Best Communication Apps to Keep Your Team Connected
Blog
October 25, 2018 | Nick Chuvalas - Hondros College Contributor
There are all kinds of tools that allow your team to communicate better. These applications and platforms offer powerful chat functionality that empowers your team to share information, assets, and other resources. The right choice for your business depends on how large your group is, whether you need to integrate the chat with other solutions, and the type of information that you’re communicating.
Slack
Slack is one of the most popular team communication apps, and for good reason. This platform acts as a centralized hub for your team. You can easily create multiple channels for every team, project, department, and topic so relevant communication is categorized properly. Slack’s search tools streamline knowledge sharing – It’s easy to find information as you need it. Due to Slack’s popularity, many third-party tools support integration with the platform. For example, you can easily pull in documents from Google Drive so everyone in the channel can see these resources.
ChatWork
Do you frequently have people talking to other teams and external partners? ChatWork has an excellent set of features for this use case, as it acts as a social network that makes it easy to communicate with all parties. It’s easy to add Chatwork users to a chat, so you don’t have to go through an extensive process to set up user accounts for suppliers, contractors, and vendors.
Twist
Sometimes threaded conversations are the best way to get across ideas and keep everyone in the loop. Twist is designed around the concept of fewer notifications compared to group chat apps. Instead, they focus on offering user-friendly information organization so all employees have access to the resources that they need. The UI may look familiar to people who use Todoist, a minimalist to-do list app, as that team designed Twist too. You have group chat functionality, but you have to either start a new thread or add a comment onto one that’s already available.
This arrangement encourages the team to sort the information so that it’s easily retrievable by people who are checking the chat in the future. You can also send direct messages to other users in case you want to discuss something that’s only relevant to a single person.
Basecamp
While built-in commenting is sufficient for quick notes on projects, sometimes you need more extensive conversation. Basecamp has a Campfire chat feature that is associated with each project. The information is condensed into one location that is relevant for the team working on that project, so you don’t have to search around.
Mattermost
Are you worried about hosting your sensitive business data on someone else’s servers? While cloud-based team communication tools offer convenient deployment and built-in mobility, they may not meet the requirements that your organization has for data security. Mattermost is a self-hosted team chat that gives you full control over the deployment, maintenance, and support of the software. You get the flexibility of changing it to meet your specific business needs rather than relying on a third-party vendor to handle that part of the process for you.
Good communication is necessary to keep productivity up and projects on schedule. Each of these tools has a distinct feature set that covers different use cases, so you can find the one that best fits your requirements.