Slack Doesn’t Work, Use This Instead
Remote offices all over the place are crashing this morning due to a Slack shutdown. If group chat isn’t enough for your team, there are tons of quick and dirty replacement options. My personal favorite is Stride.
Stride is created by the same people who created HipChat, which was used in my last office (and possibly yours) before they switched to Slack.
Signing up on their site only takes a few minutes and is free for an unlimited number of users (albeit with limited features).
To create a room, ask one (and only one) person to log into Stride and register. The registration process takes approximately 2 minutes and then they will be placed in a room where they can invite people by email. I think it could take about five minutes from the moment I created the Lifehacker room to my colleagues in it this morning.
You get unlimited users and chats for free, plus some built-in collaboration tools, file sharing and storage up to 5GB (paid version unlimited) and message history up to 25K messages (paid version unlimited).
You can check the difference between free and paid version here .
If Stride isn’t for you, there are several other decent options out there, including Rocket Chat (although I couldn’t get it to send me a confirmation email this morning) and Ryver (and a host of others). If your team is small, there is also a good old chat via Google Hangouts in Gmail or of course email.