Comment by pedalpete
14 hours ago
I'm with you on the frustration with Slack and every month when I see our bill I consider forcing the company to change.
My co-founder and I tried moving to Google Chat. We already pay for workspace so why not.
What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.
Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.
I don't even think the slack search is really that much of a value add.
We split our meeting between huddles, usually when there is only two or three of us, or google meet.
We're also more than 5, but to be clear. Your pricing is the pricing for the team, not per user?
I wish you all the best, and I'd be keen to try it as we only currently have 3 external partners, but if you can nail that management of external users, I think that is important.
I'm also assuming there are desktop/mobile/web apps? Also necessary, though also a lot of overhead for a small team.
Notifications need to be solid as well.
I am not going to lie but I joined Zulip for some project and I really enjoyed it.
Stoat (formerly Revolt) is great for single server (ie. no federation between multiple servers) and matrix/xmpp are good if you want the latter (ie federation)
Good to see some more options though but all the services I shared are open source. Not sure if this is open source.
I don't like to use closed source services (usually) because then I am still trusting trust but I am gonna be honest that Closed source services make more money at times so there is a trade-off for some businesses.
Pricing: Yes, exactly. It is a flat fee for the whole team. $15/month covers your entire group (up to 20 people). No per-seat billing. We hate that "tax" as much as you do. External Partners: You hit the nail on the head. We are building "Guest Access" so you can invite external partners to specific channels (single-channel guests) easily.Since we don't charge per-seat, adding a few clients/partners won't blow up your bill like it does on Slack. Apps: We are launching as a high-performance PWA (Web) first. It installs to your dock/home screen and feels native, but allows us to iterate faster than maintaining three separate codebases. Native wrappers are coming, but we want the core experience to be rock solid first.
I don't think you can ignore mobile, particularly wrt notifications. I'm not sure if the app stores are as aggressive in restricting wrapped apps as they used to be.
Mobile notifications are a must have for any Slack replacement. Lots of teams have centralized their on call alerts to Slack.
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I know the comments will be "ew" but as a short term solution, can you just make a native app that's a webview and enable the few app only things with custom injected APIs?
Then your iteration stays ~ the same.
Please ask ChatGPT that you're clearly using to write these responses to reapond in proper human speech, and format for Hacker News.
Offtopic (I don't know if they are LLM Or not , I don't want to respond to it because many people will already do it) but someone should study the significance of em-dashes because to me (and maybe you or others) its one of the most significant indicators (sometimes false) as well.
If someone ever used em-dashes before , what are you using now? (I don't use em-dashes but I am curious!) and did you guys ever change to purposeful linguistic errors to not look AI
I am thinking of going back to a , comma like this with spaces in both side intentionally because I used to make this mistake in the start and I had people genuinely fume over this grammar nitpick more times than I can count. But after I stopped it and got better at writing, I got called AI too (mfw when I am a human helloooo)
Just writing what's on my mind recently; I find it funny to change back to grammar mistakes because of AI .
(I made the errors in this post as well! I try to ship ideas fast lol & brain.exe not working after being tired right now :] )
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I’m very puzzled by Google chat to be honest. It’s a massive missing piece in the Google workspace toolchest. Teams is the central place for companies on Microsoft, and arguably the most sticky part of the MS cloud productivity stack. So it can’t be lost on Google how important it is to have something here.
Google slides, docs, sheets are fantastic products, but Google chat is so clunky and awkward that it seems hard to believe they really can recommend it as a slack / teams alternative. What’s keeping them from just
A: making it better?
B: buying one of the dozen other alternatives? All I really need is a log in with Google for our company domain.
History of Google text/voice/video chat is frankly insane, they refuse to just have a product and develop it, instead every few years the new thing pops up and the old thing gets deprecated.
They should've been dominating the space for near 2 decades now. Instead they had Google Talk (that even worked over XMPP!) then replaced it with google hangouts, and then Google Chat.
And each iteration is basically worse.
XMPP should be able to be a Slack replacement.
Hangouts was a proprietary reimplementation, that had most of the features in an awkward way. Group chat in columns wasn't a great idea but was fine on mobile.
Duo/Chat was weird, separation of communication for no great benefit, and wasn't really any better than Hangouts. More like Hangouts that they had given to an intern to fix up, but forgot to tell them that it still needed to work with Hangouts.
Now we have Chat and Meet, Meet "replacing" Duo, while Duo is becoming Meet?
All I know is that after Hangouts finally was retired and replaced with Chat, they hid the chat tab in gmail, and required you to unhide it, and then appeared to disable notifications so I never knew when the last couple of people using it messaged me.
1/10. Wouldn't recommend.
And Google Chat does not have a native Desktop app. I guess they're the only chat app that don't.
Really? Teams is the most sticky? Teams sucks. Excel and PowerPoint are the most sticky parts, and Teams just comes bundled with those.
I agree that Teams sucks, but speaking to people who are locked into the Microsoft environment, they love it.
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Yes in some ways. Teams being bundled means that Slack and other messaging apps have to justify against a sunk-cost solution.
That makes teams very sticky.
Perhaps he has a very narrow definition of "the MS cloud productivity stack"
Windows? Office? Not cloud, in its roots. Active Directory? Entra? Azure? Not productivity. Github? Not MS. Copilot? Not sticky.
Agree with the sentiment here. On top of this, something very important are integrations.
We use a lot of tools that send messages to dedicated Slack channels for notifications. CI failures, incidents, etcs. They use probably Slack API that you can replicate, but the integrations are native in other services ("Click to connect to Slack"). Without that, you are in a big disadvantage.
But good luck!
replicating the api is a great idea!
> Google chat doesn't allow you to add external members unless they were added at the creation of the channel. Seems like a strange limitation.
Google chat doesn't allow you to change whether external members are allowed to join after creation of the channel, but if you enabled that you can add/remove them at any time.
> What kept us on slack is the external partners who are on slack. This is a bigger deal than you might think.
We are there as well. Most partners and clients use Windows. Most of them therefore had exchange and moved to the cloud. Most of them got 'Teams' for free in the package, chat and meetings.
Now we see a zoom link and go 'euuuuugh', yuck. hipster yuck.
Give me Teams
Upsides seem to be, its back to xmpp where we can communicate with anyone
Downside is, its total lock-in to microsoft.
I feel the same way when I get an email with a Teams link, but I think we're all just going to have to live with the idea that everyone is on different platforms.
This just goes to show how badly Microsoft (or other owners before) messed up with skype. They had an opportunity to own the entire thing.
Screw teams. I had a meeting on teams for the first time ever so I decided to use safari, my designated un touched browser on my mac, to use teams in order to maximize compatibility. The thing kept shutting off my webcam every two seconds. I’d turn it on then it would shut off two seconds later. We switched to zoom for the remainder of the meeting.
Google’s offering isn’t much better either. I tried the same thing, going with safari, tested my connection, all was well. Then came time to share screen. No go! Kept complaining I need to enable permissions in safari for hangout that were already enabled.
Zoom just works on the other hand.
If you had just downloaded Teams it would have worked fine.
It isn’t Microsoft’s fault that Safari is a shit browser and the macOS people who keep it as their default won’t switch to something better.
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All the cross tenant inconsistency really needs to be ironed out, I'm not sure if it's just my org but half the features of calls are randomly disabled or enabled based on who originated it.
My favorite was when I entered VR during our standup on our otherwise quite locked down and very corporate environment.