At Fingertip Tech, INC HQ collaboration is key, so we’ve been searching for tools to help us better work together as a team. We’ve worked with a few tools over the years but none has fit our work model as well as Slack.
Slack is very similar to HipChat, the tool it is replacing at the Fingertip HQ. The main advantage that makes Slack the winner for me is its better user experience and greater focus on design than HipChat and pretty much the rest of its competition.
We’ve found it easy to integrate Slack with all of our most important services – especially our self-hosted (on Digital Ocean) GitLab source control system.
Of course with any tool, there are downsides. For instance Slack doesn’t have an app on any desktop platform other than Mac OS X. Additionally, Slack’s Mac app does not feel very native; in fact it seems to be a wrapped HTML5 app – this is something that rubs me the wrong way but in practical terms rarely becomes an issue.
Being grounded in web technologies does make its Chrome app one of the most impressive Chrome apps I’ve used in some time.
