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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

Advice on Slack and WhatsApp
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SlackSlackDiscordDiscord
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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 · 198.7K 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 · 194.1K 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 Slack and WhatsApp
Remotor Consulting
at Remotor Consulting Group · | 13 upvotes · 121.8K 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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MusaTalluzi

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.

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Mohammad Hossein Amri
Chief Technology Officer at Planally · | 3 upvotes · 248.5K 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 Slack
Pros of WhatsApp
  • 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
  • 14
    Free
  • 3
    Easy to carry on with contact

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Cons of Slack
Cons of WhatsApp
  • 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
  • 1
    No privacy
  • 1
    Centralized
  • 1
    Maximum to 8 person video call

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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.

What is WhatsApp?

It is a cross-platform mobile messaging app for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media.

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Sep 29 2020 at 7:36PM

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What are some alternatives to Slack and WhatsApp?
Microsoft Teams
See content and chat history anytime, including team chats with Skype that are visible to the whole team. Private group chats are available for smaller group conversations.
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.
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.
Skype
Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.
Asana
Asana is the easiest way for teams to track their work. From tasks and projects to conversations and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish--and get results. Available at asana.com and on iOS & Android.
See all alternatives