What do you like best about Slack?
Honestly, the channel organization is what keeps things from falling apart. I manage a data team and we have separate channels for different stuff—pipelines, incidents, general discussion, and specific projects. Before Slack, we were doing all this over email and it was impossible to find anything. Now when something breaks, I know exactly where to look. Someone messages #incidents and everyone relevant sees it immediately. It's not fancy, but it just works.
The search is actually useful in ways that surprised me. We're constantly dealing with questions that have been asked before. A business user will ask "why did revenue drop last quarter?" and instead of explaining again, I can search for that conversation from months ago and share what we found. We've probably saved a month of repeated explanations because I can pull up old threads instead of re-answering the same questions. That matters when you're supporting multiple teams asking similar questions on different timelines.
The threading keeps conversations somewhat readable. We'll have 20+ messages discussing a data quality issue—what went wrong, how we're fixing it, what we found. If it wasn't threaded, the main channel would just be chaos with ten different conversations happening at once. The thread keeps it contained so people can follow the discussion without getting lost.
I like that it's accessible. Everyone on my team uses it. There's not a learning curve. You open Slack, you know what to do. Compared to some other tools we've tried, it doesn't require a manual or training. That sounds basic, but when you're trying to keep a team aligned, tools that are just intuitive to use matter.
The notifications are fine. I can mute conversations I don't need to watch and set up alerts for keywords that matter to me. I get notified for mentions and direct messages, which is enough. I'm not drowning in notifications constantly, which is better than how email used to work.
One thing that does frustrate me is the search could be better. Sometimes I'm looking for a conversation from specific months ago and it takes a while to find it. The search results aren't always organized the way I'd expect. And honestly, Slack keeps changing the UI and it gets annoying relearning where things are. But that's minor compared to how much we rely on it daily.
The file sharing works. People upload data documentation, query results, screenshots of broken dashboards. It's all there in the conversation thread so context is preserved. Way better than email attachments getting lost.
Slack is just reliable. I can't remember the last time it was down or buggy for us. It's not going to blow your mind with features, but it does what it's supposed to do without causing headaches. For a data team that needs to coordinate quickly and reference past decisions, that's enough. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Slack?
The notification system drives me crazy. I've spent way too much time trying to configure notifications so I'm alerted about what matters but not bombarded with everything. I've got messages from five different channels, direct messages, mentions, keywords I've set up, and Slack keeps changing how notifications work. I end up either getting too many notifications and missing the important ones in the noise, or I turn things off and miss critical alerts. There's no sweet spot. The notification settings are buried in menus and it takes forever to actually tweak them the way you want.
Threads are supposed to fix conversations getting messy, but they create a different problem. If you reply in a thread, most of your team won't see it unless they specifically click into that thread. So important information ends up hidden away, and then people ask the same questions again because they didn't realize there was an answer in a thread. I've had to tell my team multiple times to mention someone directly in the main channel if it's important, which defeats the purpose of threads.
The search is unreliable for finding older conversations. Our Slack workspace is three years old and conversations from year one are hard to find. The search results don't always show what you're looking for, and sometimes you have to try different keywords just to get relevant results. When I need to reference something from a year ago, it's frustrating how long it takes to dig it up.
The UI keeps changing. Every few months Slack redesigns something or moves features around. I'll be looking for a setting and it's suddenly somewhere else. I get it—companies update software—but the changes feel unnecessary most of the time. It's just friction when you're trying to work.
Slack can be slow sometimes, especially when we have heavy file sharing happening or lots of people posting simultaneously. The mobile app especially gets sluggish. Not constantly, but often enough that I notice it and it's frustrating.
The external sharing features are clunky. When we need to collaborate with people outside our organization, the setup is awkward. It works, but it feels like a second-class feature compared to how internal communication works. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
