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Slack vs WhatsApp: What are the differences?
Introduction: In today's digital age, there are numerous messaging apps available for communication. Two popular options are Slack and WhatsApp, which offer different features and functionalities. Here are the key differences between Slack and WhatsApp.
Interface and Purpose: Slack is primarily designed for workplace communication, allowing teams to collaborate and communicate efficiently. It offers features like channels, direct messaging, file sharing, and integrations with various productivity tools. On the other hand, WhatsApp is a versatile messaging app used for personal and business communication. It focuses on individual and group chats, voice and video calls, and supports multimedia sharing.
Public vs Private Groups: Slack encourages public and private group communication. Public channels enable open conversations, while private channels allow teams to discuss sensitive matters securely. In contrast, WhatsApp is more oriented towards private conversations, with the option to create groups for specific contacts or communities.
Integration Capabilities: Slack stands out with its extensive integration capabilities. It can integrate with various third-party applications and services, allowing seamless workflow management and automating tasks. WhatsApp, while offering some integrations like sharing location on maps or integrating with payment services, has limited integration options compared to Slack.
Focus on Productivity: Slack provides numerous features and tools that enhance productivity in a work environment. It supports threaded conversations, shared channels with external organizations, and robust search functionality. WhatsApp, although offering some productivity features like document sharing and cloud backups, doesn't have the same level of emphasis on workplace collaboration.
Enterprise Features: Slack offers advanced security and compliance features needed in enterprise environments. It provides features like two-factor authentication, data encryption, and compliance with industry regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. While WhatsApp has enhanced its security measures in recent years, it doesn't provide the same level of enterprise-grade features as Slack.
Pricing and Business Model: Slack offers a freemium model with limited features for free users and additional features available through paid plans. It also offers Enterprise Grid for large organizations. In contrast, WhatsApp follows a completely free model, without any ads or subscriptions. It monetizes through its separate WhatsApp Business app, which provides additional features for small businesses.
In Summary, Slack primarily focuses on workplace communication with extensive integrations and advanced productivity features, while WhatsApp is a versatile messaging app used for personal and business communication, though with fewer workplace collaboration features and integrations.
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."
We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration
We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications
We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.
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 !
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)
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.
We are using VSCode
as an IDE since it's very light weight, easy to use and it has many extensions that makes development easier.
Slack
and Messenger
are used for communication. Since the entire organization use Slack but our team is more often online on Messenger which is used for faster feedback.
Messenger Platform
is also used to communicate with customers since it's easy to integrate with Amazon Lex.
In addition to Messenger, we're supporting WhatsApp
through Twilio
since it's the second most used communication app and Twilio allows for its integration with Amazon Lex.
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.
Pros of Slack
- Easy to integrate with1.2K
- Excellent interface on multiple platforms876
- Free849
- Mobile friendly694
- People really enjoy using it690
- Great integrations331
- Flexible notification preferences315
- Unlimited users198
- Strong search and data archiving184
- Multi domain switching support155
- Easy to use82
- Beautiful40
- Hubot support27
- Unread/read control22
- Slackbot21
- Permalink for each messages19
- Text snippet with highlighting17
- Quote message easily15
- Per-room notification14
- Awesome integration support13
- Star for each message / attached files12
- IRC gateway12
- Good communication within a team11
- Dropbox Integration11
- Slick, search is great10
- Jira Integration10
- New Relic Integration9
- Great communication tool8
- Combine All Services Quickly8
- Asana Integration8
- This tool understands developers7
- XMPP gateway7
- Google Drive Integration7
- Awesomeness7
- Replaces email6
- Twitter Integration6
- Google Docs Integration6
- BitBucket integration6
- Jenkins Integration5
- GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback5
- Guest and Restricted user control5
- Clean UI4
- Excellent multi platform internal communication tool4
- GitHub integration4
- Mention list view4
- Gathers all my communications in one place4
- Perfect implementation of chat + integrations3
- Easy3
- Easy to add a reaction3
- Timely while non intrusive3
- Great on-boarding3
- Threaded chat3
- Visual Studio Integration3
- Easy to start working with3
- Android app3
- Simplicity2
- Message Actions2
- It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC2
- So much better than email2
- Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams2
- Great interface2
- Great Channel Customization2
- Markdown2
- Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations2
- Great Support Team1
- Watch1
- Multi work-space support1
- Flexible and Accessible1
- Better User Experience1
- Archive Importing1
- Travis CI integration1
- It's the coolest IM ever1
- Community1
- Great API1
- Easy remote communication1
- Get less busy1
- API1
- Zapier integration1
- Targetprocess integration1
- Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock1
- Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT1
- I was 666 star :D1
- Dev communication Made Easy1
- Integrates with just about everything1
- Very customizable1
- Platforms0
- Easy to useL0
Pros of WhatsApp
- Free14
- Easy to carry on with contact3
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Cons of Slack
- Can be distracting depending on how you use it13
- Requires some management for large teams6
- Limit messages history6
- Too expensive5
- You don't really own your messages5
- Too many notifications by default4
Cons of WhatsApp
- No privacy1
- Centralized1
- Maximum to 8 person video call1