European alternatives to Slack

Slack organises work conversation into channels, with threads, direct messages, huddles for impromptu calls, and an app directory that wires in the rest of a company’s tooling. Salesforce acquired it in 2021 and has since folded it into its own platform, adding AI search and summarisation across message history.

Two things make leaving Slack harder than the feature list suggests. The first is history: on the free plan only the most recent 90 days are visible, and export fidelity varies by tier, so a migration can quietly lose the archive teams actually rely on. The second is the integration surface — alerts, bots and approval flows accumulate in channels over years, and each one has to be rebuilt somewhere else.