Expert guide on choosing the best team chat app for your business in 2024

Are you looking for a team chat app for your business? Perhaps your tools aren’t scaling well as your organization grows, or you’re early in your journey and want tools that will grow with you. Maybe members of your remote or global team are frustrated with your current communication software.

Team chat is often the virtual office for your organization, where employees spend a significant portion of their working hours. This makes finding the best app for your team one of the most impactful ways to make your organization more productive.

As developers of an organized chat app for distributed teams, we’ve talked to hundreds of people about the teamwork apps they use. We’ve learned how organizations choose communication software, and the impact those choices have. These recommendations are based on their real-world experience using these apps day after day.

This guide reviews SaaS team chat apps; we plan to publish a separate guide on open-source team chat options you can self-host.

If you’d like guidance from opinionated experts in the chat space, let’s dive in!

3 team chat apps to consider

To make good use of your time, we focus on the handful of SaaS team chat apps you may want to seriously consider for your business:

• Microsoft Teams
• Slack
• Zulip

We also explain why others are not the right choice for most businesses.

Microsoft Teams — “Streamline communications—all in one place”

Teams is the most commonly used business chat app, in large part due to Microsoft’s anti-competitive strategy of bundling Teams with the Office 365 suite. It’s been built to check the standard procurement department checkboxes, not to provide an excellent user experience.

We’ve talked to hundreds of Teams users, and they almost universally have feelings somewhere on the “dislike it” to “hate it” spectrum. The exceptions are those who don’t rely on its team chat capabilities, and only use it for calls, scheduling, and occasional announcements and DMs.

Teams is for organizations that:

• Care more about purchasing a single solution for meetings, calendars, calls and chat than the quality of each application.
• Want an integrated app with tabs for chat, calling, and a calendar, and integrations with Microsoft’s Office 365 suite, such as SharePoint sites created automatically for each channel.
• Plan to use chat primarily for direct messaging and announcements, not substantive conversations.

Reasons not to pick it:

• Employee frustration. Users complain of low app quality, including limited notification options that are either disruptive or make messages easy to miss, awkward navigation, and poor search functionality.
• Engineering teams especially struggle with Teams due to limited integrations and customization options, and poor code formatting support.
• Teams’ poor user experience hurts remote collaboration, as people avoid using it for discussions. Decision-making ends up happening in closed-off spaces (email, DMs) and meetings.
• Vendor lock-in. Teams does not offer a data export tool suitable for importing your data into another team chat application.

Slack — “Where work happens”

Slack is the premier traditional team chat application, with a history of strong focus on the user experience. Widely popular chat features pioneered by Slack include emoji reactions (2015) and emoji user statuses (2017).

Acquired by Salesforce in 2020, Slack’s focus has recently shifted towards large enterprise customers, leaving small and mid-size businesses less happy with the product’s direction.

Reasons to pick it:

• Users generally feel that Slack has the best UI among traditional team chat apps. It’s got a polished design, and an extensive set of features and integrations.
• Slack’s popularity makes team onboarding easier, because many people have used it before.
• Slack Connect is a convenient alternative to guest user accounts for sharing channels with external partners who are also using Slack.

Reasons to avoid it:

• Like other traditional team chat applications, Slack disrupts focus, making it difficult for teams to do their best work. Chatting on Slack is commonly described as “chaotic” and “stressful”.
• It’s easy to lose track of a conversation as new messages come in, so communication is less effective across time zones. It’s also difficult for managers to keep up, and prioritize the discussions they need to follow.
• Slack’s pricing makes the paid plans unaffordable for situations where many users are not employees, such as a customer community for your product. On a free plan, messages are hidden after just 90 days.

Zulip — “Organized chat app for distributed teams”

Zulip’s key insight is that a chat app should be organized around clearly labeled conversations. Developed as an open-source project since 2015, Zulip is stewarded and financially supported by a values-driven company set up for long-term sustainable development.

Zulip serves startups, and small and mid-sized businesses, as well as communities with up to tens of thousands of members.

Best for organizations that:

• Have remote, distributed or part-time team members who need to collaborate async. Zulip keeps ongoing conversations organized and easy to follow better than any other team chat app.
• Need managers to oversee many workstreams. Zulip offers an inbox-style overview of conversations where you have unread messages, so users can keep track of what they need to review and prioritize where their attention is needed.
• Want to create space for focus work. Because conversations in Zulip don’t get lost, you can configure notifications so that you are alerted only when your timely attention is needed. You can even follow or mute specific conversations.
• Value working with an open-source vendor, including being able to discuss feature requests with the people who are building the product, report bugs, and view the roadmap.

Reasons not to pick it:

• You require a HIPAA compliant SaaS tool because you intend to discuss patient data in team chat. Zulip meets GDPR and CCPA requirements, but only self-hosted Zulip is HIPAA compliant.
• Your organization is an enterprise with a complex procurement process that makes it hard to work with a small vendor.
• Your primary need is a mobile app for quick messages. Zulip is developing slick new mobile apps (currently in beta, to be released in early 2025); the current mobile apps are functional, but less polished than other aspects of the software.
• You want to simplify onboarding by choosing an app most employees have used before. It’s best to be intentional with onboarding team members to Zulip’s unique approach to organizing conversations, e.g., by pointing to Zulip’s onboarding guides and documenting best practices for your organization.

Chat apps to skip

These apps may already be on your mind, but are not good options for most businesses.

WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.

Some small teams are happy using WhatsApp or other consumer chat apps, which are not designed for serious business use.

If your team will grow over time, it’s best to switch to an app that will grow with you early on, to start establishing communication patterns you’ll be happy with down the line.

Google Chat — “Messaging and team collaboration”

Google Chat is included with Google Workplace, but seems to get little love from Google, and is not a serious team chat contender. Most people who’ve told us they use it for more than DMs are Google employees.

Discord — “Group chat that’s all fun & games”

A popular chat app for gamers, Discord has never built the basic security and account management features expected for business use.

Reasons to pick it:

• Discord has excellent voice/video calling capabilities for small meetings, integrated tightly with the rest of the app.
• Many people are already familiar with Discord from personal use, and like its interface.

Reasons not to pick it:

• Discord is notably lax about security. For example, the name, description, members list, and activity data for every private channel on every server has been leaked for years.
• Discord lacks account management tools: there is no single sign-on, and no way to disable an account to remove access to direct messages for a former employee.
• Discord makes it difficult to create a professional environment. For example, do your employees really need bold in-app advertisements for game quests?

What about open-source chat applications?

Several open-source team chat applications have been around for years, and are solid options if you are looking to self-host your team chat solution (Matrix / Element, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, and our own Zulip). We plan to cover these in a separate article.

Currently, Zulip is the only one of these projects focused on business use, rather than on government and defense customers.

Are there more options?

Lists of chat products found online often present dozens of options to consider. Unfortunately, digging in is often a waste of time because:

• Many of the products on comparison lists and review sites are project management tools or video conferencing tools, not team chat tools. Their basic chat functionality can’t replace a dedicated team chat application, which should include flexible notification options, custom emoji, keyboard shortcuts, permissions management, and so much more.
• New team chat products by small venture-backed startups often look great in a demo. However, they lack the robustness, security engineering, and depth of functionality required for intensive day-to-day use. When the product fails to quickly take off, it gets shut down, often with no good way to get your data out.

So unless a product is specifically built for your use case, and you have good reason to believe it’ll be around for the long term, we’d recommend sticking with one of the above options for a SaaS chat product.

How about a price comparison?

If you are based in a high-income country and are choosing a chat app for staff who will use it all day, just pick the best option for your team.

Communication consumes a huge fraction of time in an organization. A recent survey found that knowledge workers spend half of their work day on communication, yet 72% of business leaders observe that their team struggles to communicate effectively. The report estimates that businesses lose an average of over $1,000/month for each employee due to ineffective communication.

Saving time for your employees and making them happier with their daily work is worth many times more than what you can “save” by choosing a cheaper or free app that’s less suitable.

If you need a chat app for use in a community (e.g., users of your product), or are based in a low-income country, check whether you qualify for a discount program. Small vendors like Zulip may be more flexible in working with you to align the pricing with how the product is used in your organization.