I love that there are some other tools coming up to challenge Slack -- hopefully this will put pressure on Slack to up their game. Slack has been... very slow to fix bugs / add new features. They're starting to feel like Microsoft... like they don't move fast, aren't trying to improve anything, and don't care about customer feedback.

I love Slack, but some of my gripes with Slack:

* I can't spell check from a Post in Slack. Posts would be great for taking notes, but they lack order. It doesn't have to be full-on Confluence / Wiki style, but being able to add some classifications to Posts would be helpful. And in-line spell check... Every other tool everywhere supports this, but not Slack Posts.

* Posts and Chats use different formatting markup. Why not just use Markup for both?

* Channel names being forced into lower case and very short character counts... Why can't I use a longer name for a channel and just wrap the name in the display? Why does it have to be all lower-case without spaces? Why isn't there a folder structure to the channels to keep all my clients / focuses grouped?

* Slack forces me to put Bots and People in the same channel and it gives them both equal visibility. I should be able to add a #bot or something and have those messages be something I can search for, or something that shows up in the sidebar, but not something that talks over people. Their current work-around is to use two channels, one for people and one for bots... but making sure your team is added to every channel... it sucks. FlowDoc does a better job of this, and if it was built the way they do it I wouldn't have to search multiple channels to find the info I could just search one place.

* File storage in Slack is a nightmare. Try finding a file again a month later. If I upload the same file name why can't it just version the file like Box or RedPen does? Nope, it just uploads the same file again... tagging a user or # doesn't actually tag the the file the way you want it to... so I can't even really search by those things.

* When you click "Open" a file you have to log in again? That's so busted. I can download a file, but if I'm on a phone and I click "preview" it prompts me to sign in -- extra tedious for users who enable 2FA. Security doesn't have to be that tedious, just let me open files without a login -- if I can download them but I can't open them directly it's not security, it's just an annoyance.

* The default integrations in Slack kind of suck. I know that's not 100% Slack... but why can't I get updates when someone makes a change to a Google Drive file, or creates files in a Google Drive / Box / Dropbox folder?

* Hashtags are busted. Why don't # work like they do in Twitter where I can search for them after? Having # be rooms isn't good. Nobody gets that to start... I'd so much rather be able to tag a conversation (oh and have a threaded conversation) around a # and then have that # show up in the channel column...

* User management is lame. As the administrator, why can't I go into a user's profile and add them to multiple rooms at once? Or why can't I add a bunch of people to multiple rooms at once? Also why can't I lock down user names -- I don't want my users to change their user names to political statements or stupid handles, if I set it First.Last I want it to stay that way. The last thing I want is for one of my developers to rename himself @ZombieGoatMaster4DonaldTrump and have that be something that is shown to a client.

* Mobile isn't consistent with Desktop. Why don't the channel lists in Slack sort the same way on Desktop and Mobile? Why does the + sign mean join a channel on Mobile, but create a channel on desktop? It's so inconsistent it's like they don't even bother having their different product managers talk or work with the same UX team.

Anyway really glad people are producing alternatives to Slack. Going to check this out, thanks!