Slack for Desktop for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Eric R..

  Very useful, but needs folders to organize channels

  My team has been using Slack for about a year. We use Slack a lot and it has been incredibly helpful. However, the inability to organize channels into hierarchical folders, or even one level of folders, is a serious productivity killer. We have about 50 channels, so hunting for the right place to put information can be a hassle. We already use prefixes (e.g., dev_XXX or partner_YYY), but that isn’t a great solution, and it does little to reduce the visual and cognitive clutter. The team has been otherwise helpful with bugs we’ve encountered, but hasn’t been able to move the needle on folders. Hopefully, they will get to this important feature. Otherwise, Slack is great.

  
  
• By johnbej

  Priceless tool

  This is a game changer for my digital marketing agency. We use it every day and a lot of my clients are now using it too. I love all the free features it comes with but it be great if I have more privacy features for my team and clients. Because each user has a profile with contact details, it prevents me from mixing my teams together with other teams and clients. I have to create several Slack accounts for different teams/clients. I don't need my clients contacting everyone directly or vise versa. For paid, because I work with such a large team it would be too expensive to upgrade. But if I could pay a flat fee $20 up $50 a month just for that feature (ideally $25) I would pay to keep my team's contact details private and limit use of DM between each other and clients so I can add clients and team members to one channel and limit what my clients can do and DM. To pay per account is not realistiic, it's way too many people. Please add this feature it would be so great and I would pay a flat fee for it! :) I'm still giving 5 stars because the value deserves it. This would just take it to the next level.

  
  
• By Fitztacular

  Good but could be great :)

  Like this chat app a lot. Saves me a lot of time with its built-in features as well as the available integrations. Also a big fan of the styling, makes work chat less boring! However, noticed with recent update that the "Slack Helper" processes are chugging CPU time, so much so that the fans on my top-spec PC run on medium to high. Didn’t have this issue before so I’m sure this is an optimization they just need to make. One thing I would LOVE to see is the ability to “sleep” a group, so that it didn’t have to be always running in the background. For someone like me, who uses Slack for 9 different groups, having each of those chats actively run leads to each spinning up a Slack Helper process that consumes a fair amount of CPU. Would love to be able to “sleep” less important chats e.g. disable background updates for those groups until I explicitly “un-sleep” it. This would primarily be used for chats of lower priority than others.

  
  
• By prosperuser

  Poorly defined interface

  Themes are way to limited, you can only adjust the color of the sidebar. I just read a post where the dev team said they had to make hard choices about slack and that allowing for a wide selection of themes didn’t make the cut. Fortunately, there are plenty other chat tool dev teams out there that have figured out how to customize their interface, so there are choices. Threading is terrible. I’ve yet to see a team that is able to be disciplined enough to put every message into the appropriate thread for the entire discussion. Give us an option to drag it a message into a thread and add it to the discussion. Even when a thread is on going, it is buried in the initial thread with the responses tracker, making the discussion difficult to follow, especially if you are in several discussions at once. I understand that that’s probably what the All Threads is intended to cure, but that just becomes a long running mess of a discussion as well.

  
  
• By davesimmons.io

  Good product, calling and screen sharing not reliable

  I still remember back before Screen Hero or whatever it was called was discontinued. I swear it worked better as a separate product. Calling in Slack in my biggest complaint, I wish it was more reliable when it comes to the screensharing portion of things. More often than not the screenshare will freeze requiring the meeting to restart or sometimes requiring the toggle of just the screenshare component. It also uses up an extremely high amount of system resources causing the fans in my PC 16" Core i9 to go crazy. A little optimization would be nice. I am writing this review today though as I continue to be annoyed by these problems that haven't been solved for years. Google Meet and Zoom don't have issues like this. One last thing, your "cool" app update messages in the AppStore change log aren't very cool. Why not actually tell customers what you are fixing instead of trying to be so creative while avoiding the disclosure of information. I feel like transparency is a little warranted in today's climate to help build trust in our industry. I for one would like to know what you are fixing so maybe I can feel better about the platform as a whole in case I have encountered or been affected by problems that may have been fixed.

  
  

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