Slack

Slack is the workplace chat app for teams that need channels, direct messages, file sharing and lots of small integrations around their day. By our assessment, its real strength is how it turns messy email threads into organized conversations that can be searched and split by topic. The downside is the same one most teams meet: it can get noisy fast, and without discipline every channel turns into another place to miss things. In use it feels quick, message-heavy and always nudging people back into short replies instead of long documents. Against Microsoft Teams it is usually lighter and more focused on chat; against email it is far better for fast back-and-forth, but it is not a project system by itself. Slack is a strong fit for offices that live in text and react quickly, and a weak fit for people who want one tool to replace planning software, documents and meetings all at once.