IRC isn't a credible alternative for most users in 2017. It stagnated ages ago, which is obvious from problems like the fact that you can't even write a multi-line message.
My personal opinion is that Slack has been so successful primarily because nothing older than it (IRC, Campfire, HipChat) was a decently modern product by the time Slack launched and Slack was really good at marketing.
Personally, I'm trying to solve the problem of open source projects increasingly moving to Slack by working on Zulip, the leading open source alternative to Slack by contributor activity. Here's our story for why one should prefer Zulip to Slack for fellow open source projects (written a few days ago; feedback welcome!): https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/
I disagree about the decent competitors -- there is e.g. Flowdock which in many ways (such as proper threading) is still better than Slack, and was doubly so back then. I think it's more about access to VC money and network effects, and indeed the successful marketing you mentioned.
Slack took the simplicity of IRC and gave it a modern interface with things like showing a preview when you link. easily share files etc.
What makes you think that? I don't see any connection between Flowdock and social media. As far as I can see, it's purely an internal communication tool with easy file sharing, hooks for external services as GitHub, and so on.
A neat thing is that you can start a discussion thread from any of these items, so the context of the discussion is clear.
Flowdock went a little further ahead when it came to how they constructed the base communication.
Mattermost is OSish, but Rocket.Chat seems to be a much more modern/UX friendly version compared to Zulip and fits the bill with FOSS.
As for alternatives, I don't really know if many do exist. Slack offers their free version, which allows teams to use it pretty much without any strings to see if they like it. It provides great functionality in a simple UI (you may disagree, that's totally fine), and solves a problem - Office Communication.
It has been a productivity increase for the teams I've been on as it is much, much better than email chains, easier to add code snippets, images, and the fairly rich ecosystem of plugins/bots is icing on the cake for me.
The other day it took me an hour to wire up a couple endpoints in Node, add them as slack slash commands and boom, I was able to add three commands for QA department that resolved some heartburn for them.
I think Slack did a good job with a base product, and they simply solved a pain point in a better way.
I agree with this, but haven't found it to be preferable to hipchat. I definitely think it's a well designed product in many ways, I'm just surprised the valuation for such a thing is that high.
I look forward to seeing what new innovations and improvements are in the future.
I'd agree that they're both good, but if it's the main communication tool for your company the #1 priority is that it stays online.
I'd say you'd be far from the only one. The thing that Slack really brought was an improved onboarding experience, but I have a (probably somewhat vain) hope that protocols will win over corporate controlled walled gardens.
Matrix[1] / Riot[2] are really promising and I really hope we settle on something like that sometime down the road.
[1]: http://matrix.org/
This is a note to others who may be considering the same. Specific needs will vary greatly across teams/companies.
We found Mattermost web client to be ok, however phone apps and integration coverage are both poor by comparison to Slack. We also found running, securing, and maintaining our own server to be roughly as or more expensive than using Slack.
I'm hopeful the Mattermost project keeps momentum to improve. Currently though it doesn't quite seem in the same league.
Developing clients is hard. Especially good UIx and complex feature sets across a zillion platforms like Slack does. A lot of their day I bet these days is simply tracking down obscure bugs on certain platform combinations and trying to keep feature parity between everything working properly. I think most of us can stipulate Slack does a decent job there - or at minimum is far better than the competing (open) solutions.
I really wish there was a Slack alternative where I could purchase a really nice unified frontend and simply connect to an open protocol backend such as IRC or Jabber or whatever. This was the original intent behind IRC as well - back in the 90's there were a number of shareware style IRC clients developed for Windows - and you saw some interesting protocol hackery to make some more graphical features work.
I have yet to see open source really truly compete in the "client" arena, save for an exceedingly few notable exceptions. However, it excels at the backend where you will have developer interest and competence - and the long tail of possible bugs (and user competence) is a much more sane problem to tackle.
No, I do not expect this to ever exist for obvious reasons :)
There's connectors to Mattermost from IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord and many other services: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
There's a wonderful Pidgin plug-in (https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-mattermost) that even has its own installer to bundle Pidgin itself (https://github.com/Brightscout/mattermost-pidgin-client)
Here's a Terminal client for Mattermost written in Haskell (https://about.mattermost.com/galois-releases-matterhorn/).
Also, we've upgrade the polish on Mattermost UI for our 4.0 release this month: https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-4-0/
Agree good UI/UX in open source is hard, I think there are two challenges: a) Attracting top UI/UX talent, b) Having a project that prioritizes UI/UX.
That said, I would also propose that what has already happened is not impossible.
Yes, we needed better mobile apps, and new ones are here (React Native in iOS and Android with full source code): http://bit.ly/2w33V3D
Huge thanks to over 2000 beta testers that helped vet the apps along with all the community contributors.
We've also recently added a directory for making it easier to find integrations: https://about.mattermost.com/community-applications/
Our focus is helping increase productivity for companies who need total control of their infrastructure. Thousands of companies use Mattermost for that purpose and we're excited about bring them more and more value in each of our monthly releases.
As others point out, Mattermost vs. Slack is more a discussion of self-hosted vs. 3rd party cloud-hosted.
Slack has an IRC gateway. https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...
IRC doesn't do all that, especially multiline messages.
Also, Slack has an IRC gateway.
IRC –the protocol– isn't made for that. IRC clients can, but don't.
Despite all the problems you mentioned, it is still extremely usable. There are tens of thousands of users using it for decades.
I agree that Slack is pretty painful - the Linux client may as well be unsupported.
But it's still a hell of a lot better than when everyone in my office had to run their own ZNC bouncer.
Yep, and IRC and its plethora of clients are totally bug-free /s
IRC netsplits alone are far more annoying than any slack bug I've encountered.
> It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created.
You definitely can log out of a team in the OS X app (e.g. right click the team icon, click "remove" or go to the team dropdown and sign out). Or if you want to actually deactivate your account, there's a link (somewhere) in the app that opens your browser where you deactivate your account.
> the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
Not in my experience. You don't even have to reset your password. You can have slack email you a magic link as a method of logging in. Open your email, click the magic link, and you're logged in.
> Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC
How? Slack has an IRC gateway, but IRC doesn't have standardized ways of even sharing files (everything I'm aware of is client based). So how do you implement Slack's feature-set (even ignoring video/voice calls) over IRC without requiring everyone to use a special client?
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-to-client_protocol
And
Yep. Some people at work are super resistant to using slack and prefer IRC, even though slack will make their lives easier. And I get that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude, but I can't help but shake my head at the people managing these IRC bouncers at work. Like they'd rather die managing these cloud VMs running ZNC than ever use slack. Those bouncers are likely to be poorly-secured. They can see nothing when ZNC dies and the external servers don't play well with the corporate firewall (literally, people send IRC traffic through ports 80 or 443 because they can't get through the firewall otherwise).
And don't get me started on teams running bots in order to get github/jira/ci/etc integration with IRC. It's just insanity. Just use slack and its dead simple, no-bots-required webhooks/apps. Quit wasting the company's time standing up all this additional infrastructure because you're too stubborn to switch to a better chat client.
I wish popular Slack alternatives would support each others protocols, even if the support was not perfect.
It feels that alternatives like Rocket.chat and Mattermost are still way too closed. I'm not sure if the dev teams are interested in supporting multiple protocols though, as it might be too much work for something that will keep breaking.
They do have an IRC gateway, although it has to be enabled by your team: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...
I used to use IRC a lot when I was working on the Openstack project and do not agree with this part.
No offense, but the IRC user interface is REALLY lousy. I've been around the block, and I hate going into IRC.
In addition, I wish people would bring back mailing lists. No, Google Groups is not a good substitute.
IRC is Not Good.
That's strange, cause we have been heavily using it for 2 years at a team of 100+ and have yet to find any bug to write home about, and basically nothing affecting day to day use (mostly OS X clients).
>It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
While no doubt there are bugs, those all seem like corner cases.
"un-join" a team works fine when the admins un-join you, for example, which is more likely in a business use case.
I also don't think "updates frequently force a logout" even qualifies as a bug. Heck, OS X and Windows updates force a full reboot.
And how often does one "partially creates" a team they have to remove? Even if that's a bona fide bug, it's still quite a corner case. I've seen worse bugs in XCode or Photoshop, and those are on their nth decade of existence...
I've found several very annoying bugs in the OSX Slack client, and each time I wait a few months before trying it again, yet more bugs continue to occur.
It's impossible to un-join a team via the OSX app, or to remove a team that you partially created. Also, updates frequently force a logout and the password reset procedure is quite clunky.
I finally realized that the web version works pretty well so now I just use that when I need to use Slack.
I know this makes me sound old, but I really wish popular open source projects would just stick to IRC as it just works and doesn't require any proprietary client (and isn't trying to turn into video chat, screen sharing, etc.) Or I suppose I wish Slack would make its ecosystem available via IRC.