RocketChat or Slack? Slack was launched in 2014 to assist team members working remotely and provide flexible, text-based workspaces to enhance productivity and collaboration. While this dominated the market temporarily, more demand arose for Slack alternatives focused on more stringent data privacy practices and offered more amenities to virtual teams. According to Pew Research, this demand only heightened after the pandemic era began, and 71% of the U.S. workforce began to work from home.
This need began the popularization of GitHub-sourced RocketChat and other alternatives. In this article, we review what both Slack and RocketChat have to offer and present a product comparison of the platforms so that you can purchase in confidence.
Key Feature Comparison: RocketChat vs. Slack
The main goal of both platforms is the same: To help streamline team processes and enhance productivity and collaboration. However, each platform offers different product focuses and features, which are vital to consider when making the platform decision for your business. Below is a list of the features of each and what you can expect when you purchase.
Slack Features
Slack’s easy-to-navigate interface has become popularized within corporate America – showing the hundreds of user channels that you can make in just a few clicks, as well as that deep purple navigational bar that can orient you in seconds. Here are just a few more features that Slack can offer teams:
- Easy to use admin panels for member management
- Low-cost pricing scheme for business accessibility
- Fully-functioning mobile interface for working on the go
While these features are great, Slack often falls short for teams requiring more complex or centralized operations and those who need higher levels of data privacy. For example:
- Slack is a closed-source application, making bug fixes internally based and more prolonged than open-source applications.
- The variety of options available for simple channel creation can be overwhelming.
- Your data can be compromised by the requirement of third-party app integrations to get things done – which can harm your efficiency.
These gaps have left room for new solutions to rise to the market, as RocketChat has.
RocketChat Features
RocketChat has entered the market as a done-for-you efficiency option that can help take your team to the next level – with the option to allow users to completely customize their experience thanks to open coding practices and data ownership options that will enable you to know how your data is used. This is especially important for teams dealing with sensitive information, especially following the 2020 hack that Slack experienced where data was exposed in a harmful way.
Here are just a few of the features that RocketChat can bring to teams:
- Security features include E2E encryption, ISO 27001 compliance, and compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD entities.
- Seamless navigation of channels featuring vendors, team members, and guests.
- A fully customizable user interface to tailor to your business’ needs.
- Protected integrations over a SaaS based or self hosted platform
And the best part? RocketChat is open-sourced. You can install and run RocketChat on your own servers.
How Does RocketChat Enhance Team Efficiency?
There are several hidden areas where teams and managers can lose valuable minutes out of the work day. Just a few of these can be completing lengthy onboarding processes, extensive administrative management, and navigation between the tens or hundreds of communication channels that they may be in. This isn’t counting the endless calendared meetings, emails that come flying in, or virtual knocks at your office door.
Remote work has pushed employees to new levels of burnout⸺and sometimes, the simplest changes make the difference in your team’s overall efficiency and satisfaction.
In order to determine how your fully-customizable RocketChat platform can enhance your team’s overall productivity, consider collaborating with them to identify areas of improvement when it comes to project and time management.
You can also start the process yourself by identifying common areas of time loss and how you can amend them using the one-step communication solution that RocketChat provides. Below are a few starting points for your consideration:
- Automate your administrative process with RocketChat’s auto-join feature
- User-friendly tagging features are available in seconds using the familiar “@” designation
- Team changes in as little as four clicks, leading to seamless team creation and integration
- Multi-user video call ability with minimal data usage for real-time collaboration
Some other, more personalized benefits include the sleek system that isn’t as disruptive with banner notifications, mentions, and the complexity that Slack’s threads and channels offer to new platform users. These simple upgrades can make the difference in saving hours over your day. RocketChat is the ultimate team collaboration tool that will make your workdays easy to manage and seamlessly efficient for your team.
Install Rocket Chat
A self hosted version of Rocket Chat can be installed on your own servers. Here are instructions to install Rocket Chat on Ubuntu. Rocket Chat is one of the tools included in the Open Source Bundle giving you a self hosted version of Rocket Chat without doing the technical work.
