We left Slack and Telegram to use GoogleChat

Published: 2018

At the end of 2017 to the beginning of 2018, we decided to work a lot on internal communication in my first startup.

We started using Slack, but knowing that when we reached 10,000 messages, it would start deleting the first few. We love the organization of the app, channels, conversations, history. Light years ahead of Skype, which we used before.

When we reached 10,000 messages, we looked at the cost of adopting the paid tool. A bit of a disappointment. I remember that it was 8 or 9 dollars per user, and at that time we were 14 people (in June we were already 21). We gave up. Partly because the dollar was also costing approximately 3.50.

After some weekend research and comparisons between opensource apps (Slack copies) and similar apps, we decided to move to Telegram. Hmm, Telegram! Unlimited messages, channels similar to the Slack model, but very personal (hard to be specific to the business context) and horrible when a person leaves the company. By the way, it was when the first person was fired after Telegram was in use that we decided to look for another solution and change again. It was a lot of work to remove a single person from all the groups/channels they had been included in Telegram. Our experience with the app lasted approximately one month.

Soon we were looking for another replacement. If I remember correctly, it was in April 2018. Our developer commented that Google had just released its enterprise Hangouts, Google Chat. We validate the communication and internal organization in channels/groups, the chat, and then, the process of unlinking someone from the company. As Google Chat is based on email, and we use Google Apps / Business Gmail, we decided to use Google Chat. It has been a good bet as it has behaved very well so far. But I’ll go ahead: For those who use Slack bots, unfortunately Google Chat still doesn’t have as many bots and features as that one (although it does have some). We don’t use it, so we don’t need it.

The best thing about Google Chat is the organization of conversations into groups. You create conversations within a certain group, and people can talk in that specific conversation. So you can have multiple conversations running in parallel within the same group, each on a different topic. Unlike other apps, where there is only one specific conversation in a group, and it gets messy.