talk. but it become tedious. each time for a new subject that you wanted to discuss, you needed to add all the team members into a new room. and after a while the room goes silent. you will end up with a tons of not-in-use rooms that you don't want to clean up them for history purposes. also the slack UI for sub discussion is very stupid. if someone forget to check the checkbox to post the subdiscussion in the main discussion thread, other team members even won't notice such discussion is in progress.

we was paying for office 365 and thought why not give the teams a shot. we won't be in worth situation than we are. we moved to teams and we loved it instantly, we had a separate tab aggregated all the files upload. we could reply on other talk. no need of creating a new room. this way room belongs to a team and not a certain topic. our sub discussion was visible to the whole team. enjoyed integration with azure and unlimited history. the best part was integration with outlook. it was a full suit solution. our stats become busy on outlook meeting events. we get weekly analyse. we didn't need to host our wiki seperated. we've created wiki per team. the communication was much more fun.

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Pros of Gitter
Pros of Slack
  • 63
    Github integration
  • 55
    Free
  • 45
    Markdown support
  • 19
    Markdown
  • 17
    Graceful integration
  • 16
    Project-oriented
  • 15
    MARKDOOOOWN
  • 12
    IRC bridge
  • 9
    Integrates with everything
  • 8
    LaTeX
  • 4
    Apps available for most platforms
  • 2
    Cross-repository issue reference
  • 2
    Github login
  • 1
    IRC support
  • 1
    My new fav'rite thing is on it
  • 1
    Very fast work
  • 1
    Very open
  • 1
    Now open source
  • 1
    Open source
  • 1
    Free unlimited archives
  • 1
    Open access (no invitation needed)
  • 1
    Single account for all communities
  • 1
    Free, open & free hosting
  • 1.2K
    Easy to integrate with
  • 876
    Excellent interface on multiple platforms
  • 849
    Free
  • 694
    Mobile friendly
  • 690
    People really enjoy using it
  • 331
    Great integrations
  • 315
    Flexible notification preferences
  • 198
    Unlimited users
  • 184
    Strong search and data archiving
  • 155
    Multi domain switching support
  • 82
    Easy to use
  • 40
    Beautiful
  • 27
    Hubot support
  • 22
    Unread/read control
  • 21
    Slackbot
  • 19
    Permalink for each messages
  • 17
    Text snippet with highlighting
  • 15
    Quote message easily
  • 14
    Per-room notification
  • 13
    Awesome integration support
  • 12
    Star for each message / attached files
  • 12
    IRC gateway
  • 11
    Good communication within a team
  • 11
    Dropbox Integration
  • 10
    Slick, search is great
  • 10
    Jira Integration
  • 9
    New Relic Integration
  • 8
    Great communication tool
  • 8
    Combine All Services Quickly
  • 8
    Asana Integration
  • 7
    This tool understands developers
  • 7
    XMPP gateway
  • 7
    Google Drive Integration
  • 7
    Awesomeness
  • 6
    Replaces email
  • 6
    Twitter Integration
  • 6
    Google Docs Integration
  • 6
    BitBucket integration
  • 5
    Jenkins Integration
  • 5
    GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback
  • 5
    Guest and Restricted user control
  • 4
    Clean UI
  • 4
    Excellent multi platform internal communication tool
  • 4
    GitHub integration
  • 4
    Mention list view
  • 4
    Gathers all my communications in one place
  • 3
    Perfect implementation of chat + integrations
  • 3
    Easy
  • 3
    Easy to add a reaction
  • 3
    Timely while non intrusive
  • 3
    Great on-boarding
  • 3
    Threaded chat
  • 3
    Visual Studio Integration
  • 3
    Easy to start working with
  • 3
    Android app
  • 2
    Simplicity
  • 2
    Message Actions
  • 2
    It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC
  • 2
    So much better than email
  • 2
    Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams
  • 2
    Great interface
  • 2
    Great Channel Customization
  • 2
    Markdown
  • 2
    Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations
  • 1
    Great Support Team
  • 1
    Watch
  • 1
    Multi work-space support
  • 1
    Flexible and Accessible
  • 1
    Better User Experience
  • 1
    Archive Importing
  • 1
    Travis CI integration
  • 1
    It's the coolest IM ever
  • 1
    Community
  • 1
    Great API
  • 1
    Easy remote communication
  • 1
    Get less busy
  • 1
    API
  • 1
    Zapier integration
  • 1
    Targetprocess integration
  • 1
    Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock
  • 1
    Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT
  • 1
    I was 666 star :D
  • 1
    Dev communication Made Easy
  • 1
    Integrates with just about everything
  • 1
    Very customizable
  • 0
    Platforms
  • 0
    Easy to useL

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Cons of Gitter
Cons of Slack
  • 2
    Sends data to US Gov
  • 13
    Can be distracting depending on how you use it
  • 6
    Requires some management for large teams
  • 6
    Limit messages history
  • 5
    Too expensive
  • 5
    You don't really own your messages
  • 4
    Too many notifications by default

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What is Gitter?

Free chat rooms for your public repositories. A bit like IRC only smarter. Chats for private repositories as well as organisations.

What is Slack?

Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Gitter?
What companies use Slack?
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Sep 29 2020 at 7:36PM

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What are some alternatives to Gitter and Slack?
Discord
Discord is a modern free voice & text chat app for groups of gamers. Our resilient Erlang backend running on the cloud has built in DDoS protection with automatic server failover.
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
Riot
Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.
Mattermost
Mattermost is modern communication from behind your firewall.
Spectrum
The community platform for the future.
See all alternatives