08 Feb
Table of Contents
It’s important, especially in this remote-work world, to ensure your team has the tools it needs to properly collaborate and communicate with each other. While not in an office, it can sometimes be difficult to maintain the open communication that is vital to successful projects and teams. These team messaging options are designed to keep your team functioning properly and in close contact no matter the physical distance.
1. Clariti
Clariti is a team chat app that has been gaining in popularity among small businesses and the startup community especially in the technology and media markets. A key reason for its success has been its ability to address issues that other long-standing tools like Slack and Teams have perpetuated with their chat-focused communication paradigm. Clariti brings your chats, emails, call, to-dos, documents…in one app and automatically links related items in a “TopicFolder”. TopicFolders add topic-centric organization to your communications, so you are never lost or waste time searching for information.
2. Slack
Slack is a traditional staple in the team messaging space, and probably what most people first think of when they hear “team messaging.” The app is structured around talking to your co-workers in both public channels and private chats, with the additional option to create “threads” around specific messages. One of the main perks of Slack is that several other great technologies can seamlessly integrate with it, which multiplies the number of features it can provide to users. However, it can sometimes get a bit clunky for use within larger organizations.
3. Discord
Discord’s main draw is “always-on” verbal chat, which can be overkill for some teams and situations but very good for others. If your team gets a lot of value from verbally talking to each other ad-hoc (for example, brainstorming new ideas as they come to you as a team) Discord can be a good team messaging product to enable that kind of open, natural communication, particularly with smaller teams; with larger groups, however, it can be harder to communicate via Discord without talking over one another.
Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s solution to the team messaging question, is great for larger organizations that are split up into smaller, more siloed teams; like the name suggests, the structure of the app is designed around creating “teams” of people with their own individual workspaces. It is also great for organizations that commonly utilize other Microsoft Office products such as Word and Excel, because Teams provides great integrations with other Microsoft Office products that allows you to work across them seamlessly. It may not be as good for smaller organizations as other options such as Slack, but for what it is, it does the job very well.
5. Google Chat
Like Microsoft’s integration with Microsoft Office, Google Chat—Google’s team messaging platform—is seamlessly integrated with other Google products such as Slides and Docs. This can make Google Chat a great collaboration option for organizations that utilize other Google products often, as well as for organizations that prioritize the cloud-first ethos of Google technology. Like both Slack and Microsoft Teams, Google Chat provides both 1:1 chats and larger group workspaces to facilitate communication among team members.
Conclusions
There are many options to choose from when considering your team messaging options, and it’s hard to go wrong when deciding between them. Every platform is optimized for a different audience, so choosing the best one is simply a factor of determining what audience you fall into. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here, so make sure you’re choosing the solution that fits you best!
