Slack

What hackers pick instead

• Microsoft TeamsRecommended mainly because it comes with Microsoft 365 and integrates with Office, SharePoint and Outlook, with decent video calls; many find it heavy, buggy and confusing for chat.228recommend
• ZulipAn open-source, self-hostable team chat whose topic-based threads make big, complex conversations easy to follow and catch up on, though self-hosted mobile notifications need a paid subscription.143recommend
• ChattoOpen-source, self-hostable chat app that feels fast and is easy to set up; caveats are an unstable API and missing enterprise features like SSO.55recommend
• MattermostSelf-hostable Slack alternative that people find stable and easy to roll out. Critics say the free edition has added limits and the license is unclear.40recommend
• FluxerPeople recommend Fluxer as a Discord alternative that feels familiar and is open source and self-hostable. Critics say it has age verification and scaling problems.22recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 729 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Because Slack is so frictionless, there was no barrier asking anything, including questions that were answered the day prior in the main channel

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “I Love Email (2023)”

2. Not being able to keep Slack and Outlook open at the same time seems like a pretty significant productivity hindrance to me.

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Apple Introduces MacBook Neo”

3. Slack doesn’t have spam coming from outside my company, and any “apps” that “helpfully” bother me can be silenced easily.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Your Inbox Is a Bandit”

4. it's configurable in slack so now I have it configured the Enter inserts a line break and Cmd+Enter submits the message

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Bring Back Idiomatic Design”

5. Getting an agent working via an existing Slack setup is fairly effortless and the control over output format is useful

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Claude Code: Channels”

6. I turned off the "X is typing..." indicator in Slack and it made my day to day life at work surprisingly better.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Don't Just Say Hello”

7. I still think Slack encourages a "continuous partial attention" way of engaging with chat that I don't like.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month”

8. It just works most of the time, well, besides slightly buggy text editor and almost non-working calls.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “OpenAI Should Build Slack”

9. I have better "ambient awareness" remotely because with slack I am in every hallway simultaneously

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship”

10. it was not only easy but asynchronous to search or even just go back through a day's unread posts

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?”

11. Yes, it is insanely expensive. But if time is money, the alternatives would've been far costlier.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Microsoft Teams is a red flag”

12. Sure Slack had its own issues, but I don't remember ever feeling like I was actively fighting it

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Bring your own Agent to MS Teams”

13. Making App integrations for Slack to basically anything is pretty close to a joyful experience

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux”

14. Slack is great in almost all aspects, but they dropped the ball on pasting formatted content.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Slackfmt: Paste Markdown into Slack keeping formatting intact (via Quill Delta)”

15. The ability to search past conversations has saved me hours of productivity and well worth it

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Ask HN: Does anyone here use Discord as their work chat tool?”

16. my only complaint is Slack's RAM usage (which honestly has no negative effect on my machine

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps”

17. I'm sitting here on a Mac with Teams, Outlook and Slack open and there's 18 gig of RAM gone

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “MacBook Neo”

18. Other integrations with Linear and Slack are also very handy to getting into this workflow.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Cursor 3”

19. Slack still wins on so many levels that I don't see anyone willing to move any time soon.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss”

20. Integrations are simple and reliable, giving us useful information about critical things.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “OpenAI Should Build Slack”

21. Everything about this product sucks: bad video calls, no meeting recording, limited screen sharing, janky authentication, and predatory pricing.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Tag”

22. Slack does this annoying thing where I click a chat, which gains focus, but I actually have to click again to switch to the chat I want.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Is it a bubble?”

23. Having every inconsequential discussion on public channels is what really lower the signal to noise ratio of messages on Slack nowadays.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting”

24. Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Stop Ruining It”

25. Running Slack, Figma, Linear, Spotify, Discord, Obsidian, and others at the same time consumes a lot of memory for no good reason.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “The Codex App”

26. Compared to the situation today with Slack, AI, and remote culture, almost every company IMO has a much worse work life balance

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees”

27. Been using Slack for 10 years now and it has never been slower. A freshly started Slack app on my macOS takes up nearly 1GB.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Direct Win32 API, Weird-Shaped Windows, and Why They Mostly Disappeared”

28. I don't want to spend my entire day in Teams/Slack messages with people that start messages saying "hi" with no follow-up.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “How to Attend Meetings”

29. For some reason, in 2012 something like Slack or Outlook or an IDE was exactly as performant on a PC with 8GB and 2 cores

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Get your Windows license refund”

30. Their killer feature, being able to share a link with anyone at the company and instantly collaborate (live!), is made far easier on the web platform vs native.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Microsoft Hasn't Had a Coherent GUI Strategy Since Petzold”

31. apps like VS Code, Discord, Slack, etc show that with enough effort a team can use those tools to deliver something with relatively much better performance

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “When Code is Free, Why is Claude is an Electron app?”

32. Github and Slack are good examples of services who make very good use of their ability to self-serve their customers out of the gate

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration”

33. I'm in multiple slack servers where the threads are an exception for things that would otherwise really pollute the discussion

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month”

34. It works, but agents are structurally second-class there — manual setup, limited API surface, no agent-native identity.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Filesystems Are Having a Moment”

35. basically does anything you could possibly imagine and is essentially a business communication application platform

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB”

36. irc, hipchat, campfire, matrix, slack, zulio, lync, wave, and a hundred others have had their moments of success

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss”

37. I can’t think of any time any of these things have existed at all or noticeably impacted my experience on Slack

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB”

38. our slack agents are very strong this department and it is guaranteed there is zero leak of private information

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting”

39. Slack has a very permissive data export policy, as long as you are doing it for your own organization's data.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Anthropic, Please Make a New Slack”

40. The latest version of it will run on very old phone hardware, going all the way back to the iPhone 8

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB”