slack is incredibly, unbearably slow

As a chat system workplace is inferior to slack. Discovery and organisation of chats are hard, especially group chats that would normally be a channel.

However the combination of the "newsgroup" and chat makes it kinda better than slack on it's own.

Would I use workplace at a new startup? probably not. I would use slack though.

Yea, it could be that FBs internal tooling connected to workchat is what made it so great. I think channels are a nasty way to handle topics of conversation compared to posts on a forum type place. Leaning into searchability and all that was great.

I’ve seen sub 500 employee companies and Slack kicks ass, but it seems once it goes over 1k it’s like glhf managing channels and bots.

Butterfly bot integration to workplace was really something.

Workplace def overkill sub ~ 600 users though.

I also think meta's workchat was better than slack. Maybe its because at my new company slack has to play the role of both workplace and workchat whereas at meta they have two separate things for that.

Moving to a company using a hodgepodge of constantly rotating SaaS tools has been hell. I’m always thinking to myself “why can’t they just do this?”. I think I’ve been both spoiled and broken permanently.

On the other hand, building all these connections between the disparate apps is basically my job, so it’s got its positives.

Don't believe the hype -- I think workchat probably beats slack for speed in the web client, but the desktop/android clients which I use regularly are truly sluggish and constantly refusing to load new messages if I'm not constantly using them, forcing me to restart them in order to do so.

Oh yea, web comparison for sure, but I also don’t see a difference between slack desktop and web. They’re both electron clients though iirc, the desktop client just wasn’t given much attention because web worked great.

Meta uses workchat which is just a reskinned Facebook Messenger. It’s been a while since I’ve used it but I remember it being a lot less glitchy than slack on iOS (desktop is another story).

Slack tries to satisfy a number of requirements, all through a chat interface. 1:1 chatting, group chatting, team/project discussions, company updates, etc. I think Slack is as good or superior to Workplace just considering chat functionality, but as a tool for inter-company collaboration Workplace is much better.

Once your company reaches a sufficient size (maybe 300+ employees?), Slack channels just become so clunky and tedious for trying to keep up with projects and discussions. Using Slack keyword notifications helps cut through the noise, but I really think applying Facebook's ranking/Groups expertise to work-related content has been the best solution I've seen so far. You're no longer inundated with unread channels that may or may not have messages relevant to you, Workplace just surfaces the relevant content (and obviously there's chat/mentions for more pressing issues).