Slack

Slack is team chat software for companies that organize work in channels rather than email. Salesforce owns it; the free plan keeps 90 days of history.

Slack is team chat and messaging software that organizes a company's working conversation into channels instead of email chains and private inboxes. A channel holds the messages, files, apps and people for one project, team, topic or customer, so the record of a decision stays where anyone with access can find it later. Slack Technologies, LLC is a Salesforce company, and Salesforce has owned Slack since its 2021 acquisition. After the deal closed, Slack kept the Slack name, stayed at slack.com and went on signing up workspaces directly. Conversation runs through public channels, private channels and direct messages, with threaded replies keeping a side discussion out of the main flow. Huddles start an audio or video call inside a channel, and Clips record short audio, video or screen recordings for people who are not online at the same time. Canvases and Lists turn a channel into a place to write a document or track work items beside the messages. Slack Connect extends a channel into a partner organization's own workspace, while the app directory and Workflow Builder connect and automate the other tools a team runs. Slack AI adds conversation and thread summaries, daily recaps, file summaries, AI search and Slackbot, which Slack describes as a personal AI agent. Slack suits organizations whose work crosses several teams and tools, and the vendor aims it at engineering, IT, customer service, sales, marketing and project management groups. Distributed and hybrid companies get the most from it, because huddles, clips and searchable history cover the hours when people are not online together. Teams already on Salesforce have a further reason to look: CRM records can be brought into the channel where a deal is being discussed. Pricing is per user per month on a single workspace, across one no-cost tier and three paid ones. Project coordination, incident response, customer escalations, sales deal rooms and the everyday back and forth that would otherwise sit in inboxes all run through it. Administrators run it alongside an identity provider using SAML single sign-on and SCIM user management, and compliance teams work through legal holds, the Discovery API, audit logs, information barriers and data residency controls. Integrations bring Google Drive files, Salesforce records and the rest of the app directory into the conversation rather than a separate tab. Slack sits beside the email and calendar a company already keeps, and what it asks for is moving the day's discussion into channels where the next person can search it.