Any of you guys use slack for your businesses?

[Clueless Newbie]

If so, how do you like it and are there any must have plugins?

 

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[Ravens_Shadow]

I use discord for my business, I like it much more than slack.

 

[Beerbread]

I use discord for my business, I like it much more than slack.

This. I find Discord more intuitive than Slack.

 

[Andy Black]

I’ve had to use Slack a few times when whitelabelled through other agencies. Never again. I’ll decline work if it means I have to use Slack to manage projects.

 

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[WestCoast]

Slack is just awful- I have no idea how it EVER got so popular.

maybe back in the day when it was a novel idea?

It’s like running your business with tin cans and string to communicate.
Slack is like that, except much less intuitive and user friendly.

 

[Clueless Newbie]

Interesting, thanks for the feedback guys.

 

[CareCPA]

Since everyone seems to dislike Slack, what are you using that is objectively better? I've "used" Discord, but just for chat functions. Are there features that make it better than Slack that I'm not understanding?

If not, what are other people using for internal communication to keep email from being cluttered?

 

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[Rabby]

Huh. I use slack for 2 businesses, and I'm in several slack groups for community organizations and such too. I think it's pretty good. Discord is also Ok, I guess, but seems less work oriented to me.

We don't use a lot of slack plugins, but we do use the API or other integration options to feed alerts, orders, etc through slack. For example, we have an "orders" channel where the people who need to double check orders can find a feed of them. In addition to being pretty readable, it serves as a sort of backup view in case another system is temporarily down. Similarly, if a machine on AWS starts operating outside normal parameters, we have an "operations_alerts" channel that gets pinged with a graph and info about the machine so we can address it. And when we open new cards in our project management system (clubhouse) there's an updates channel that alerts us so we don't have to use email alerts. Aaaaand if we're testing some kind of email server or something, we'll temporarily dump messages into a slack channel so that we can accept invitations, reset password links, etc., while we're testing (though now we mostly use mailtrap for this).

There's even an insurance company that made a shared slack channel with my business so that their training team could talk about solutions we offer, etc. The channel just sits in my slack organization like any other channel. I think it's pretty useful, anyway.

 

[Jon L]

I've tried using Slack because its what all the cool people use. I just can't get into it for some reason. Not because I don't like it, but because no one else uses it that I work with. Everyone is on Skype, which works just fine. To keep projects organized, I use Jira. Communicating with clients goes through me only.

I've tried 'forcing' people to use Slack, and something invariably comes up, and we just end up using Zoom, Skype, email or something we already use.

 

[Rabby]

I guess people are using it for different things. We mostly use it for text-based chat (including alerts from the bots and such), and passing screenshots back and forth. Calls, screen sharing, etc are all secondary, although it doesn't hurt that they're possible through Slack. It's basically a pretty IRC replacement for us.

 

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[Andy Black]

We use Basecamp. It has areas for chat, much like Slack, and has areas for threads, much like this forum. It also has threads that can be given due dates, assigned to people, and marked as done.

 

[Kak]

I've tried Slack a couple of times, but ultimately we end up back on Skype.

Might have to try discord though.

 

[Tom H.]

Use Slack daily for my day job. My usage consists mainly of clicking "mute notifications until tomorrow" and then finding a bunch of increasingly aggravated messages from co-workers at the end of day as I've ignored all of their attempts to interrupt me.

 

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[Ocean Man]

For my day job we use Signal. I could see Discord being a good use as well.

 

[Bing]

We moved from Skype to Slack a few years ago and as a software engineer I love it. The built in "bot" to set/snooze reminders, every message is hyper-link-able and how easy it is to write code to push stuff to channels make it a winner for me. I haven't really familiarized myself with discord, but I certainly don't understand the Slack hate.

 

[Antifragile]

I use slack for communication with my PR agency. Drop info in when I have time. They review reply when they have time. It’s all good and basic. Better than say email…

Discord - l got and used it as a text messaging app, that’s all. Not sure what else it can do.

I’ve heard great things about Basecamp and used it when our website designers “forced us” to use it. Since I was forced, and didn’t interact too much with it; it was meh for me.

 

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[Simon Angel]

I don't really have any strong opinions on Slack. It's fine.

Some of my clients use it, others use Skype or Discord, and one of my older clients used Microsoft Teams (yikes).

 

[Andy Black]

Took on a client recently who wanted to use Discord, then switched to Slack.

It’s just confirmed I’m still a Slack and Discord hater.

Basecamp for the win.

 

[eramart]

We did use Slack, never had any problems with it.

 

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[peddletothemetal]

Depends what kind of business you run, for technical businesses it's the gold standard and works very well. You don't need any plugins. Just be sure to have your staff trained in the best ways to use it, like by reading Collaborate with kindness: Consider these etiquette tips in Slack .

 

[Devilery]

Most of my clients use Slack, I love it. It's super simple to use and we organize tasks/goals/whatever by creating a subchannel for each of those.

 

[BigRomeDawg]

What is the point of this thread?

Are you trying to figure out which chat app to use?

Or if you should have a chat app at all?

What's your hopeful outcome from posting this question?

 

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