Overview

Slack

Stacks121.7K

Followers97.7K

Votes6.0K

Gitter

Stacks232

Followers257

Votes277

Gitter vs Slack: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this markdown code, we will outline the key differences between Gitter and Slack, two popular messaging platforms used for communication within teams and communities.

Integration with Development Tools: One significant difference between Gitter and Slack is their level of integration with development tools. Gitter is specifically designed for developers and provides a seamless integration with GitHub, allowing users to easily access repositories, issues, and pull requests. On the other hand, while Slack offers integrations with various development tools, it is not as developer-centric as Gitter.
Pricing and Limitations: Another important distinction between Gitter and Slack lies in their pricing and limitations. Gitter provides a free plan with limited features, which makes it an ideal choice for small development teams or open-source communities. In contrast, Slack offers more extensive features but follows a freemium business model, making it more suitable for larger organizations that can afford the subscription fees for advanced features and integrations.
Community and Ecosystem: Gitter and Slack also differ in terms of their community and ecosystem. Gitter emphasizes a strong developer community, with an extensive list of public chat rooms dedicated to various programming languages, frameworks, and open-source projects. It provides a platform specifically tailored for developers to connect and collaborate. Slack, on the other hand, has a broader user base and a larger ecosystem. It caters to a diverse range of industries and communities, making it suitable for both technical and non-technical teams.
User Interface and Design: The user interface and design of Gitter and Slack differ significantly. Gitter has a minimalistic and straightforward design, focusing on simplicity and ease of use. It provides a clean and intuitive interface, similar to traditional chat applications. Slack, on the contrary, offers a more modern and visually appealing UI, with a customizable interface that allows users to personalize their workspace according to their preferences. It provides a wide range of customization options, including themes and plugins.
File Management and Collaboration: Gitter and Slack also have differences in terms of file management and collaboration capabilities. Gitter allows users to share files directly within chat rooms but lacks some advanced collaboration features, such as document editing in real-time. In contrast, Slack offers a more robust collaboration platform, allowing users to create and edit files collaboratively within the application itself. This makes Slack a more suitable choice for teams that heavily rely on document collaboration.
Integration Partners and Marketplace: The integration partners and marketplace available for Gitter and Slack are another point of distinction. Gitter provides a limited set of integrations and plugins compared to Slack, which has a vast marketplace with thousands of integrations and apps. This extensive marketplace in Slack allows users to customize and extend the functionality of their workspace to better suit their needs, making it a more flexible and scalable platform.

In summary, the key differences between Gitter and Slack can be summarized as follows: Gitter offers seamless integration with development tools, a developer-centric community, and a free plan, while Slack provides a broader ecosystem, a more visually appealing UI, advanced collaboration features, and an extensive marketplace of integrations.

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Advice on Slack, Gitter

Remotor

Apr 13, 2020

Decided

Keybase is a powerful and secure team-organizing software. And because Keybase is so transparently good at what it does, Keybase is a foundational software that facilitates the future of work: effective, inclusive, secure Remote Teams.

Keybase is a free, end-to-end encrypted, open-source program with almost limitless flexibility. Each Keybase user or team is a unique cryptographic identity. Each message or interaction that a user has with a team or other user, is verifiable and digitally-signed. Custom combinations of users/teams/bots, can be designed to catalyze Remote Teams of all kinds, this process can also be automated. Keybase includes Git integration for versioning, bots from multiple platforms to facilitate audio/video-conferencing, a Cryptocurrency wallet, and many advanced privacy features to make you more or less traceable.

Services like Slack and Discord are centralized platforms that perform analytics on your behavior and can sell or leak this data to 3rd parties. Any audio/video features available within Slack or Discord, are bound to be less secure and less flexible than excellent alternatives such as Jitsi. Slack and Discord do have a fun, causal feel to them, which can potentially facilitate social engagement in certain conditions (also many users are already on these platforms).

Centralized and Proprietary team platforms such as Discord and Slack have a large market presence (at least in the USA) based on their first-mover advantage, name recognition, and network effects from size. However these products do not have the flexibility or power of Keybase. Keybase excels on its own excellence, and also has an open and active developer community.

Find us on Keybase: @remotorteam (Keybase username) @remotor.public (Public Keybase Team)

132k views132k

Comments

carlche0616

Oct 11, 2020

Decided

As it is the communication tool chosen for the course, our team will be using Slack to monitor the course announcements from our instructor as well as to communicate with the instructor and industry partners. The tool for communicating within the team will be Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams enables the team to share documents and edit them synchronously(Google Drive is not an option due to one team member's location). Since it also provides a group chat feature, we chose to use it as our communication tool to avoid using too many softwares.

197k views197k

Comments

Dominique

Co-founder

Oct 17, 2022

Needs advice

Hi There,

We are a company that does the administration for a number of different projects/companies and I wanted to know your thoughts on a teams/Microsoft planner set-up vs an asana/slack set-up. We are relatively small but I foresee a lot of growth and we are still trying to work out our structure in terms of team creation and how we are going to delegate tasks. We want to use tools that allow us to step back and not micromanage our team members.

13.3k views13.3k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Slack	Gitter
Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together.	Free chat rooms for your public repositories. A bit like IRC only smarter. Chats for private repositories as well as organisations.
Create open channels for the projects, groups and topics that the whole team shares.;Search with context;Autocomplete makes mentioning your teammates quick and painless.;Configurable notifications for desktop, mobile push and email keep you as informed as you’d like.;Everything is perfectly in sync as you move between your desktop, iPhone, iPad, or Android device.;Powerful search & archiving means you can forget when you need to: we’ll remember for you.;Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub Integration;Add comments for feedback & stars for easy retrieval;Built-in internal and external sharing options ensure you can get and share any file with anyone	Know who's seen any message;Edit messages after you've sent them;Full emoji support;Special Lurk Mode;IRC bridge.;Automatically embeds content like Gists, YouTube, pictures of cats and other stuff;Desktop notifications and @mentions.;Infinite chat history stored in the cloud;Will soon be searchable too;Phew, that's a lot and we're building more constantly.;Desktop app for Mac. Windows, iPhone and Android coming soon. Works perfectly in mobile web browsers.
Statistics
Stacks 121.7K	Stacks 232
Followers 97.7K	Followers 257
Votes 6.0K	Votes 277
Pros & Cons
Pros 1209 Easy to integrate with 876 Excellent interface on multiple platforms 849 Free 694 Mobile friendly 690 People really enjoy using it Cons 13 Can be distracting depending on how you use it 6 Requires some management for large teams 6 Limit messages history 5 Too expensive 5 You don't really own your messages	Pros 63 Github integration 55 Free 45 Markdown support 19 Markdown 17 Graceful integration Cons 2 Sends data to US Gov
Integrations
GitHub Bitbucket Zapier Stripe Asana GoSquared Dropbox New Relic Google Drive Zendesk	Sprint.ly GitHub Trello Travis CI Jenkins

What are some alternatives to Slack, Gitter?

HipChat

HipChat is a hosted private chat service for your company or team. Invite colleagues to share ideas and files in persistent group chat rooms. Get your team off AIM, Google Talk, and Skype — HipChat was built for business.

Zulip

Zulip is powerful, open source team chat that combines the immediacy of real-time chat with the productivity benefits of threaded conversations. Zulip allows busy managers and others in meetings all day to participate in their teams chats.

RocketChat

Rocket.Chat is a Web Chat Server, developed in JavaScript, using the Meteor fullstack framework. It is a great solution for communities and companies wanting to privately host their own chat service or for developers looking forward to build and evolve their own chat platforms.

Mattermost

Mattermost is modern communication from behind your firewall.

Flowdock

Flowdock is a web-based team chat service that integrates with your tools to provide a window into your team's activities. With the team inbox, everyone on your team can stay up to date. Stay connected with Flowdock's iOS and Android apps.

Microsoft Teams

See content and chat history anytime, including team chats with Skype that are visible to the whole team. Private group chats are available for smaller group conversations.

Users can send messages and exchange photos, videos, stickers, audio and files of any type. It provides instant messaging, simple, fast, secure and synced across all your devices.

Keybase Teams

Keybase is for anyone. Imagine a Slack for the whole world, except end-to-end encrypted across all your devices. Or a Team Dropbox where the server can't leak your files or be hacked.

Fleep

Leave email behind and manage all conversations with your team, partners and clients in Fleep. If some of them are not Fleep users yet, they will receive all messages as normal emails.

Let's Chat

Let's Chat is a persistent messaging application that runs on Node.js and MongoDB. It's designed to be easily deployable and fits well with small, intimate teams. It's free (MIT licensed) and ships with killer features such as LDAP/Kerberos authentication, a REST-like API and XMPP support.