It’s a mistake to think of Slack as “just chat”. It really is a full-on communications platform that is infinitely extendable. Best of all, for small teams, it’s free to use, but with some significant limits. Slack has clients for all major operating systems, including Linux, as well as mobile OSes and a web version.

I have used at at various companies I have worked for, and my wife and I have used Slack for our personal “chat” tool as well. We replaced it with self-hosted Mattermost a while back, however. I still use Slack daily to communicate with a few groups I belong to.

Slack integrations are the key

What makes Slack so compelling are the integrations available. For instance in my “home” team, my wife and I share a Google Calendar that sends reminders to a special channel. That helps keep us up-to-date with daily reminders. We use it at work with dozens of various integrations for things like notifications when code is pushed to Git as well as custom web hooks for various things.

The only real limit is the imagination of whoever is using it and needs to send info somewhere or receive info from somewhere. As a developer, I really appreciate the APi, which obviously had a lot of thought put into it.

Think of Slack as the best parts of instant messaging, texting, and even phone calls all rolled into one.

• Check it out: https://slack.com/