Team chat

Team chat apps give a company channels, direct messages and calls in one place. Two of the biggest are sold inside office suites, so the real question is often what plan you need and what else it buys, not the chat app itself.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, help, licensing and trust pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan is priced, whether the page leads with a promotion, whether a month-to-month price is listed, and statements that differ between pages.
• Free tier: a free plan a company can run as its own workspace and the history it keeps, a free version for personal accounts, or a trial.
• Price for 50 people: the cheapest paid plan that includes the chat product, on annual terms, with the arithmetic and what else that plan buys.
• Message history and eDiscovery: full history, admin retention periods, legal hold and eDiscovery, and which plan each needs.
• Compliance and data residency: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, a HIPAA BAA and EU data storage.
• Admin and outside access: company single sign-on, an audit log, and group conversations with people outside the company.

Features count fully on the plan priced in the scenario and less on higher or enterprise plans. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.