Compare / Salesforce, Inc.
Rutba vs Slack
The team chat standard. Better than ours at being a chat app — and structurally unable to do the one thing ours was built for.
Checked 1 September 2026Slack pricing ↗
What Slack is
Team messaging: channels, threads, direct messages, search, huddles and an enormous app and workflow ecosystem, at very large scale and with enterprise compliance and retention tooling.
Who it genuinely suits
- Essentially any team that needs to talk, which is why it is everywhere
- Organisations with eDiscovery, retention or compliance requirements on messaging
- Companies whose workflows already live in its app ecosystem
Where they win
What Slack does better than us.
Every comparison page on this site has this section and none of them is empty. If it were, you would be right to discount the rest of the page.
It is a much better chat product than ours
Search, mobile, notifications, threading, huddles and reliability at a scale we will not see for years. Rutba Chat is in early access and our own site labels it that way.
The app and workflow ecosystem
Thousands of integrations and a workflow builder people genuinely use.
Compliance tooling
Retention policies, legal hold and eDiscovery, audited and required by many organisations.
Where we win
What Rutba does that this does not.
Argued from how the products are built rather than from a feature list, because feature lists are the part of a comparison that goes stale first.
A conversation can be bound to a record
This is the one thing no general chat product models, and the reason ours was built thin rather than integrated: a discussion attached to an order, a ticket or a customer, visible to whoever opens that record next — rather than a channel somebody has to remember the name of.
The context is already there
Talking about the work next to the work, instead of pasting a link into a channel so that six people can open a different system.
One vendor and one directory
Chat, mail, files, meetings and the business software share an identity, so joining and leaving are one action each.
And the one that is not a feature
Salesforce, Inc. will not build what you ask for. We will.
That is not a criticism of them — a vendor at their scale has to weigh your request against every other customer it touches, and schedule it behind a roadmap set a year out. Your request is a rounding error in their planning, honestly so. We are small, and the people building the product are the people you talk to: what helps everyone goes into the product at no extra charge, what is specific to you is quoted as the work it is, and when the answer is no you get the reason.
Side by side
The same six questions the hub asks of everyone.
| Question | Rutba | Slack |
|---|---|---|
| Runs the businessCRM, stock, orders, production and the ledger, from one vendor | Included | Not covered |
| Runs the dayMail, files, documents, chat and meetings, included rather than licensed separately | Included | Partly |
| One set of recordsDo the modules share the records, or integrate copies of them | Included | Not covered |
| Buy it yourselfCan you subscribe and start without a partner or a sales cycle | Included | Included |
| Parts sold separatelyCan you take one piece without committing to the platform | Included | Included |
| Run it yourselfIs there a path to your own hardware | Partly | Not covered |
On price: We do not reproduce Salesforce, Inc.’s prices here. A list price is published and fair to quote, and it is stale within a quarter — which would make this page quietly wrong in a way you could not see. Read today’s number from them, and ours is on our pricing page in full, tier by tier.
Moving
What leaving Slack actually involves.
The question that decides this is not whether you should move but whether you can. This is the honest version, including the parts that do not come across.
- 1
Most businesses should not move off Slack, and we would say so on a call. It is better at the thing it does.
- 2
The realistic pattern is both: Slack for the team’s general conversation, Rutba Chat for discussions bound to records, which is where the general chat tool was never going to help.
- 3
Message history export exists on both sides; threading and reactions do not survive a migration intact.
- 4
If you do move, do it channel by channel rather than at once, and start with the channels that are really about records.
No customer has done this yet. The steps above describe the mechanism — what exports, what imports, what has to be rebuilt — rather than a migration we have run. When one has been run, this section will say whose it was.
Our actual recommendation
Keep Slack. The comparison worth making is not chat against chat — it is whether the conversations about your orders and your customers should be happening in a system that has never heard of either.
If you did move
The products this comparison is about.
With their real availability labels, which apply inside a comparison exactly as they do everywhere else on this site.
Note before you compare: Rutba Chat, Rutba Meet are not generally available yet. Any row above that we win on them is a claim about what ships, not about what you can buy today.
Rutba Chat
Early accessTeam chat & business messaging
Channels, direct messages, and threads for the team — plus discussions attached directly to the order, ticket, or customer being discussed.
- Channels, direct messages, and threaded replies
- Discussions attached to orders, tickets, and customers - with deep links both ways
- Searchable history, read state, presence, and mentions with directory autocomplete
From $4 per user / month
Rutba Meet
Coming soonVideo meetings & calendar
Scheduling, a shared calendar, and video rooms — with each meeting logged against the customer or deal it concerned.
- Shared team calendar, scheduling, invitees and RSVP
- Availability visible across the organization, exportable as ICS
- Meetings booked from - and logged to - customer records
From $6 per user / month
Rutba CRM
Available nowCRM & sales pipeline software
Track leads from first contact to signed quote, keep every conversation attached to the customer it belongs to, and run your support desk off the same contact record your sales team uses.
- Lead capture, scoring, and pipeline stages you define
- Quotes and proposals that convert straight into orders
- Shared customer timeline — calls, emails, and tickets in one thread
Includes: CRM · Helpdesk · Customer Portal · Marketplace
From $18 per user / month
Head to head
Slack against the others.
You are comparing Slack to something, and it may well not be us. These are written to the same standard as this page — sourced, dated, and naming where each product wins.
Weighing this against Slack?
Tell us what you run and how you use it. We will be specific about what would improve, what would get worse, and whether the move is worth it at all.