Hangouts Chat is an innovative tool. Google is constantly adding new features to Hangouts Chat, it's interactive easy-to-use, and intuitional. bPol team migrated in one day - with the argument of unlimited history it was not hard to convince the members.
"Hangouts Chat makes it easy for teams to be able to get their work done in one place. From direct messages to group conversations, Chat helps teams collaborate easily and efficiently. With dedicated, virtual rooms to house projects over time — plus threaded conversations — Chat makes it simple to track progress and follow-up tasks. Chat currently supports 28 languages and each room can support up to 8,000 members."
Pricing: Slack is expensive for the given value/features. When using Freemium Version, there is a limited amount of plugins and a limited history ( to a few days back in our use case). We are users of G-suit so our migration to Hangouts Chat was just a matter of time.
Messaging: Hangouts Chat - based on threads, on Slack it's just one of the features
Notifications: Same
Search: Both in Slack and Hangouts Chat, users can search within messages.
Voice and video calls: Quickly schedule meetings - integration with Google hangouts is a game-changer for us.
Summary after one-week trial :
So far, good points are:
- Solid Meet integration
- Easy of use
What is missing :
- Some new shortcuts to learn
- New app to install
- No way to have guests in the channels(rooms)
To sum up :
Of course, competition is healthy, and slack will stay available to all teams that have no enterprise G-suite or equivalents of Microsoft. But my opinion is that it might lose some market share.