With the Coronavirus (COVID-19) leading to employees and students staying home and working remotely, Slack has been experiencing outages and third parties are reporting a growing number of issues. On Slack, the vast majority of its traffic is in the form of text, rather than data-heavy video. But since the video calling feature is becoming overused, problems are becoming more evident. This article lists what to use instead of Slack. 

Hey @SlackHQ @SlackStatus there's definitely something up with calls. Everyone keeps getting randomly disconnected, but not all the way. Screen goes black and it just starts randomly playing connect and disconnect sounds.

— matt.js (@mattisadev) March 11, 2020

Slack  has confirmed that “Slack Calls are experiencing some connectivity difficulties right now.” The difficulties coincide with the push from tech companies to move workers to remote-only meetings and conference calls, amid the outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19. In a previous blog post outlining Slack’s response to COVID-19, it said that their system architecture is designed to automatically accommodate the surges of traffic throughout the day that this brings to our systems, but the connection issues are telling a different story.  To overcome video or messaging problems when working remotely, there are many other video calling and team messenger apps: what to use instead of Slack. 

What to use instead of Slack: Best Slack-alternatives

1. Zangi 

Advantages: Zangi is free messenger to download and instantly start using with groups, friends, family, and colleagues. the best part is that it withstands millions and billions of users at the same time, it has flashing delivery speed an it’s very secure (great for work-related confidential files and conversations)

Also, if you want something more advanced — ask Zangi to get your own dedicated private team communication app on your servers, which will belong only to you. Your team will get complete ownership of mobile and desktop apps along with its communication data, hosted on your company servers. You’ll have a safe place for all your voice and video calls, messages and collaboration.

2. Fleep

Advantages: One of the cheaper Slack alternatives, Fleep is an open network. This means that you can talk with any Fleep user and belong to several teams with the same account. Fleep has an integrated Tasks feature for lightweight and contextual task management. Also, the seen-bys (‘Read’ indicators) show you how far people have read the messages in any conversation. Included in the price are audio/video calling, screen sharing.

3. Microsoft Teams

Advantages: Teams integrates with Office 365 apps, such as Outlook and Skype, etc. This allows users to email and call their peers all from within Teams.

And if someone sends you a Word document, you can edit it in Teams without having to leave the platform. Teams also comes with a tab-based structure, making it very convenient to access the apps and services integrated with Teams.

4. Hibox

Advantages: With Hibox team communication software, you get an all-in-one task management, you don’t need to always switch to another platform if you need to share files, talk in real life, or assign tasks. Included is live support in English 24/7: for whenever you need help.

And most impressively, you get a built-in AI virtual assistant. This tool recognizes which messages you want to create a task from and makes an automatic suggestion for you. You can create tasks directly in the chat stream. And most surprisingly this cheaper Slack alternative, with all these functionalities, is exactly half the price of Slack!

5. Twist

Advantages: One of the cheaper Slack alternatives, Twist team communication app concentrates on making the messaging experience simpler and distraction-free. It’s asynchronous by default, so your team can finally prioritize focused, productive work without fear of missing something important.

Twist organizes discussions into threads that stay on topic and in context. Information remains neatly structured and easy to find (even years later).

6. Flock

Advantages: Need to invite vendors or clients to work with you on Flock? Add as many as you need as guests on Flock at no extra cost. With Flock team communication software you go beyond messaging, with task assigning, to-do lists, live polls, automated mailing lists for each channel so you can send emails when chat is not the best medium and integration with Google Drive.

7. Chanty

Advantages: Chanty strives to keep the balance between features and usability, staying simple yet with enough great features a team needs for effective work. A built-in task manager allows you to turn any message into a task, assign it to your teammate and get notified when it’s done. The app is code snippet-friendly and you can import your message history from other apps, like Slack, Flock, Hipchat, Stride. What’s also nice about Chanty is its unlimited searchable message history, which is available even in the free plan. 

8. Ryver 

Ryver came into the team chat app game when Slack was already doing great, the main selling point of Ryver is the combination of team communication and task management. It’s something like putting Slack and Trello together.

What to use instead of Slack? Which app to choose?

With many teams going remote, with them needing more versatile and quality conferencing options/more integration possibilities, and others strongly valuing their team conversation and data privacy, team communication app is filling in for the different needs of different kinds of teams.  If you’re looking for a proven solution that is loved by many, go for Slack.

However, note that Slack’s free plan is very limiting and the app itself can get rather slow with its enormous number of users. There are plenty of strong alternatives as to what to use instead of Slack in the list, which might as well be a better fit for your team. So we’d recommend you check them out and see which one has the best feel for you.