Slack is a messaging app that brings all your communication together in one place. It offers real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. You can have all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go.

Slack integrates with dozens of external services, and the app keeps adding more all the time. It offers built-in internal and external sharing options to ensure you can get and share files with anyone. The app has advanced search, filters and sorting that make it simple to get the right files. You can filter results by recent type, relevance or file type to find exactly what you need.

Slack offers fully native apps for iOS and Android to give you full functionality wherever you go. Another feature is read state synchronization: when you read something on your phone, your laptop will know about it and automatically mark those messages as read.

Generally, Slack is a messaging platform for teams that brings all communication together, creating a single unified archive accessible through powerful search. Modern teams benefit from a unified communication hub that collates all channels they are using, but also stores their conversations in robust databases to make them easily searchable and available at any moment. Whatever action the user is performing with it, he will get to complete it on an intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard, even in cases where he has no experience with similar products. The lack of training and complex installations, the same as cloud hosting make Slack a reasonable investment, particularly having in mind its flexible pricing scheme.

Slack is built around a channel format that allows you to quickly go from asynchronous to synchronous communication. When it matters, the real-time response cannot be undervalued, but Slack’s highly customizable notifications allow you to jump in and out when you’re needed. The centralized and searchable archive of messages is something that’s available not just to people on the team today, but the ones who start next week or next month or next year. Onboarding ramp up times are dramatically reduced. Other advanced features include creation of open communication channels, desktop and mobile messaging, internal and external sharing, flexible browsing, read-state synchronization, and many more.

The numerous integrations give companies another distinctive reason to choose Slack for their needs. The system will blend easily in every software ecosystem, as it works with Zendesk, MailChimp, GitHub, Google Drive, Dropbox, and all main social networks.

When you switch to a centralized system for internal communication like Slack, you get an immediate benefit in the form of cross-team transparency. The tension between “I want to be kept in the loop, so please CC me” and “I get way too much email, so stop CCing me on everything” disappears.

By default, communication is public, and everyone can see what’s going on everywhere else. The need for status reports and daily stand-up meetings decreases. Now, marketing can see what challenges the sales team is facing, engineers get a glimpse of what designers are working on before it gets handed over, technical operations have insight into what’s in the customer support queue, etc.

Having a searchable history of the entire team’s communication dramatically accelerates the process of getting up to speed. Compared to your first day at an email-based organization, where you start with an empty inbox, with Slack you can scroll back over every decision, every discussion, every link, every file, and everything else.

In Slack, you can quickly pick up on subtle aspects of a company’s culture, the norms for communication, who knows the answers to what kinds of questions, and who really makes the decisions and the kind of soft knowledge that can take a long time to absorb without Slack.

Slack saves you tons of time associated with triaging emails and status update meetings. You are much more efficient and your throughput shoots through the roof.

Lastly, Slack is an easy and fun tool to use. Onboarding is intuitive and teams quickly adapt to the new model of real-time messaging which we are accustomed to in our personal lives.

Slack Pricing Plans:

Slack offers three SMB and enterprise pricing packages for users to choose from. Give the details a look, and select your plan:

Free – No limits on time or users

• Searchable message archives, up to 10k of your team’s most recent messages
• 10 apps or service integrations
• Native apps for iOS, Android, Mac & Windows Desktop
• Two-person voice and video calls
• 5GB total file storage for the team
• Two-factor authentication

Standard – $6.67 per user/month billed annually ($8 billed monthly)

• All features from the Free plan
• Unlimited searchable message archives
• Unlimited apps and service integrations
• Custom retention policies for messages and files
• Guest access
• Priority support
• OAuth via Google
• Mandatory two-factor authentication
• Custom User Groups to reach a team or department
• Group voice and video calls
• 10GB file storage per team member

Plus – $12.50 per user/month billed annually ($15 billed monthly)

• All features from the Standard plan
• SAML-based single sign-on (SSO)
• Compliance Exports of all messages
• 99.99% Guaranteed Uptime SLA
• 24/7 Support with 4-hour response time
• User provisioning and deprovisioning
• Real-time Active Directory sync with OneLogin, Okta, Centrify, and Ping Identity
• 20GB file storage per team member

Enterprise – $49-99 per user/month billed annualy

• Fully searchable archive with unlimited messages
• Unlimited external integrations
• Free native apps for iOS, Android & Mac Desktop
• Detailed usage statistics, reporting & analysis
• Custom message retention policies
• Guest access
• Priority support