Following the Recent Social Media Downtime, What’s the Best App for Your Team Chat?

Following the Recent Social Media Downtime, What’s the Best App for Your Team Chat?

Facebook’s big outage, which also caused Instagram and Whatsapp to go down, shook some people who rely on those platforms for business communication and transactions. 

Even if you don’t use any of those platforms professionally, the downtime might have caused you to question how stable other essential tools, like team chat apps, really are.

Keep reading to find out what some of the most functional (and stable) apps for team chat are that you can start using to get more done today.

The Best Team Chat Apps in 2021

Spike: best conversational email chat app

If you’re looking to declutter your email inboxes and merge multiple email accounts into one dashboard, Spike is the app for you. It lets you sync all your different emails and shows your sent/received messages in a chat format, allowing for quick, natural responses. 

It’s much easier to view only the information you need in Spike instead of sifting through long email threads full of repetitive subject lines, headers, and content. Not only does Spike convert your emails into a conversational chat format, but it lets you create collaborative notes, tasks, and to-do lists right within the app, so you and your team can stay on top of all your work in one place.

Other useful features of Spike include:

  • Ability to preview email attachments without downloading them
  • Video meetings and voice messaging
  • Calendar
  • Advanced search
  • Groups for teams
  • Priority inbox (filters things like newsletters and promotions out)

Discord: best voice chat

Discord allows for voice, instant messaging, and video chat, but it’s best for those who want to remain connected via VoIP (voice over internet protocol) chat. Users can create private communities or servers where they can chat with other members. 

Discord isn’t primarily designed with businesses in mind (it’s more popular in the online gaming world), but it can be great for teams who want to be able to constantly voice chat while collaborating. 

For example, if you and your team simultaneously work on shared documents or spreadsheets, you can all log in to a Discord server to talk as you collaborate, improving efficiency and productivity.

Google Chat: best chat app for Google Workspace users

If you spend most of your day in Google Workspace (i.e., using Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Gmail), the native Google Chat might be the right workplace chat app for you. Google Chat lets you create as many channels, or chat rooms, as you need, so you can easily organize your chats with different team members into easy-to-follow threads.

That may sound pretty basic, but the main reason why Google Chat is great for people who work a lot in Google Workspace is how seamlessly it integrates with the other Google apps. For instance, if you share a Google Drive link in a chat room, everyone in that room automatically gets access to it. You can also create calendar events right from chats.

Microsoft Teams: best enterprise chat app

Microsoft Teams is a great team communication app for corporations and businesses where your employees are organized into many different teams. Basically, it lets you invite employees to teams within the app, then break those teams down further into smaller channels, so all your communication stays just as organized as your company. The app allows for instant messaging and video calls, as well as easy screen sharing for efficient collaboration.

Signal and Telegram: best WhatsApp alternatives

If you use WhatsApp to communicate with team members, clients, or vendors around the world, the recent outage might have caused you quite the scare. Signal and Telegram are two different encrypted text and call apps that allow you to contact anyone, anywhere. Of the two, Signal is the more secure app, while Telegram offers more customization options and features.

Slack: best chat app with integrations

Slack is a very robust app for team chat with all the handy chat features you should look for in a team communication app, including advanced search/filtering, multiple channels, threads within channels, file sharing, status updates, to name some of the big ones. 

Where Slack really shines is its integration with other third-party productivity apps, including popular project management software platforms, file-sharing platforms, and more. This integration allows you to unify and centralize a lot of your workspace into Slack, saving time and increasing productivity. 

Conclusion

The recent social media outage showed us that even the most trusted, widely used apps could go down for extended periods of time, potentially leaving businesses and their employees left without one of their main means of communication. 

However, if you use any of the team chat apps mentioned above, you can be certain you’re getting one of the best, most stable messengers for you and your team.

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