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Slack vs XMPP: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Slack and XMPP. Both Slack and XMPP are messaging protocols used for communication, but they have some distinct features and functionalities.

  1. Message Formatting and Rich Content Support: Slack offers a rich set of formatting options that allow users to emphasize words, create bullet points, add hyperlinks, and even insert code snippets with syntax highlighting. Additionally, it supports the embedding of media files, such as images, videos, and documents. On the other hand, XMPP's message formatting capabilities are more limited, primarily supporting basic text styling without rich content embedding.

  2. User Experience and Interface: Slack is designed with a modern, user-friendly interface that focuses on enhancing collaboration. It provides features like real-time typing indicators, user presence status, and threaded conversations to improve communication efficiency. In contrast, XMPP has a simpler and more traditional interface, which may lack some of the advanced collaboration features found in Slack.

  3. Third-Party Integration Ecosystem: Slack boasts a vast selection of third-party integrations, which allow users to connect with various external services, such as project management tools, customer support systems, and development platforms. These integrations enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and facilitate seamless information sharing. XMPP, while also supporting integrations, typically has a smaller ecosystem of compatible applications and services.

  4. Support for Public and Private Channels: Slack enables the creation of both public and private channels, where users can join or be invited based on their interests or roles. Public channels encourage transparency and open communication, while private channels offer a confidential space for specific teams or projects. In XMPP, the concept of channels is less prevalent, and a greater focus is placed on direct messaging between individual users or small groups.

  5. Notifications and Real-Time Updates: Slack provides comprehensive notification settings, allowing users to customize how they receive updates and alerts. Users can choose to be notified about specific keywords, mentions, or activity within particular channels. XMPP also offers notification capabilities, but its options might be more limited compared to Slack's extensive range of notification preferences.

  6. Privacy and Security: Slack employs robust security measures, including encryption at rest and in transit, two-factor authentication, and compliance with various data protection regulations. It also offers enterprise-grade features like data retention, eDiscovery, and compliance exports. While XMPP supports encryption, its security features may vary depending on the specific implementation and server configuration.

In summary, Slack offers advanced message formatting, a modern interface with collaboration-focused features, a vast integration ecosystem, support for public and private channels, extensive notification options, and strong security measures. XMPP, on the other hand, has a simpler message formatting system, a traditional interface, a more limited integration ecosystem, a focus on direct messaging rather than channels, fewer notification customization options, and potentially varied security measures.

Advice on Slack and XMPP
Needs advice
on
SlackSlackDiscordDiscord
and
GitterGitter

From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."

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Replies (4)
Rebecca Driscoll
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration

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Arnaud Lemercier
Expert En Dveloppement Web Et Systmes Dinformations, Designer UX, UI, Co-grant at Wixiweb · | 4 upvotes · 200.9K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications

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Michael Ionita
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.

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Julien Tanay
Lead DevOps. Every day product hacker. at Dior · | 2 upvotes · 196.3K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

Our Discord Server is our n°1 community stop; we gather feedback from our users from here, discuss about new features, announce new releases, and so on.

We even use it for internal meetings and calls !

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Decisions about Slack and XMPP
Remotor Consulting
at Remotor Consulting Group · | 13 upvotes · 123.9K views

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)

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Stefan Schuchlenz

We chose RocketChat over other communications suites like Cliq or Slack mainly because we can self-host it on our own infrastructure. Since we have quite some projects going on which demand that we stay in touch with a lot of different stakeholders, pricing was an issue, too. With RocketChat, we have a huge set of features basically for free, RC offers apps for all major devices and systems and overall, we're very happy with it. The only downside is the limited amount of apps and integrations, but we can make due with what we have available.

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Mohammad Hossein Amri
Chief Technology Officer at Planally · | 3 upvotes · 251.9K views

we were using slack and at the same time we had a subscription with office 365. after a while we hit the slack free limitation quota. and it got annoying. the search ability was useless in free tier. and more annoying whenever you search, it opens a webpage and doesn't do it in the app.

on mobile there were many cases that I didn't get notification of important discussions. rooms was the way to separate a talk. but it become tedious. each time for a new subject that you wanted to discuss, you needed to add all the team members into a new room. and after a while the room goes silent. you will end up with a tons of not-in-use rooms that you don't want to clean up them for history purposes. also the slack UI for sub discussion is very stupid. if someone forget to check the checkbox to post the subdiscussion in the main discussion thread, other team members even won't notice such discussion is in progress.

we was paying for office 365 and thought why not give the teams a shot. we won't be in worth situation than we are. we moved to teams and we loved it instantly, we had a separate tab aggregated all the files upload. we could reply on other talk. no need of creating a new room. this way room belongs to a team and not a certain topic. our sub discussion was visible to the whole team. enjoyed integration with azure and unlimited history. the best part was integration with outlook. it was a full suit solution. our stats become busy on outlook meeting events. we get weekly analyse. we didn't need to host our wiki seperated. we've created wiki per team. the communication was much more fun.

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Pros of Slack
Pros of XMPP
  • 1.2K
    Easy to integrate with
  • 876
    Excellent interface on multiple platforms
  • 849
    Free
  • 694
    Mobile friendly
  • 690
    People really enjoy using it
  • 331
    Great integrations
  • 315
    Flexible notification preferences
  • 198
    Unlimited users
  • 184
    Strong search and data archiving
  • 155
    Multi domain switching support
  • 82
    Easy to use
  • 40
    Beautiful
  • 27
    Hubot support
  • 22
    Unread/read control
  • 21
    Slackbot
  • 19
    Permalink for each messages
  • 17
    Text snippet with highlighting
  • 15
    Quote message easily
  • 14
    Per-room notification
  • 13
    Awesome integration support
  • 12
    Star for each message / attached files
  • 12
    IRC gateway
  • 11
    Good communication within a team
  • 11
    Dropbox Integration
  • 10
    Slick, search is great
  • 10
    Jira Integration
  • 9
    New Relic Integration
  • 8
    Great communication tool
  • 8
    Combine All Services Quickly
  • 8
    Asana Integration
  • 7
    This tool understands developers
  • 7
    XMPP gateway
  • 7
    Google Drive Integration
  • 7
    Awesomeness
  • 6
    Replaces email
  • 6
    Twitter Integration
  • 6
    Google Docs Integration
  • 6
    BitBucket integration
  • 5
    Jenkins Integration
  • 5
    GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback
  • 5
    Guest and Restricted user control
  • 4
    Clean UI
  • 4
    Excellent multi platform internal communication tool
  • 4
    GitHub integration
  • 4
    Mention list view
  • 4
    Gathers all my communications in one place
  • 3
    Perfect implementation of chat + integrations
  • 3
    Easy
  • 3
    Easy to add a reaction
  • 3
    Timely while non intrusive
  • 3
    Great on-boarding
  • 3
    Threaded chat
  • 3
    Visual Studio Integration
  • 3
    Easy to start working with
  • 3
    Android app
  • 2
    Simplicity
  • 2
    Message Actions
  • 2
    It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC
  • 2
    So much better than email
  • 2
    Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams
  • 2
    Great interface
  • 2
    Great Channel Customization
  • 2
    Markdown
  • 2
    Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations
  • 1
    Great Support Team
  • 1
    Watch
  • 1
    Multi work-space support
  • 1
    Flexible and Accessible
  • 1
    Better User Experience
  • 1
    Archive Importing
  • 1
    Travis CI integration
  • 1
    It's the coolest IM ever
  • 1
    Community
  • 1
    Great API
  • 1
    Easy remote communication
  • 1
    Get less busy
  • 1
    API
  • 1
    Zapier integration
  • 1
    Targetprocess integration
  • 1
    Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock
  • 1
    Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT
  • 1
    I was 666 star :D
  • 1
    Dev communication Made Easy
  • 1
    Integrates with just about everything
  • 1
    Very customizable
  • 0
    Platforms
  • 0
    Easy to useL
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    Cons of Slack
    Cons of XMPP
    • 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
    • 4
      Too many notifications by default
      Be the first to leave a con

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      What is Slack?

      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.

      What is XMPP?

      It is a set of open technologies for instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized routing of XML data.

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      What companies use Slack?
      What companies use XMPP?
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      Sep 29 2020 at 7:36PM

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      What are some alternatives to Slack and XMPP?
      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.
      Discord
      Discord is a modern free voice & text chat app for groups of gamers. Our resilient Erlang backend running on the cloud has built in DDoS protection with automatic server failover.
      Trello
      Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.
      Skype
      Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.
      Asana
      Asana is the easiest way for teams to track their work. From tasks and projects to conversations and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish--and get results. Available at asana.com and on iOS & Android.
      See all alternatives