# Slack

> Slack is a channel based messaging platform owned by Salesforce, used as a company's internal communication tool and, by default rather than by design, as the home of a very large number of professional and industry communities; the free plan keeps only 90 days of message history and allows ten apps, Pro costs $8.75 per user per month or $7.25 billed annually for unlimited history, and because every active member is a billable seat, running a community of any size on a paid plan is economically impossible.

- Category: Community Platforms (https://saastracker.org/categories/community-platforms)
- Website: https://slack.com
- Starting price: $0 (Free), then $8.75 per user per month (Pro), or $7.25 billed annually
- Free plan: Unlimited members and channels, but only 90 days of visible message history, a maximum of ten apps, one to one huddles, and one to one external messaging through Slack Connect.
- Free trial: The free plan serves as the evaluation path; paid plans are self serve
- Founded: 2013, HQ: San Francisco, California, United States, Ownership: Owned by Salesforce
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/slack

## Overview

Slack is in this category for one reason: enormous numbers of professional communities run on it, not because anyone chose it as a community platform but because everyone already had it open. Product managers, founders, marketers, RevOps people, and anyone who works in software will belong to half a dozen Slack communities they never consciously joined a platform for. That default status is genuinely valuable and it is also the trap, because Slack's pricing model is designed for a company with employees, not for a community with members.

Founded as an internal tool inside Stewart Butterfield's failed game company Tiny Speck, launched publicly in 2013, listed via direct listing in 2019, and acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for $27.7B, Slack is now a mature enterprise product with an enterprise roadmap. Recent releases are about AI: Slackbot as a personal AI agent that understands conversations, files, and projects, AI search, daily recaps, and file summaries, all of which land on Business+ and above rather than on the plans a community could afford.

The free plan is the only realistic option for a community, and its central limitation is brutal in exactly the way that matters here. Message history older than 90 days is hidden. Not deleted, but inaccessible, which means the answer a member wrote to a hard question in March is gone by July. A community's entire long term value is the archive it accumulates, and Slack's free plan systematically destroys it. Discord keeps every message forever, free, and this single difference is why a knowledge oriented community should not be on Slack.

The other structural problem is money. There is no commerce layer of any kind: no checkout, no memberships, no transaction fee to model, because Slack cannot take a payment. Paid Slack communities exist, but they work by billing somewhere else, usually Stripe or Memberful, and using a third party gatekeeping tool to issue and revoke invites. And upgrading is not an option at community scale: a thousand active members on Pro at $7.25 each billed annually is $7,250 a month, which is more than eighty times what Circle costs to host the same people.

## How it works

1. You create a workspace for free in minutes. Anyone with an email address can be invited, and members reach it through mature apps on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and the web.

2. You structure the community as channels, public or private, with threads underneath messages to keep side conversations out of the main flow. Channels can be organized into sections per member, and canvases attach persistent documents to a channel.

3. You manage membership through invitations. There is no self serve public join link that scales safely, so most community operators run an invite form and a third party tool that issues invites, and, if the community is paid, revokes them when a subscription lapses.

4. You extend it with apps, which are capped at ten on the free plan. Workflow Builder automates onboarding messages and forms without code, and Slack Connect lets you share a channel with people in another organization, limited to one to one on free.

5. You handle money entirely outside Slack. Stripe, Memberful, or a similar tool takes the payment and a gatekeeping service issues the Slack invite, because Slack itself has no checkout, no membership product, and no concept of a paying member.

6. You live with the 90 day wall on the free plan. Everything older is inaccessible unless you upgrade the entire workspace to Pro, at which point every single member becomes a billable seat.

## Best for

Professional and industry communities under a couple of hundred members whose value is live conversation and access rather than an accumulating archive, especially where members are software or business people who already live in Slack all day and will not install anything new.

## Not the right fit for

- Any community that accumulates knowledge. The free plan hides everything older than 90 days, so the good answers your members write have a shelf life of one quarter, and Discord keeps them forever for the same price.
- Communities of more than a few hundred people that want unlimited history. Upgrading means paying per member: a thousand members on Pro billed annually is $7,250 a month, against $89 for Circle or $0 for Discord.
- Anyone selling access. Slack has no checkout, no memberships, and no entitlement system, so a paid Slack community is always a third party invite tool taped to a Stripe subscription, with manual failure modes when a card declines.
- Communities that need to be found. Nothing in Slack is indexed by search engines, and unlike Discord there is not even an internal directory, so there is no discovery of any kind.
- Consumer, creator, or fan communities. Slack has no voice room culture, no persistent audio, no events product, no courses, and an interface that signals work; the free tier of Discord beats it on every axis that matters to a non professional audience.

## Features

### Conversation and structure

Excellent as work chat, adequate as a community, and capped by the history limit.

- **Public and private channels**: The core unit, with per channel membership and private channels for paid tiers, moderators, or working groups.
- **Threads**: Replies branch under a message rather than flooding the channel, which is genuinely better than Discord's default behaviour and one of Slack's real advantages for a busy community.
- **Message history limits**: 90 days on the free plan, unlimited on Pro and above. This is the single most consequential line on Slack's price list for anyone running a community, and it is the reason most knowledge oriented communities eventually leave.
- **Canvases**: Persistent documents attached to a channel or standalone, useful for onboarding guides, rules, and resource lists that would otherwise scroll away.
- **Lists**: Lightweight structured tracking inside Slack for projects, requests, or member submissions, which reduces the need for an external tool.
- **Search**: Strong search by keyword, channel, person, and date, and considerably better than Discord's. On the free plan it can only search the 90 days you can still see, which negates the advantage.
- **Slack Connect**: Share a channel with people in another organization. Free allows one to one external messaging only; Pro allows group external channels with up to 250 organizations, which is how partner and customer communities are usually run.

### Live and asynchronous

Huddles are good, but this is not a live events platform.

- **Huddles**: Lightweight audio and video calls inside a channel, with screen sharing. Free is limited to one to one; group huddles of up to 50 people require Pro.
- **Clips**: Short recorded audio or video messages posted into a channel, which is a useful asynchronous alternative to scheduling a call.
- **Workflow Builder**: No code automation for welcome messages, forms, request routing, and recurring prompts, which covers most of what a community operator would otherwise need a bot for.
- **No events product**: There is no scheduled event object, no RSVP, no Stage equivalent, and no recording library. Community events on Slack are a calendar link pasted into a channel.

### Administration and moderation

Built for an IT department, not for a community manager.

- **Member types and guests**: Members, multi channel guests, and single channel guests, each with different access. On paid plans, multi channel guests consume a billable seat, which is what makes community scale unaffordable.
- **Admin and owner roles**: Workspace owner, admin, and member roles with channel management, member deactivation, and posting restrictions per channel.
- **Posting permissions**: Restrict who can post in a channel, which turns any channel into an announcements channel without a separate feature.
- **No moderation queue or spam filter**: There is nothing equivalent to Discord's AutoMod or Discourse's spam classification. Slack assumes everyone in the workspace is a trusted colleague, which is a bad assumption for an open community.
- **SAML single sign on**: Available from Business+ at $15 per user per month, which no community will ever pay for at member scale.
- **Compliance exports and legal holds**: Corporate exports on Business+, and information barriers and legal holds on Enterprise+, all of it aimed at employers rather than community operators.

### AI and integrations

The 2026 roadmap, priced out of reach for communities.

- **Slackbot as a personal AI agent**: An assistant that understands conversations, files, and projects, available from Business+ at $15 per user per month.
- **AI search, recaps, and summaries**: Daily recaps of busy channels and summaries of long threads and files, again from Business+ upward. Free and Pro get only basic AI.
- **App limit on free**: Ten apps on the free plan and unlimited on Pro. Ten is workable for a community but binds quickly once you add a welcome bot, a moderation helper, an events tool, and an invite gatekeeper.
- **Very large app directory**: Thousands of integrations plus a mature developer platform with bots, slash commands, and Block Kit, second only to Discord in this category for community tooling.
- **No commerce layer at all**: Slack cannot take a payment, has no membership object, and has no entitlement system. Every paid Slack community is Stripe or Memberful plus a third party invite tool, with the failure modes that implies.

## Use cases

- **Industry peer group of 150 professionals**: Senior people who will not install another app, who are in Slack all day for work, and whose value is fast answers from peers rather than a searchable archive. Outcome: A free Slack workspace gets adoption no purpose built platform would, threads keep discussions readable, and the 90 day history limit is tolerable because nobody was going to read March's messages anyway.
- **SaaS company running a customer community**: Customers want direct access to the team, and the company already runs on Slack internally. Outcome: Slack Connect on Pro shares channels with up to 250 customer organizations without them joining your workspace, which is the one genuinely strong community use case Slack has. Note that the paid plan applies to your own employees, not to the customers on the other side.
- **Paid mastermind of forty members**: A high ticket group where members pay several thousand a year and expect a professional environment rather than a gaming app. Outcome: Stripe or Memberful handles billing, a third party gatekeeping tool issues and revokes Slack invites, and at forty people even a paid Slack workspace is affordable. Above a few hundred members the same arrangement becomes financially absurd.
- **Community operator hitting the 90 day wall**: Two years in, members keep asking questions that were answered brilliantly a year ago, and nobody can find or link to the answer because it is behind the history limit. Outcome: The honest options are to move to Discord for free permanent history, to Discourse for permanent indexed history, or to Circle for a paid branded home. Upgrading Slack to Pro at $7.25 per member is almost never the right answer at community scale.

## Pricing

Per user per month subscription designed for employees, with a permanently free tier limited by message history and app count. There is no community pricing, no member tier, and no commerce layer.

- **Free**: $0 forever. Unlimited members and channels; 90 days of message history; Up to 10 apps; One to one huddles; One to one Slack Connect external messages. The only plan a community can realistically use, and the 90 day history limit is the reason communities eventually leave Slack.
- **Pro**: $8.75 per user per month, or $7.25 billed annually. Unlimited message history; Unlimited apps; Group huddles up to 50 participants; Group Slack Connect with up to 250 organizations; Basic AI features. Priced per member. A community of 1,000 costs $7,250 a month billed annually, which is why nobody runs a real community on paid Slack.
- **Business+**: $15 per user per month, or $12.50 billed annually. Slackbot as a personal AI agent; AI search, daily recaps, and file summaries; SAML single sign on; Compliance and corporate data exports; 99.99 percent uptime guarantee. An employer plan. Nothing here is aimed at a community operator.
- **Enterprise+**: Custom quoted by sales. Multiple workspaces under one organization; Enterprise search and enterprise AI; Information barriers and legal holds; Multiple SAML configurations; Data residency options.

Billing notes:

- Prices reviewed in August 2026 in US dollars. Annual billing saves roughly 17 percent on both Pro and Business+.
- Slack charges per active member, and on paid plans multi channel guests consume a seat too. This is the single fact that disqualifies Slack for community use at scale.
- Do the comparison. A community of 1,000 members costs $0 on free Slack with a 90 day archive, $7,250 a month on Pro with a permanent one, $0 on Discord with a permanent one, and $89 a month on Circle with a permanent one plus courses, events, and a checkout.
- There is no transaction fee to model on paid memberships because Slack has no commerce layer at all. If you charge for a Slack community, you pay whatever your billing tool charges: Stripe at roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, or Memberful at 4.9 percent plus $49 a month, plus a third party invite gatekeeping service.
- That indirection has an operational cost as well as a financial one. Nothing in Slack knows whether a member has paid, so revoking access when a card fails depends entirely on the third party tool working correctly.
- The ten app limit on free is not usually the binding constraint, but it becomes one once a community runs a welcome bot, a moderation helper, an events tool, and an invite gatekeeper at the same time.

Value assessment: Free Slack is worth using and paid Slack is not, at least not for a community. What the free plan gives you is genuine: unlimited members, unlimited channels, the best threading model in this category, strong search within its window, mature apps, a huge integration directory, and a professional audience who already have it open. What it takes away is the thing that makes a community compound. Ninety days of history means the archive never accumulates, and the members who answer the same question for the fourth time will eventually stop. Upgrading is not a fix but a different problem: at $7.25 per member per year Slack is charging you employee prices for people who are not employees, and a thousand member community would pay $87,000 a year for what Discord provides free and Circle provides for about $1,100. The correct read is that Slack is an acceptable free venue for a small professional community that trades on access rather than on archive, and a bad idea for anything else.

## Strengths

- Zero adoption friction with professional audiences. Software, product, and business people already have Slack open all day and will join a workspace without installing anything or learning anything.
- The best threading model in this category. Replies branch cleanly under a message instead of flooding a channel, which keeps a busy community readable in a way Discord struggles with.
- Search quality is genuinely good, with filters by person, channel, and date, and better than every free alternative here within the window it can see.
- Slack Connect on Pro shares channels with up to 250 external organizations, which is the strongest legitimate community use case Slack has for a B2B company.
- Canvases, Lists, and Workflow Builder cover documentation, tracking, and no code automation without adding another vendor.
- A very large app directory and a mature developer platform, second only to Discord for community tooling.
- Owned by Salesforce with enterprise grade reliability, compliance, and an uptime guarantee on higher tiers, which matters if the community is attached to a serious B2B product.

## Limitations

- The 90 day history limit on the free plan destroys the archive, which is the single largest source of long term community value, and Discord does not have this problem at the same price.
- Per member pricing makes upgrading impossible at community scale. A thousand members on Pro is $7,250 a month, or roughly eighty times Circle.
- No commerce layer whatsoever: no checkout, no memberships, no entitlement, so charging for access always means a third party invite tool bolted onto Stripe.
- No moderation queue, no spam classifier, and no equivalent of AutoMod. Slack assumes a workspace is full of colleagues.
- No events product, no persistent voice rooms, no Stage equivalent, and no recording library, so live programming is a calendar link in a channel.
- Nothing is indexed by search engines and there is no internal directory either, so Slack offers less discovery than Discord, which is itself invisible to Google.
- No custom domain, no white labelling, and no branded app at any price; your community lives under Slack's brand.
- The AI features that define Slack's 2026 roadmap start at Business+ at $15 per user, which no community will ever reach.

## Comparisons

- **Slack vs Discord**: For a community, Discord wins outright. Both are free, but Discord keeps every message forever where free Slack hides anything past 90 days, and Discord adds forum channels, persistent voice, Stage events, AutoMod, and a permission system Slack does not attempt. Slack's advantages are threading, search quality, and a professional audience who take it seriously and will not install Discord. Choose Slack for a small senior peer group; choose Discord for anything that needs to last.
- **Slack vs Discourse**: Opposite tools for opposite problems. Discourse is asynchronous, permanent, indexed by Google, and has the best moderation and spam tooling in this category. Slack is real time, ephemeral on the free plan, and invisible to search. A common and sensible pattern is Slack for live conversation and Discourse for the answers that should be findable in two years, which is exactly the gap Slack's history limit creates.
- **Slack vs Circle**: Circle costs $89 a month flat and gives you a branded community on your own domain with permanent history, spaces, courses, events, live streaming, a member directory, and a checkout that takes 2 percent. Slack gives you better threading and an audience already logged in. The moment your community has more than about a dozen paying members or needs an archive, Circle is both cheaper and more capable, because Slack's per seat model was never designed for people who do not work for you.
- **Slack vs Thinkific**: A common migration path for course and training communities that started in Slack. Thinkific costs $54 a month flat rather than per member, keeps every post permanently, organizes discussion into permissioned spaces, and ties community access to a course purchase automatically, none of which Slack can do. Slack keeps better threading and an audience already logged in. If your students' answers are disappearing behind the 90 day wall, that is the signal to move.
- **Slack vs Bettermode**: Bettermode is a purpose built branded community platform aimed at companies running customer communities, with permanent indexed content, a real permission model, and your own domain. Slack is the thing those companies are usually trying to graduate from, having discovered that a free workspace loses its archive and a paid one costs per customer. Bettermode is priced for mid market buyers, so the comparison bites once a customer community becomes a real programme rather than a channel.
- **Slack vs Heartbeat**: Heartbeat exists in large part because professional communities outgrow Slack. It offers chat that feels familiar to a Slack user, plus permanent history, events, courses, and a checkout, on a flat plan rather than per member. If your Slack community is working but the 90 day wall and the lack of a payment layer are the problems, Heartbeat is the closest shaped replacement.

## Implementation

- Setup time: Minutes to a workspace, a day to a well organized one. The real work is deciding channel structure and writing an onboarding flow in Workflow Builder, because Slack gives new members no guidance by default.
- Learning curve: Effectively zero for professional members, who already use it daily. Moderate for operators only because Slack's admin tooling assumes an IT context rather than a community one, and much of what a community manager wants simply is not there.
- Onboarding: Entirely self serve on Free, Pro, and Business+. Enterprise+ is sales gated. Slack publishes extensive documentation, none of which is aimed at community operators.
- Migration: Migrating in is trivial because most professional members already have accounts. Migrating out is the reason to plan early: exports on the free plan cover public channel messages only, and the free plan's 90 day window means much of the history you would want to take is already inaccessible before you start. Member email addresses are available to workspace admins, which is better than Discord, and third party tools can import Slack exports into Discourse or other platforms. If you expect to outgrow Slack, run an export before the history you care about ages past the window.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Web
- API: A comprehensive developer platform with a Web API, Events API, bots, slash commands, Block Kit, and workflow steps, plus one of the largest app directories in software.
- Compliance: SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA support on higher tiers, FedRAMP on specific Enterprise offerings
- Data residency: Data residency options are available on Enterprise+ only.
- SSO: SAML single sign on from Business+ at $15 per user per month; free and Pro use email or Google and Apple sign in.
- Security notes: Enterprise grade security posture inherited from Salesforce, including encryption in transit and at rest, corporate data exports on Business+, and information barriers and legal holds on Enterprise+. None of these are reachable at community pricing, and the free plan offers no moderation or spam controls at all.

## Support

- Channels: Help center and support tickets on all plans, Priority and 24/7 support on higher tiers, Dedicated account management on Enterprise+
- Documentation: Extensive product documentation and a large developer platform reference, all written for workplace administrators rather than community operators.
- Community: A very large ecosystem of Slack communities, consultants, and app developers, plus Slack's own developer community.

## Company

- Founded: 2013
- Founders: Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, Serguei Mourachov
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Ownership: Owned by Salesforce
- Employees: Part of Salesforce; several thousand within the Slack business unit
- Funding: Raised roughly $1.4B in venture funding, listed via direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2019, and was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for $27.7B.

Funding history:

- Series H (2018): $427M. Led by Dragoneer and General Atlantic at a $7.1B valuation.
- Direct listing (2019): No new capital raised. Listed on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2019 rather than running a traditional IPO.
- Acquisition (2021): $27.7B. Acquired by Salesforce in July 2021, the largest software acquisition of that year.

Timeline:

- 2009: Stewart Butterfield founds Tiny Speck to build the game Glitch; the team builds an internal chat tool to coordinate.
- 2013: Glitch shuts down and the internal chat tool launches publicly as Slack, growing faster than almost any business software before it.
- 2019: Lists on the New York Stock Exchange via direct listing in June rather than a conventional IPO.
- 2021: Acquired by Salesforce in July for $27.7B.
- 2022: Changes the free plan from a 10,000 message limit to a 90 day history window, which quietly makes free Slack unsuitable as a community archive.
- 2024: Ships canvases, lists, and expanded Workflow Builder, moving Slack from chat toward a work operating system.
- 2026: Slackbot becomes a personal AI agent with AI search, recaps, and summaries, available from Business+ at $15 per user per month.

## Integrations

Salesforce, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, Zoom and Google Meet, Jira, Linear, GitHub, and Asana, Zapier and Make, Stripe and third party invite gatekeeping tools for paid communities, Thousands of apps in the Slack App Directory, Web API, Events API, webhooks, and Block Kit

## FAQ

### What is Slack and what job does it do in this category?

Slack is a channel based messaging platform for workplaces, owned by Salesforce. In this category it is a chat platform being used as a community by default: enormous numbers of professional and industry communities run on Slack, not because anyone evaluated it as a community platform but because members already had it open all day.

### How much does Slack cost?

The free plan is $0 with unlimited members but only 90 days of visible message history and a maximum of ten apps. Pro is $8.75 per user per month, or $7.25 billed annually, and adds unlimited history and unlimited apps. Business+ is $15 or $12.50 annually and adds SSO, compliance exports, and the AI features. Enterprise+ is custom priced.

### What is the transaction fee on paid memberships?

There is none, because Slack has no commerce layer at all. It cannot take a payment, has no membership object, and has no entitlement system. Charging for a Slack community means billing through Stripe at roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents or Memberful at $49 a month plus 4.9 percent, plus a third party invite tool to issue and revoke access. Nothing inside Slack knows whether a member has paid, so access revocation depends entirely on that external tool working.

### What are the member and admin seat limits?

The free plan has no member limit, which is why communities of thousands exist on it. The catch is that any upgrade is priced per member, and on paid plans multi channel guests consume seats too. A community of 1,000 members on Pro costs $7,250 a month billed annually, against $0 on Discord and $89 on Circle for the same people. This is the structural reason no serious community runs on paid Slack.

### What actually happens at the 90 day history limit?

Messages older than 90 days are hidden rather than deleted, and cannot be read, searched, or linked. In practice this means a community's archive never accumulates: the excellent answer someone wrote in March is unreachable by July, and members who answer the same question repeatedly eventually stop bothering. Because an archive is the main thing that makes a community compound in value, this is the most important fact on Slack's price list for anyone in this category.

### Can I use a custom domain or brand it as my own?

No. Your community lives at a slack.com workspace URL, in Slack's app, with Slack's branding, and there is no white label option at any tier including Enterprise+. If your community needs to look like your business, Circle, Bettermode, or Heartbeat are the shapes that do it and Slack is not.

### Is Slack community content indexed by search engines?

No, and Slack is worse than Discord here because it does not even have an internal directory. There is no discovery of any kind: nobody finds your community through search, and nobody browses to it. Every member arrives through a link you gave them. If discussion is meant to be an acquisition channel, you need Discourse or a public forum alongside, and many Slack communities eventually add one for exactly this reason.

### Are courses and events first class features?

Neither exists. There is no course product, no lessons, no progress tracking, and no certificates. There is no scheduled event object, no RSVP, no Stage equivalent, and no recording library. Huddles cover ad hoc calls, limited to one to one on the free plan and up to 50 participants on Pro, and everything else is a calendar link in a channel.

### How good is moderation and spam tooling?

Weak, because Slack assumes a workspace is full of colleagues. There is no moderation queue, no automated spam filter equivalent to Discord's AutoMod or Discourse's spam classification, and no verification levels. You get channel posting restrictions, member deactivation, and admin roles. For an invite only professional community that is usually enough; for an open community it is not.

### Should I use Slack or a free Discord for my community?

Discord for almost every case, and it is not close. Both are free, but Discord keeps every message forever where Slack hides everything past 90 days, and Discord adds forum channels, persistent voice, Stage events, AutoMod, and a real permission system. Slack wins in exactly one situation: a small professional peer group of senior people who already live in Slack, will not install a gaming app, and value fast access over a lasting archive. That is a real use case, and it is much narrower than the number of communities currently sitting on Slack would suggest.

## Editorial verdict

Slack is where a great many professional communities live and almost none of them chose it. As a free venue for a few hundred senior people who already have it open, it is legitimately good: threading is the best in this category, search is strong, adoption friction is zero, and Slack Connect handles customer and partner channels better than anything else here. As a community platform it has two disqualifying flaws. The free plan hides everything older than 90 days, so the archive that makes a community valuable over time never accumulates, and Discord does the same job for free while keeping every message forever. And upgrading charges employee prices for people who are not employees: a thousand members on Pro is $7,250 a month, roughly eighty times what Circle costs to host the same community with permanent history, courses, events, and a checkout. There is no commerce layer at all, so charging for access means a third party invite tool bolted onto Stripe, with the fragility that implies. Use free Slack for a small professional group that trades on access. For anything that should still be useful in two years, move to Discord if you want free, Discourse if you want found, and Circle or Heartbeat if you want paid.

---

Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology