Collaboration Software Tech Review for Teams #2

Collaboration Software Tech Review for Teams #2: A Slack vs. Quip vs. Yammer Review

With so much noise taking place in the project management realm, getting everybody motivated and on the same page demands constant, strategic effort from the leaders throughout your organization. The right collaboration tool can help you and your teams do more while stimulating a connected workplace.

Arden’s second post in our Tech Review for Teams Series explores the features and capabilities offered by three of today’s popular team collaboration softwares: Slack, Quip, and Yammer.

We’ll Be Upfront About This

Even the best collaboration software isn’t going to do the team development work for you. For that, you need to establish ground rules, instill and work toward trust, and ensure that pathways are open for clear communication. Find out how to begin honing a group of individuals into a high-performance team when you download our free eBook on successful offsite facilitations.

Now, without further ado, let’s get to helping you narrow down the collaboration software that will gel and excel your company’s culture and teams.

Slack Review

Price/Availability: Slack is a messaging-centric collaboration software that makes a great option for teams of all sizes. Slack runs well on Mac and Windows and offers an accompanying app for both Android and iOS.

  • The basic version of Slack is free to try with an unlimited trial period.
  • Slack Standard costs $6.67 per month per user and brings in a message search function, unlimited apps and service integrations, enhanced security, and 10 GB of storage per user.
  • Slack Plus builds on Slack Standard’s capabilities plus 20 GB of total storage per team member.

Noteworthy Capabilities: Through its savvy messaging platform, supreme integration with the other tools that you use, and searchable function that quickly allows you to pull up files or messages in a flash, Slack saves groups time and works to increase team transparency. Their user data showed a 48.6% reduction in internal emails and 25.1% fewer meetings.

Something Neat: Slack offers nonprofit organizations an annual Standard plan subscription for free and 85% off either of their annual plans for educational institutions and student-run groups.

Quip Review

Price/Availability: Quip equips your team with elite document sharing and messaging capability across Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS.

  • Quip Basic is free to use.
  • Quip Team includes unlimited group sharing and enhanced document recovery. It costs $10 per month for teams of 10 or less and $40 per month for teams of 11 to 20.
  • Quip Business is $12 per user per month and allows unlimited guests, additional security, and data leak protection.
  • The top Quip version, Enterprise, costs $25 per user per month and includes a dedicated account manager, single sign-on for Google Apps, and other tools.

Noteworthy Capabilities: With Quip, team members can use instant messaging, post to discussion boards, upload and edit all kinds of documents, and have multiple team members working on the same project materials at once.

Something Neat: For every document that’s in the works, a chat window appears where you can ping others in the file and get answers and updates in real time.

Yammer Review

Price/Availability: Yammer acts as your company’s private social network. By tapping into social media methods such as a home discovery feed for each user, employees stay in the loop on company-wide updates in addition to those for their individual groups and teams. Since Yammer is a Microsoft product, its pricing is weaved into Office for Business and Office 365 plans.

  • Yammer Basic is free and Yammer Enterprise as a standalone feature costs as little as $3 per user per month.

Noteworthy Capabilities: In Yammer, you can access shared calendars, manage projects, and set up groups for different departments throughout your organization. Yammer plugs seamlessly into Office for file sharing and co-authorship with Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access files.

Something Neat: Social functions such as liking a post shared to a group- or company-wide page or sending praise from one team member to another is part of what makes Yammer unique. Allowing individuals’ personalities to shine through, it’s a great tool for companies looking to facilitate and grow their culture.

Ready, Set, Collaborate!

Each of these top-notch softwares helps teams to increase productivity and brainstorming success across projects and initiatives. We hope our review helped you find one that would work well for your organization.

Looking to switch out your current online meeting technology or explore new options? You may be interested in also getting up to speed on the usability and features of Google Hangouts, GoTo Meeting, and Join.Me. See what these popular programs have to offer by reading our first team tech review on video conferencing software.