We ditched Slack to use Telegram

We stopped using Slack in favor of Telegram, great user experience and not missing any big feature. I will explain to you why šŸ˜‰

I was a huge fan of Slack; it made our live lot easier at Open Classifieds to have real time communication with our remote workers. Easy to use anywhere and full featured.

Why?

We reached the 10.000 limit of stored messages, so when you make a search it’s limited to that amount of messages and you can not see any history back. At first this was not a blocking issue but soon we realised that we have replaced email with slack and we needed some info we shared. 10K may seem a lot but if you have some bots integrations as we have with github and different groups you will reach it quite fast.

So first thought was, ok let’s pay to Slack, works great and we are happy with it. No problem to pay for a good product that you use daily. Issue comes on the pricing. We collaborate with a great amount of people that not all of them are employees and we gave them access to slack…. At slack the first pricing tier starts from $8 per user month… for a small startup like us with so many collaborators will be like shooting to your own feat.

Common features

  • Real time chat obviously
  • Offline messages
  • Groups/Channels
  • Bots (integrate github and not much more)
  • Share files / images
  • Search messages
  • API
  • Mention users
  • Use it anywhere, mobile, web, desktop natives apps

Telegram betterĀ than Slack

  • Free, no matter amount of chats, images etc.
  • Unlimited, search history
  • Secret chats, awesome to share 1 time passwords screenshots or nudes xD
  • Open Source with great community
  • Privacy seems a really serious stuff on telegram and they endorse it
  • Audio notes!

SlackĀ betterĀ thanĀ Telegram

  • You need to have a mobile phone to use telegram, for digital nomads can be an issue
  • Search engine with tags lot better
  • Integrations, Slack has a huge amount of bots and great integrations, I miss some at telegram
  • Mark message as favorite, this is really useful.

What needs to improve Telegram

  • The native apps for Linux and Web do not let you start Secret chats
  • The native apps should be more responsive the sidebar of the users is too big for my taste
  • Design could be a bit better but I like it!
  • Integrations and bots, I have tried many that do not work
  • Mark messages as favorite so you can check later

Other alternatives

I have tried different chat solutions but none was as good as telegram.

  • Whatsapp, no desktop app, no offline messages, no usernames (without num), no secret chats, files, bots, apis…
  • Hipchat, ugly linux implementation, bad UI
  • rocket.chat was my favorite option and we were really close to use it, but you need to host it yourself and maintain it of course, great job they did here.

  • Telegram deletes not frequently viewed old messages (or something like that). Don’t use Telegram for long term storage of conversations.

    • thanks! well is good to know, we never use it for that purpose šŸ˜‰ but so far never missed anything, love it!

      • Also, there’s riot.im which uses the matrix.org open and federated (you can chat with people on another server just like email) protocol. Matrix introduces the concept of bridges too, so you can chat with your friends on IRC, slack, gitter etc from matrix, and have all of them in the same matrix room. And mattermost is a open source, self-hosted slack clone which is compatible with slack hooks.

        • Thanks Yan! nice alternatives, but I like telegram for now, was enough pain to move my employees there hahaha we are really satisfied for the moment. I knew them since I saw them on PH but never tested them in deep.

          Which one do you use at work?

          • Slack šŸ˜› but planning to move to mattermost when I get time.