Slack Cheat Sheet: A Full Slack Information for 2024

Distant work and distributed groups have elevated the complexity of communications, as small particulars often communicated face-to-face should now be reworked into environment friendly digital interactions. Slack as a instrument is designed for this actual function.

Slack helps groups handle communications from the smallest element to giant company-wide bulletins. Learn by way of this information to know what Slack is and catch a glimpse of what it has to supply.

What’s Slack?

Slack is a cloud-based collaboration instrument that serves as a central hub for crew communication. It was initially designed as a sort of e-mail alternative that helped remove the confusion brought on by lengthy e-mail chains usually utilized by collaborating crew members. Slack has since developed right into a complete suite of options that facilitate each personal and public conversations inside a company.

What’s Slack used for?

Slack is designed to be the nerve heart of your office. It’s not only for chatting; it’s an intuitive platform for venture administration, info sharing and even socializing. Whether or not it’s a company-wide announcement or a personal message between two crew members, Slack gives a spread of channels, each private and non-private, to suit the communication wants of any group.

How a lot does Slack value?

Slack gives a number of pricing choices to swimsuit numerous wants. It gives a free plan with restricted options and three paid tiers: Professional, Enterprise+ and Enterprise Grid. Every tier gives further functionalities, similar to limitless message historical past, group conferences and integrations.

Slack gives a 50% low cost for the primary three months of the Professional plan. It additionally gives steep reductions and offers for instructional establishments and nonprofit organizations.

Free

Slack’s Free plan is comparatively restricted in comparison with its paid tiers. As an example, message and file historical past is restricted to 90 days, and customers can solely add as much as 10 integrations, whereas these options are limitless for paid plans. As well as, collaboration options like huddles and dealing with exterior customers are restricted to one-on-one solely.

Professional

The Professional Plan is $7.25 per consumer monthly when billed yearly. For month-to-month, the speed is $8.75 per consumer.

The Professional Plan gives a limiteless variety of integrations and contains customized retention insurance policies, consumer teams, Google Authentication and Apps for Domains sign-in, visitor entry and a configurable e-mail ingestion service.

Enterprise+

The Enterprise+ plan prices $12.50 per consumer monthly, billed yearly, or $15 per consumer when billed month-to-month.

For many midsize organizations, the Enterprise+ plan ought to be sufficient. The plan contains SAML-based single sign-on, compliance exports of message historical past, and real-time Lively Listing sync.

Enterprise Grid

Slack’s Enterprise Grid plan, focused towards organizations with 500 to 500,000 workers, permits for limitless workspaces and shared channels, enabling organizations to arrange Slack in a means that higher mirrors their organizational construction. This plan gives message and file sharing that’s HIPAA compliant.

Groups within the Enterprise Grid plan might want to contact Slack’s gross sales crew for a customized quote.

Slack AI

As of February 2024, Slack gives an AI add-on plan, which provides automated summarization of conversations, a day by day recap and a extra versatile search operate. Slack AI prices $10 per consumer monthly. You’ll have to have one of many paid plans with a purpose to buy Slack AI.

Slack AI is accessible in English, Spanish and Japanese, with extra languages anticipated to come back out later.

Key options of Slack

Group communication

Slack gives a wide range of communication and collaboration options, like huddles, which gives audio and video calls and the power to share screens.

Slack permits for group or personal messaging by way of its channels characteristic. These channels could be department-specific or project-specific, offering a centralized place for related crew members to collaborate.

It additionally has a messaging characteristic that delivers organized crew chat and a clips characteristic that permits customers to conveniently report and share audio or video clips.

Video capabilities

Slack gives a built-in video chat characteristic. Whereas not as feature-rich as specialised video conferencing instruments like Zoom, it gives a fast and straightforward means for crew members to provoke face-to-face conversations when wanted whereas additionally permitting screen-sharing and whiteboard capabilities.

Slack’s Huddles characteristic makes face-to-face communication fast and straightforward. Picture: Slack

Workflow automation

Slack Workflows enable customers to automate a variety of duties by way of a no-code strategy, making routine processes extra environment friendly. With Slack’s Workflow Builder, customers don’t want technical expertise to automate processes; they’ll take a drag-and-drop strategy to easily and creatively automate their workflows. Any premium model of Slack has entry to Slack’s automation instruments.

Ease of Use

Considered one of Slack’s most compelling options is its user-friendly interface and general simplicity. That simplicity has contributed to Slack’s quick development over time, and the corporate has been profitable in not letting feature-creep complicate the general usefulness of the app.

New venture administration characteristic: Lists

In June 2024, Slack debuted Lists, a venture administration characteristic. Lists provides a visible, interactable, shareable to-do listing characteristic that may be dropped into channels to indicate how a venture is progressing.

Lists began to roll out on June 6, 2024 and might be totally out there in paid plans “in the coming months,” Slack stated in a press equipment.

How do you utilize Slack?

Slack is accessible by way of numerous platforms. You need to use it by way of an internet browser or obtain its desktop software, out there for Home windows, macOS and Linux. Cell apps are additionally out there for Android and iOS.

What are Slack shortcuts?

Slack shortcuts are automated interactions between both totally different components of Slack or Slack and third-party functions. Customers can arrange “triggers” to fireside shortcuts with out having to manually ship a message to carry out the identical motion each time.

Listing of Slack shortcuts

Whereas utilizing Slack could also be intuitive for a lot of customers, listed below are some frequent keyboard shortcuts value understanding to make repetitive processes quicker.

Slack has many extra shortcuts you possibly can discover from inside its desktop app by urgent Cmd + / on macOS and Ctrl + / on Home windows and Linux.

SEE: For extra tips about Slack, take a look at our 10 Slack suggestions: a how-to information, and see how one can arrange key phrase alerts to make Slack extra handy for you.

What are some prime Slack integrations?

Slack gives a plethora of integration choices, slicing throughout the classes of analytics, communication, buyer help, design, developer instruments, advertising, venture administration and extra. Fashionable integrations embody:

• Jira: Excellent for Agile groups, the Jira Cloud app for Slack permits customers to obtain notifications and monitor points with out leaving the Slack interface.
• Google Calendar: As soon as put in, this integration updates customers’ Slack standing based mostly on their calendar entries and sends reminders, making it simpler to handle and talk their schedules.
• Salesforce: This integration permits for real-time information sharing between Salesforce and Slack, streamlining the workflow for gross sales and customer support groups.
• Zoom: With the Zoom integration, assembly organizers can schedule, be part of and even report Zoom conferences immediately from Slack, making it handy for distant groups and groups that rely closely on video conferencing.
• GitHub: Builders can maintain monitor of code modifications, pull requests and points with this integration, making it simpler to handle software program initiatives.
• Trello: This integration permits venture managers and crew members to handle Trello playing cards, replace due dates and transfer playing cards between lists inside Slack. Try our Trello versus Slack information to find out how Trello compares to Slack.
• Asana: For venture administration, the Asana integration permits venture managers and their groups to create and assign duties and obtain notifications inside Slack. Learn our comparability of Slack and Asana to see how they differ as venture administration instruments.
• Dropbox: Groups of every kind can share information and collaborate on paperwork by connecting their Dropbox accounts to Slack.
• Monday.com: The monday integration can ship alerts from the visible job administration platform into Slack, letting workers know when somebody has tagged them or when an project is of their arms.

The place does Slack match within the present collaboration software program market?

Slack places an excessive give attention to streamlining typical communications customers might not even know could be streamlined, which has carved a distinct segment for the collaboration instrument. Beginning off as a possible e-mail alternative, Slack is now an intuitive platform for crew communication and collaboration.

Nonetheless, it additionally qualifies as a contemporary venture administration instrument by way of its give attention to real-time communication, making it a favourite for dynamic groups that require instantaneous suggestions and fast decision-making. Furthermore, Slack’s free plan and scalable pricing plans make it accessible for companies of all sizes, from startups to giant enterprises.

What are Slack’s major rivals?

Microsoft Groups

The Microsoft Groups platform is the first competitor to Slack. Groups goes past chat and video communication to incorporate file sharing, automation instruments and a centralized workspace. This allows venture groups to entry and collaborate on duties inside one platform. And with the addition of visitor accounts and a free tier in 2018, Microsoft Groups is well-equipped to compete head-to-head with Slack’s freemium mannequin.

For extra info, take a look at our Microsoft Groups cheat sheet.

Zoom

The favored video conferencing software program Zoom has added Zoom Chat to their software program, which immediately competes with a few of Slack’s core options. This makes Zoom another for these already on the platform who solely want gentle chat options. Zoom Chat works equally to Slack with search capabilities, granular admin controls and safe file-sharing.

For extra info, take a look at our Zoom cheat sheet.

Twist

Slack’s impartial competitor Twist payments itself as a “communication tool for teams who believe there’s more to work than keeping up with group chat apps.” It has an deliberately minimalist strategy, because it lacks a web-based standing indicator. A free tier exists, with message retention restricted to 1 month. The limitless tier is accessible for $5 per consumer, monthly.

See how Twist compares to our listing of the finest digital collaboration instruments.

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 combines messaging with a wide range of different organizational instruments, together with kanban boards, job templates and CRM. Its communications instruments embody a clear UI and tabs for simply switching between conversations, calls and file sharing. Lots of Bitrix24’s collaboration instruments are free, with larger tiers including instruments for particular departments like Gross sales or HR.

Mattermost

Mattermost is a collaboration platform designed particularly for protection, authorities and important infrastructure enterprises. With infrastructure meant for resilience, it gives HIPAA-compliant safety, granular management over information and administration and different specialised safety boosts.

Who owns Slack?

Slack is owned by Slack Applied sciences LLC, which has been a subsidiary of Salesforce since its acquisition in 2020.

Is Slack HIPAA-compliant?

The Enterprise Grid model of Slack can retailer information in a means that’s compliant with the Well being Insurance coverage Portability and Accountability Act, the medical info privateness regulation within the U.S.

There isn’t any one certification to find out compliance. Organizations can verify self-assessments and examine their general digital footprint towards the privateness rule itself when contemplating how a messaging software matches into their healthcare privateness operations.