Slack is a messaging app that gives you one platform for all your communications, offering real-time messaging, file sharing, archiving, and search. It’s built for modern teams so you can have all your communication in one online location, instantly searchable, and immediately accessible from whatever connected device.

Slack works with more than 1,500 external apps and services, giving you one fully flexible and extendable platform. It has several internal and external sharing options so you can receive and share files with anyone. It offers advanced search, filters and sorting that make it easy to get the right files that you need. You can set filters by variables such as recent type, relevance or file type.

The solution comes with fully native apps for iOS and Android to give you full mobile functionality. It also has read state synchronization like for instance when you read something on your phone, your in sync laptop will know about it and automatically mark those messages as read.

Modern teams require responsive and unified communication hub that not only 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 you perform with it is completed since on an intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard. There is no need for complex installations, maintenance or training since the platform is fully cloud hosted.

Slack is built around a channel format that allows you to quickly go from asynchronous to synchronous communication, giving you real-time response. Its centralized and searchable archive of messages is made available not just to people on your team today, but also to those who’ll get on board later on. Other helpful features include open communication channels, private groups, internal and external sharing, flexible browsing, and many more.

Slack is one of the most extensively integrated platforms around, which is why it is the communication and collaboration platform of choice by teams from top global companies. The system will blend and work with almost every leading software out there that you use such as Dropbox, Zendesk, Google Drive, MailChimp,GitHub as well as all major social networks. Slack also has a strong SMB following and orientation because you can start off with a robust free plan with no restrictions on time and number of users.

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 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 – By quote

• 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