Team communication
Our team chat is a mess and nobody can find anything
Conversation volume has outgrown the tool. Decisions are made in channels nobody else reads, and search stopped being useful months ago.
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Recognise this?
What it looks like from the inside
If three of these are true, the tool has stopped fitting the team. If one is, it is probably worth waiting.
- 01
The same question gets asked three times a week
- 02
Important decisions live in a DM nobody else can see
- 03
History is capped, or search returns noise
- 04
New joiners have no way to catch up on context
What separates the options
The questions that actually decide a chat tool
Everyone asks about price and seat count. These are the ones specific to this category — and the ones our questionnaire asks you.
- 01
How should conversation be organised?
Channels with threads · Named topics you can catch up on later · Always-on voice rooms · No strong preference
- 02
Do people outside your company need to join?
Daily — clients, agencies or contractors · Occasionally · Internal only
- 03
Do you need message retention and export controls?
Yes — we are audited on it · We would like full history · Not a concern
5 options
What you could move to
Every credible chat tool we have done the work on. The questionnaire ranks them against your answers.
Discord
Free, fast, voice-first chat that scales to very large communities.
no seat cost
Mattermost
Open-source, self-hostable team chat built for regulated and air-gapped environments.
$10/seat
Microsoft Teams
Chat and meetings bundled into Microsoft 365, so the marginal cost is often zero.
$4/seat
Slack
The default team chat tool, with the deepest app directory of any.
$8.75/seat
Zulip
Topic-threaded chat designed so asynchronous and distributed teams can catch up quickly.
$6.67/seat
Prices are unverified estimates — useful for comparing orders of magnitude, not for budgeting. Confirm the current figure with the vendor before you commit to anything.
Questions
Before you move
Is switching chat tool actually the fix?
Sometimes, and sometimes not. If the symptoms are about a capability the tool does not have — retention controls it cannot enforce, a price that scales the wrong way, an integration that does not exist — then switching solves it. If they are about how your team uses the tool, a new one will reproduce the same mess in a fresh interface within six months. The questionnaire asks what is driving the change precisely to separate those two cases.
Which chat tool should we move to?
The credible options are Discord, Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zulip. Which is right depends on your team size, budget and non-negotiables — a 12-person team with no compliance requirement and a 400-person team that needs EU data residency should not end up with the same answer. The questionnaire ranks all 5 against your specific situation.
What does it cost to fix?
Two numbers matter: the licence difference and the cost of the move itself. Median list price in this category is about $8 per seat per month, so the licence difference at 50 seats is usually a few thousand dollars a year either way. The migration is the bigger number, and it scales with history, integrations and headcount rather than with the tool you pick. The questionnaire estimates both.
How long does a switch like this take?
For a team under 50 with a handful of integrations, a few weeks of elapsed time and one to two weeks of actual work. Above 200 people, or with compliance in scope, plan a quarter. The single biggest variable is not the tool — it is how much history has to come with you, and how many other systems are wired into the one you are leaving.
Get the 5 options ranked for your team
About a dozen questions — team size, budget, timeline, what is non-negotiable — and you get a shortlist with the reasoning shown, plus what the move would cost.
Get my shortlist