Slack review and pricing

Slack is the original modern team-chat product, launched 2013 by Stewart Butterfield and team out of the ashes of Tiny Speck, IPO via direct listing on the NYSE in June 2019, and acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for $27.7B in one of the largest enterprise SaaS deals of the decade. The product set the modern team-chat template: channels (public and private), threads, direct messages, file sharing, search, presence, and an app directory that became the deepest third-party integration surface in the category. Strengths: deepest third-party app and integration surface, strongest developer mindshare and bot ecosystem, polished UX that still leads on day-to-day messaging quality, Slack Connect for cross-organization channels, Huddles and Canvas as native lightweight collaboration surfaces, and a credible enterprise-grade admin and compliance story (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA at Enterprise Grid, FedRAMP Moderate). Trade-offs: post-Salesforce velocity has visibly slowed across 2022 to 2026, renewal pricing has crept up with several buyer reports of double-digit increases at renewal, the Enterprise Grid tier required for SSO, audit log, and HIPAA is expensive at scale, message-retention limits on Free and Pro tiers force buyers up the price ladder, and the Salesforce cross-sell pressure (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Slack AI) is a real factor in late-stage commercial conversations.