The 5 best Slack alternatives for businesses in 2026

Our team at Zapier is fully remote and spread across more time zones than I can count. That means Slack is our office. It’s where company announcements live, projects get unblocked, and most importantly, where we find every opportunity to use custom emoji of our dogs.

Slack is a powerful, feature-packed team chat app, but it’s far from the only option out there. After years of using Slack at Zapier—and testing dozens of other team communication tools with my teammates—here’s my updated roundup of the best Slack alternatives.

The best Slack alternatives

Why pick a Slack alternative? 

Despite Slack’s robust feature set, some teams might come up against a few barriers that make it a less-than-ideal communication solution. Here are some of those key limitations:  

• Audio and video calls aren’t the focus. Slack’s video and screen sharing features aren’t as reliable as some other tools. If your team depends on real-time calls to collaborate, dropped or low-quality calls can really hurt your productivity. 

• Disjointed file sharing experience. Slack supports file sharing. But if your team primarily works with and collaborates on Microsoft Word and Excel files or Google Docs, for example, you’ll find it takes more clicks to share these files in Slack than it would in Microsoft Teams or Google Chat.

• Pricing. Slack offers a free plan, but this version lacks many key features that make it useful for the workplace. If you upgrade to a paid plan—$7.25/user/month (billed annually) for the lowest tier—and add Slack AI for an additional $15/user/month, the costs add up fast. If you’re a large business, that’s probably not a problem. But for startups and small businesses, this can be a big obstacle. Some of the other apps on this list are included with software you’re already paying for.

The best Slack alternatives at a glance

The best Slack alternative for large organizations broken down into teams

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams pros:

• Tight integration with Microsoft ecosystem

• Better audio and video quality than Slack or any Slack alternative 

• Supports large enterprise use cases with strong security and admin controls

Microsoft Teams cons:

If you’re a Microsoft-focused organization, let me save you from having to scroll any further: the best Slack alternative for you is Microsoft Teams. 

With a Microsoft 365 Business Basics package and above, you get access to Teams and cloud versions of the full suite of Microsoft Office apps, including Word, Excel, and OneDrive. These are live versions of the apps, so you can collaborate on them asynchronously or in real-time via a Teams video or audio call. Slack also integrates well with some Microsoft apps—but as you’d expect, the integration isn’t as tight as what you’d experience using Teams.

When it comes to organizing chats, Teams takes a more streamlined approach—it groups them initially by team structure, whereas Slack groups chats into channels by topic. Anyone can create a channel in Teams, but new ones will exist as a subcategory of an existing team. It might sound a little confusing, but the ultimate result is a neat and compartmentalized side panel. Because of all these layers, it does mean you’ll sometimes need to do a bit of clicking around to find the channel you’re looking for. 

Teams is also compatible with Microsoft Copilot, an AI add-on that costs $21/user/month (quite a bit more than what Teams costs otherwise). It does most of what you’d expect from AI meeting assistants: generate transcriptions, summaries, sentiment analysis—that kind of thing.

The main downside to Teams is how much work it is to roll out: if you don’t have a dedicated IT staff, it’s going to be tricky to set up. But considering the size of organizations Teams seems to be built for, that’s probably not much of a barrier—especially if your team is already using the Microsoft suite of apps. 

You can also use Zapier’s Teams integration to connect it with the rest of your tech stack. This way, you can automatically do things like turn a Teams message into a task in your to-do list app or project management tool. For more inspiration, check out other ways to automate Microsoft Teams, or get started with a pre-made workflow.

Microsoft Teams pricing: From $4/month/person (billed annually) to use Teams on its own; from $6/month/user (billed annually) for Microsoft 365 Business Basic, which includes Teams, plus core Microsoft apps like OneDrive, Word, and Excel.

Read more: Slack vs. Teams 

The best Slack alternative for Google Workspace users  

Google Chat 

Google Chat pros:

Google Chat cons:

If you’re deep in Google Workspace apps, you already have access to a solid Slack alternative: Google Chat (formerly known as Google Hangouts Chat). 

Google Chat’s interface follows the same design and organization principles as the rest of Google’s apps, so there’s almost no learning curve. It does lack some polish, though. For example, some seemingly simple actions, like browsing a list of public rooms to join, are mysteriously buried behind multiple clicks. 

Beyond the superficial, Chat gives you chat organization tools similar to Slack. You can send direct messages and group messages, group related replies into threads, and set conversations to be either public or private. If you’re coming from Slack, the structure will feel familiar, but more basic.

Where Chat really shines is how seamlessly it integrates with Google’s ecosystem of apps. For example, when you paste a Google Doc link in a Google Chat meeting, it automatically changes permissions so that all meeting attendees can access the file. Setting up a meeting is just as easy. Tag Google Meet and your coworkers, and say when the meeting should happen, and it’ll create a calendar appointment complete with a Google Meet link for video conferencing. 

On the AI front, Google Chat supports Gemini for Google Workspace users on eligible plans. You can use Google Gemini (the AI chatbot) to do things like summarize the chat, generate a list of action items, and answer specific questions about the chat.

With Zapier’s Google Chat integration, you can connect with the other apps you use most, turning your chat app into a work hub. For example, you can automatically get notifications in the right channel before important events or when a new form response comes in. Learn more about how to automate Google Chat, or get started with a template.

Google Chat pricing: From $7/user/month (billed annually) for Google Workspace, which includes Google Chat and other Google productivity apps.

Read more: Google Chat vs. Slack

The best Slack alternative for always-on voice chat

Discord 

Discord pros: 

Discord cons: 

Listing Discord as a Slack alternative surprises some folks. After all, Discord was originally built as a gaming tool, and these days, it’s marketed more broadly to online communities—not companies. But if you look past the branding, you’ll find Discord can work for business chat for one key reason: excellent always-on audio. 

If talking out loud is how you get work done, Discord is a great remote coworking tool. Click any voice channel in the Discord sidebar to enable the audio, and you’ll immediately be able to hear everyone else who enabled the audio. This means you can talk to colleagues while working remotely in a shared Google Doc, or you could share your screen in any application and collaborate that way. 

Slack’s version of always-on audio channels is huddles. For the most part, they’re used the same way as voice channels, but the process isn’t as seamless and the audio quality isn’t as solid. 

Discord also offers regular text conversations with threads and video chats, if you want to see your teammates face-to-face. 

Discord doesn’t offer much in the way of official integrations, at least not for business-facing apps. But you can use Zapier to connect Discord to any of the other apps you use, allowing you to build just about any Discord integration you can imagine. For example, you can automatically get an alert in Discord when a meeting is about to start or when a new task has been added to your project management tool. Here are even more ideas for ways to automate Discord.

Discord pricing: Free for basic features; $3-10/month (billed monthly) for the Nitro plan, which includes higher-quality screen sharing, larger file uploads, and more emoji.

Read more: Slack vs. Discord

The best Slack alternative for video conferencing and screen sharing 

Zoom 

Zoom pros: 

Zoom cons: 

Video and screen-sharing features aren’t the primary features in Slack, which is probably why so many Zapier users connect Slack to Zoom. If these are the key features you’re looking for in a Slack alternative, you might want a dedicated video conferencing app instead. 

Zoom consistently tops our list of the best video conferencing software, and for good reason: it works. You can share your entire screen, just one section of your screen, or an individual app. You can also share only audio from your computer, if you want to face-mute while coworking. And it’s really reliable, working even on weaker internet connections.

While Zoom started as a video conferencing app, it’s now adding features that make it more of a workspace app. The video conferencing features are still front and center, but it also offers chat, a mail client, and a connected calendar. It even has Zoom Docs, an AI-driven document editor, to help you generate new files based on meeting content, with real-time collaborative editing. If you’re on a paid plan, you can use the Zoom AI Companion to summarize unread messages and ask questions about your chat. Zoom is slowly becoming its own version of a software suite.

With Zapier’s Zoom integration, you can take the busywork out of managing coworking sessions. For example, you can automatically attach Zoom links to your calendar events and get notifications for upcoming hangouts. Learn more about how to automate Zoom, or get started with a pre-made workflow.

Zoom pricing: Free for up to 100 participants for 40-minute meetings; from $13.33/month/host (billed annually) for the Pro plan, which includes the AI Companion and longer meetings.

The best Slack alternative for self-hosted team chat

Element 

Element pros: 

Element cons: 

Some conversations are too important to host on a third-party server, which is where Element comes in. 

Built on the open source Matrix protocol, Element is team chat software you can install on a private server. It’s the most feature-complete self-hosted Slack alternative our team could find. All messages are encrypted. Similar to Slack and other team chat apps, you can group conversations into channels, create threaded replies, send voice messages, host video and audio chats, and even share polls. 

The user interface is extremely streamlined, rare among open source applications, and there are plenty of options for controlling which notifications users do and don’t get.

Even better: there are multiple clients, meaning people who don’t like the default Element app can install something they prefer instead. It’s a great deal of flexibility, and paid plans get even more powerful thanks to bridges. These allow you to connect to Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams rooms, either to pull in your archive of messages or to connect to parts of your company still using those services.

Plus, Element doesn’t have any AI integrations, which is a huge plus for people who are concerned about the privacy and security implications of that technology—a category of people that overlaps with open source enthusiasts.

Element pricing: Free download for accessing public servers; custom pricing for enterprise and air-gapped plans. 

Other Slack alternatives 

You really can’t go wrong with any of the five Slack alternatives on this list. But if you’re not interested in going with a big name or a self-hosted option, here are some other options. 

• Lesser-known apps like Pumble and Ryver tend to get good reviews. 

• Lark is a good Slack alternative if you’re looking for more of an all-in-one business operations tool. 

• New AI-first chat apps, like Glue, are starting to enter the scene.

• Project management apps like Asana and ClickUp come preloaded with solid chat features—so if you want to avoid app bloat, you might already have what you need.

Which Slack alternative should you use? 

All the apps listed above offer the same thing Slack does: a way to communicate with your team. But how they go about accomplishing this differs from app to app. If you’re looking for a no-frills app that makes it easy to voice chat with your teammates, go with Discord. If you want a more feature-rich team chat app that integrates seamlessly with the apps you use most, and those apps happen to be part of the Microsoft or Google Workplace suite of apps, then the answer is obvious: go with Teams or Chat. 

Each app listed here also offers a robust free plan (the only caveat being that the free plans for Teams and Chat are limited to personal use). So if a few have piqued your interest, try them out before signing up. And if you end up sticking with Slack in the end, that’s still a win.

Related reading: 

This article was originally published in August 2024. The most recent update was in January 2026 by Nicole Replogle.