Is there any reason to use the paid version of Slack?
I'm new to Slack and have apparently been using a trial version of the paid version for the last couple weeks and will be reverting back to the free version soon. Is there any feature that I'm going to be losing that is important enough that I should fork over some money?
Answers ( 3 )
For casual conversation, the free version is actually better. It allows you a certain limit on stored data, which it recycles on a FIFO basis so old conversations eventually disappear. I think that's a feature, not a bug, if you are using slack to talk a lot of shit, which I have been known to do on occasion. Unless my friends are screenshotting me, nobody will remember how I once told them to drop everything and get tickets to Fyre Festival that one time. 🤨
For a business, you definitely don't want to lose records of the past. For this alone, you will want to go with paid.
Not sure how that would happen. I believe the entire workspace is either paid or free, not individual accounts. They count the number of active members and set the price as a monthly fee per active member. If you want to pay less, have fewer active members in your workspace. Or, alternatively, have another way of keeping records. Paid slack is really only worth paying for if it reduces cost/effort from a process you need and would be using anyway.
The primary differences between the paid and free versions of Slack that you would actually want to use are:
1. Free only makes the last 10,000 messages searchable, while Paid let's you search all content ever created and added to Slack
2. If you're integrating with a lot of Slack's 3rd party apps (more than 10), you'll need to have the paid version. Examples would be Jira, Google Mail, O365, etc.
3. The paid version allows you to do group phone calls with multiple attendees while the paid is only 1 on 1 audio calls
4. The paid version lets you bring outside guests into specific rooms only and have guest accounts vs. the free version gives all members full access to all rooms that aren't explicitly private rooms.
Some of the above are very important, and definitely important when running a business using Slack as a key productivity tool.