What is Slack? Slack is an American cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services, founded by Stewart Butterfield. Slack is a messaging app. Slack offers many IRC-like features, including persistent chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups and direct messaging. All content inside Slack is searchable, including files, conversations, and people. On the free plan, only the 10,000 most recent messages can be viewed and searched. Slack teams allow communities, groups, or teams to join through a specific URL or invitation sent by a team admin or owner.

I said that Slack is a messaging app. So is email. Slack aims to improve on the deficiencies of email. Email can be a bit awkward. The emails come in and are stored based on the time they arrived and if we want to locate an old email, we can search for it. What’s even worse and more time-consuming is to manually organize your emails into folders related to projects or topics or some other system. With Slack, instead of folders we have Channels. Channels are like topics such as finance, marketing, production, expansion, human resources, and so on. Channels are much more powerful than simply scanning a bunch of chronological emails in a folder in your email.

Slack is a freemium product, whose main paid features are the ability to search more than 10,000 archived messages and add unlimited apps and integrations. Freemium is a portmanteau of the words “free” and “premium”, is a pricing strategy by which a product or service is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical (offline) goods.

Slack integrates with a large number of third-party services and supports community-built integrations. Major integrations include services such as Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, Box, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, Crashlytics, GitHub, Runscope, Zendesk, and Zapier.