Why I decided to quit Slack and start chatting on Ryver

You may know about apps like Slack that help you and your team communicate more efficiently. This new one is called Ryver. We moved my team at Geeks Life from Slack to Ryver and have been pretty happy with it. I want to show you the differences so you can decide what’s best for your team.

Chatrooms are great in both apps

With both apps, you can set up multiple chatrooms with your team members. We have a general chat for everyone on the team to communicate together. Then we have smaller group chats for only members of the team that a topic applies to. No need to bother everyone when it’ll just be noise for some people, right? Then of course, direct messages for individual conversations. Both applications work pretty much the same in this respect.

Teams work better in Ryver

Let’s say you want to invite someone outside of your company into a conversation. Maybe a client. In Slack, you must set up a separate team for that conversation or risk them being able to see everything that happens in the general chat. Potentially a disaster zone for clients to see!

In Ryver, this isn’t the case, and one of the main reasons we switched. You can bring a client in without fear they’ll see something you don’t want them to. Or just bother them with stuff they don’t need. It’s just a lot cleaner.

Ryver has unlimited files and messages

In Slack you can only have so many messages for free kept on the server. And you have a storage limit for sharing files. Which I totally understand! They have a business to run, right? Ryver takes a different approach to their business and keeps it unlimited for files and messages for most users. Essentially, enterprise level customers are paying for the free users. So you’ll be able to keep and access everything you ever say or send.

Now … Slack is great at search, but again, if you can’t search a conversation you had a month ago, it does you no good. Where Ryver really shines is this: you can promote a chat to a Post. Or you can create a Post from scratch. When it’s a Post, you can have conversations that are housed in the post instead of all over the place. It keeps the conversation together.

Here’s how we use that inside my team. When we’re working on a video, we create a post with that video as the title. Then we can link to the google doc that has our script, plus all the necessary information about posting it to social media. Tags. All that kind of stuff. When the episode has been edited and uploaded, the video editor posts that that’s been done. So our Editor-in-Chief knows to go in, grab all the appropriate files, and finish the publishing process. Having everything housed together is brilliant and efficient!

Notifications

Where Slack wins out in all this is notifications. It’s fantastic at notifying you immediately when someone is talking to you. Both on desktop and mobile. Ryver isn’t quite there yet. On desktop, it’s great at notifying you when someone’s talking. A little too good, though. In Do Not Disturb mode, it’s doesn’t always fully shut off.

And it’s finicky about mobile notifications.

I expect these are issues that will be fixed with time.

Similar, but different!

So there you go — two great team communication apps. They’re similar, yet very different! Which app do you use? Are you considering switching after watching this video? Leave a comment below, and use the links above to share this video on your favorite social media site.

I’m Luria Petrucci. You can find more of me at GeeksLife.com, or of course, right here on Digital Trends! Bye!