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Ask HN: Slack Alternatives?

45 points by maest ↗ HN
I run Slack on Firefox and it's gotten to the point where the app is unusable, mostly because of the ridiculous memory consumption.

This was noticed not just by me but by my entire team.

So, at this point, it makes sense to move away from Slack.

What are some alternatives? In terms of features: * channels and private messaging * share images and files * (maybe) support for some of the automated commands you can integrate with Slack.

91 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] thread
gomangogo
Fleep.io
sgt
How does it compare to Floop.io?
bnt
2 letters are different.
mscasts
rocket.chat perhaps. But it is still a webapp so the memory consumption will perhaps be similar.
potatochup
Mattermost is a self hosted clone, zulip is an option too although it's not a direct copy. We've also used discord and MS teams
andy_ppp
MS Teams has decent video but everything else about is hugely inferior to Slack in my experience. Very frustrating.
Freak_NL
Mattermost is really nice, and is self-hosted. If you run a self-hosted version of GitLab as well, the GitLab omnibus may be interesting, because it contains Mattermost as well.

https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/

newman8r
I've also hosted a few mattermost instances, highly recommended. It's a YC company too which is cool.

I like that you can choose to use the smartphone app, desktop app or the web app - just like slack except you host it.

alexvoda
If you work in the Microsoft ecosystem, Teams is the obvious answer. On my machine it currently hovers around 82MB.
gowthamgts12
I have used Teams before, but it's not smooth. Had a lot of UX cramps.
bartread
How long ago?

We've been using Teams for about 18 months since switching from Slack due to its prohibitive cost across our whole org[1]. Whilst Teams is far from perfect, it's got considerably better during that time.

[1] We'd reached the point where the 10000 message limit on the free plan meant our history was down to a few days, which meant that important messages were getting lost whilst they were still needed.

lexapro
>We'd reached the point where the 10000 message limit on the free plan meant our history was down to a few days

Why not pay for it? It's $6.67 per person, per month. Doesn't seem very expensive for a company.

bartread
Expensive isn't really the issue. For a (reasonably sized) company (earning decent revenue) plenty of things aren't expensive in isolation. The problem is that there are a lot of things a company either needs or wants to spend money on, so at some point you have to start prioritising.

For us, we need single sign-on, so Slack's £9.75/user/mo. For 200 users that's nearly £2000/month, or £24000/year.

We're now nearly 300 people. That's about £35000/year. And it only gets worse as the company grows.

That's more - I mean, way more - than it costs us to license SQL Server (amortised annually on a 3 year upgrade cycle). It's more than the licenses for several of our other business critical systems and services combined.

In terms of priorities then, we're about to embark on a series of infrastructure improvements and I'd much rather use that £35,000 there, where for us it can add more value.

The problem with Slack is it sounds cheap but the cost creeps up to quite substantial levels for even relatively small organisations. It then needs to be weighed against other costs, and the value it provides versus the value they provide.

Whereas on the other hand we're already paying for Office 365, which everybody in the company uses heavily every working day of the year, and Teams is bundled with it, and it does everything we need, so why not use it?

gowthamgts12
Damn, I can agree with you. 35k per year is a hell lot for collaboration software.
rapsey
On macOS the UI is pretty crampy.
bartread
Fair comment: I've only ever used it on Windows and iOS. My personal machines are Macs but I never use Teams on them.
gowthamgts12
I was forced to use for a customer project around ~8months ago
AllegedAlec
I found it to be a horrible product. Automatically, you get notifications from each channel, creating a private team is pretty much impossible, the threads are a bad feature and it's not possible to give people nicknames, which is really fucking annoying when it automatically tries to detect what a person's first name is and does it wrong.
viraptor
Have you looked at ripcord? (https://cancel.fm/ripcord/) It's not the most amazing UI right now, but it's light and functional. And it works with the existing slack service.

Otherwise, have you tried contacting Slack? They've done a lot of improvements recently. My memory usage in FF barely goes over 30mb normally. If you're way over that, maybe you're running into some specific bug they'd want to fix.

TeMPOraL
Seconded. It's not amazing UI in terms of modern design sensibilities, but to me, it's an improvement over Slack. Snappier, higher information density. And, of course, very lightweight.
gowthamgts12
flock.com? Haven't used but it will have features similar to Slack.
BrissyCoder
Skype for Business. It's for business after all.
coold
RingCentral App, even with phone calls and video conferences
beezle
My condo assoc. has used Glip for a few years on the free tier without any issue. You'll need to pay to get compliance exports.
Hates_
Discord (https://discordapp.com/)
Double_a_92
Discord probably has a similar overhead, since neither are native apps but use Electron instead.
radicalbyte
It's way better though. None of this weird threaded discussions and other annoying lock-in features.
geoah
Threaded discussions are a god-sent in most teams I've worked with. It allows keeping conversations nice and tidy or just ignore the ones you don't care about.
tmlee
We recently moved to using Basecamp for communication, it has a flat fee for as many team members you want which is pretty good for a growing company.

Real time Chat feature (Campfire) is built in which is great and intuitive.

However most of our team members are somehow still used to Slack chat interface.

nicoburns
Have you updated to the latest version of Slack? Mine is currently sitting at 222mb, which isn't great but it's significantly less memory hungry that it used to be.
progval
IRCCloud allows sharing images and files, and is compatible with IRC so people can join from other IRC clients as well if they want to
jamil7
I'm not a massive slack (or electron) fan but with it open right now in 7 teams it's using around 85mb of memory. It's improved a fair bit.
threeseed
Slack is a mess for me. I have only 3 teams open but it will routinely freeze for 10-20 seconds and often will go into the hundreds of MBs.

No problem with Teams so clearly it isn't Electron.

ankit_it09
I just wanted to know why not installing the slack app? I have seen running any app in FF which polls data every few intervals is really difficult to maintain, it eats up all the memory and CPU.
sgt
The Slack app is Electron based and pretty bloated too in my experience. I want a native app.
ankit_it09
But I think it's still better than running in FF.
tontonius
Odd to see that no one recommended ERC the emacs IRC extension
znpy
on a more serious note, TheLounge is pretty great as a self-hosted web-based irc client
sgt
I would like an alternative too that uses a native app, not an Electron app preferably. Something that is very simple will be fine, but it needs to allow for drag and dropping pictures and documents.
ajimix
Telegram works great. Free, privacy friendly, you can create channels (groups), supports bots, super fast with native apps, unlimited cloud storage, unlimited search history and more.

We've been using it for years in our company with excellent results

matteuan
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, I think Telegram is a valid choice sometimes, expecially if your organization is not that big.
alain34
Agreed, been using it for 5 years for around 30 of us in 5 to 7 teams. Drag and drop for upload, as well as desktop, mobile and web apps.
gtirloni
I didn't downvote but for a company-wide tool like that, I'd prefer a solution with a more established legal presence somewhere. Telegram seems more targeted at the consumer space.
nicebill8
Keybase.io is free and encrypted. Subteams, chat, file sharing and encrypted git support.
riffraff
And oddly enough, a cryptocurrency wallet now.
grenoire
They give you free money for some reason. I was priding myself on never having any crypto holdings until they forced the cash on me (which, of course, cannot be complained about on a basis of principle).
Legogris
Not really true, they only distribute it for users who have initiated the wallet set-up AFAIK.
giaour
It does create headaches for those of us who have to report gifts and extramural income sources.
rkangel
We used Zulip in a previous team and it was great. The topics system is the killer feature (like a much better version of Slack's threads).

The mobile apps weren't brilliant 9 months ago, but they were in the early stage of a rewrite in react native, so the situation has likely improved as that has matured.

rvense
Zulip's topic system looks fantastic for keeping things organised over time. I wish we could use it instead of Slack.
ykevinator
We use zulip and most of the time the topic thing is used by accident. We also tried slack but it was too bloated. Honestly hip chat was the best platform we ever used. Maybe we will try rocket chat.
aero31aero
> the topic thing is used by accident

It has been designed to be used with the topics and there is no workflow that allows you to avoid topics. I'm not sure what you mean by using topics by accident.

Uw7yTcf36gTc
probably started with a 'general' topic and people never created other topics.
rkangel
That's definitely true, but the time it really shines is when there's been a lot of conversation on a few different things while you've been away. In Slack, you basically have to read every message to see if there was anything of importance to you. In Zulip you just flick through the topics to see which ones are relevant and only read those.
UserIsUnused
A total different approach: Twist.com I suggest reading about their approach to async communication and the blogs.
yurylifshits
Hi all! Check out Openland. We are YC W18 company and are building a next-generation general-purpose messenger. It completely replaced Slack for us internally (remote team of 12). Totally free now.

What we have:

    Apps for every platform
    Voice calls and conferences
    Group chats and channels
    Mentions, replies, forwards
    Emojis, emoji reactions, and stickers
    Threaded comments
    Link previews
    Rich text formatting
    Keyboard shortcuts
    File attachments and previews
    Message search
Invite: https://openland.com/invite/h2BGtL
darekkay
Is there a landing page? I'm getting redirected to the invite page when opening openland.com

I think few people (especially on HN) are okay with giving away their email without seeing at least a glimpse of what your app is doing.

Legogris
Are you building on the Matrix protocol? In case you decided not to, what made you decide against it?
sergiosgc
Opened it, I can only see an unicorn. There's an error on the console: "Notification is not defined" at main-9cc8c714bb9b9a687b5f.js:1:4562
yurylifshits
Looking into it. Can be a connectivity issue.
einpoklum
Alternatives:

1. IRC, and share files and images through web-based sharing platforms and links.

Simple, low resource consumption, excellent instrumentation and automation possibilities, logging, etc. Downside - not as convenient as pasting shared content onto a channel. There are web-based IRC clients as well, but they're the opposite of private, and few of the benefits of standalone clients.

In extremely extensive use by many groups and organizations, despite not being fashionable.

2. Telegram (using the groups feature)

Kind of in the middle between Slack and IRC, I guess. Not sure you can use it from within the browser though.

Used, for example, by the LibreOffice development community (from which I noticed this kind of Slack-like use - the LTR/RTL QA volunteers have their own group.)

fmpwizard
https://www.flowdock.com , besides all the normal features you mentioned, it has excellent thread support, which is huge! So you can have multiple conversations in the same channel/flow during several days and can just ignore whichever thread isn't for you. We have been using it with a 100% remote team for over 6 years.