Four Chat Tools, and Only Two Will Print a Price

Convert everything to one annual number for your own headcount, then read what each price leaves out. Write down three figures: how many people need an account, how many external people need to be inside your channels, and how far back you need to be able to search. Slack and Microsoft you can price today from their own pages. Google you price by pricing Workspace, because Chat is not sold on its own. Mattermost you price by asking. Then add the part none of them quote, which is the hours somebody spends running the thing afterward.

Almost never on the software. It goes wrong on ownership. Somebody capable rolls it out in two weeks, everyone starts relying on it, and then that person changes role. Two years later there are four hundred channels, several integrations are dead, half a dozen former contractors still hold guest accounts, and nobody can say what the retention policy is. All four platforms here can do the job. What went wrong is that no one was ever assigned to keep doing it.

You do, entirely. You hold your own Zoho Cliq subscription in your own name and we work inside it as administrators. The channels, the history, the files, the bots and the integrations are yours, so if you move to another provider or bring it in house, nothing has to be exported out of an account we control. We would rather earn the renewal than hold anything of yours as leverage.

For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say it here than after an invoice. If you have fifteen people, one office and no compliance obligation, Slack Pro or Microsoft Teams Essentials will serve you perfectly well and there is nothing here worth paying us to manage. This starts being worth it roughly where the second question arrives: external collaborators who need controlled access, a retention or eDiscovery requirement, or enough integrations that one of them breaking actually costs you a day.

Microsoft, for most businesses, and we are not going to dress that up. Teams Essentials is four dollars a user a month paid yearly, and if you already pay for Microsoft 365 then the difference between the Business Basic plan with Teams and the one without it is a dollar sixty. Nothing on this page beats that on price alone. What the four dollars does not include is anybody deciding how your workspace should be shaped, or noticing when part of it quietly stops working, which is the whole of what we sell.

On a subscription the platform is supported and whatever you configured on it is not, and almost everything that breaks is what you configured. A bot that stopped posting because an API version was retired. A channel whose permissions drifted after a reorganization. A connector that silently stopped syncing in April. The vendor will confirm their service is healthy, which it is. Somebody still has to go and find the actual fault.

No, and it usually goes better if you do not. The normal order is one department that is already frustrated with whatever it uses now, then the teams that talk to that department most, then everybody else. Both tools run in parallel for a couple of weeks so nobody loses a conversation mid project. The one thing worth settling up front rather than in stages is the channel and permission structure, because retrofitting that onto an active workspace is considerably harder than starting with it.

Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the channel and team structure, who holds administrator rights, where guests and external people sit, what the retention and export settings actually do, and which integrations are still alive. Then we tell you what we found before touching anything. Occasionally the honest answer is that rebuilding the structure costs less than untangling it, and if that is the answer you get it in writing rather than as a surprise halfway through.

Two to six weeks for most businesses, and longer where nobody currently agrees who may talk to whom. The channel structure comes first, then guest and external access, then the integrations into your other systems, then the bots and slash commands. A migration carrying years of Slack or Teams history is its own project and is scoped separately, because the size of that varies enormously between one company and the next.

Possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns the workspace and genuinely keeps it current is most of this job. Where we tend to be useful alongside one is the build work that keeps getting deferred, and cover for the two weeks they are away. We are also perfectly happy to be a second opinion on a structure rather than the people running it.

Two cases, and both are common. If you have a small team in one place with no external collaborators and no compliance obligation, buy Slack or Teams and spend the money elsewhere. And if your data genuinely cannot leave your own infrastructure, Zoho Cliq is cloud only and cannot meet that, so self hosted Mattermost is the right answer and we are not. You would hear both of those on the first call rather than the third.

We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. Communication that feels chaotic is usually chaotic because decisions are being made in six places and nobody has agreed which one is authoritative. Moving that to a new platform moves the chaos, it does not remove it. If what you actually need is somebody to decide where work gets decided, that is a shorter conversation and a much cheaper one.

Three hundred dollars a month, per organization, covering up to a hundred users and five bots or integrations. It is listed on the managed Zoho Cliq page and on this one. Unlike the figures on the cards above it is a management fee rather than a license, so your own Cliq subscription sits alongside it and we will price that with you before you commit. A migration off Slack or Teams, or a custom integration build, is scoped and quoted separately so the monthly number stays predictable.

Thirty days’ notice ends it. Everything stays exactly where it is, because it was always in your Zoho account rather than ours. The channels, the history, the bots, the integrations and the permission structure all remain, and we hand over documentation of how it was built rather than leaving the next person to reverse engineer it. There is no export to negotiate and no term left to run down.

A rough headcount, including the people who will need an account but will rarely log in. Whatever you are using for chat today, in whatever state it is in. The names of the people who should hold administrator rights. A sense of which external parties need to be inside your channels. And any retention, export or compliance requirement you are already under, because that shapes the tier before anything else does.