Is Slack still the king in 2025? An honest Slack review

For years, Slack has been the go-to "digital HQ" for countless businesses, promising to rescue us from the black hole of internal email. It’s fantastic for zipping messages back and forth and keeping teams connected in real-time. But with a flood of new tools and AI changing the game, we have to ask: is Slack still the best choice for your team in 2025?

This isn’t your average Slack review. We’re going to dig into its key features, the latest pricing, and the real-world pros and cons. We’ll look at where it truly shines, where it stumbles, and how you can level it up from a simple chat app to a smart, automated hub for your team.

So, what is Slack anyway?

At its heart, Slack is a communication tool that corrals your team’s conversations into channels. Instead of messy, never-ending email chains, you get dedicated spaces where you can discuss projects, share files, and hash things out, either live or whenever you have a moment.

It’s built on a few core ideas:

• Channels: These are basically chat rooms for specific teams, projects, or even office-wide topics (like #random-cat-gifs).

• Direct Messages (DMs): For one-on-one chats or small group conversations that don’t need a whole channel.

• Threads: These are little side-conversations that branch off a specific message, which helps keep the main channel from getting too chaotic.

• Huddles: Quick, informal audio or video chats you can start with a single click.

Essentially, Slack aims to be the central, searchable record of your team’s working life.

A Deep Dive into Slack’s Core Features

To figure out if Slack is the right fit, you need to understand what it actually does well and where the cracks start to show.

Messaging and channels: The good and the noisy

Slack’s bread and butter is its channel-based messaging. You can set up public channels for anyone to join or private ones for more sensitive work. It’s a solid system for keeping conversations organized and out in the open. Threads are also a lifesaver for responding to a specific point without derailing the main conversation.

But here’s the catch: as your company grows, that strength can turn into a major headache. The number of channels explodes, and everything gets incredibly noisy. Important info gets buried under a mountain of chatter, and you end up with people asking the same questions over and over because finding the original answer feels like an archaeological dig.

Huddles and calls: Good for a quick chat, not a full meeting

Huddles are Slack’s answer to the classic "got a quick second?" tap on the shoulder. You can spin up an instant audio or video call inside any channel or DM. They’re perfect for those short, informal check-ins that don’t warrant scheduling a whole meeting.

The problem is, Huddles are pretty basic when it comes to more serious meetings. They top out at 50 people, and you can’t record them for anyone who missed out. Compared to dedicated tools like Zoom or Google Meet, they feel limited, which means most teams end up paying for a separate video conferencing service anyway.

Integrations and workflows: Connecting the dots

One of Slack’s biggest draws is its massive app directory, which connects to more than 2,600 other tools. You can link apps like Google Drive, Asana, and Jira to pull notifications and some basic actions right into your Slack workspace. Plus, the built-in Workflow Builder lets you automate simple, repetitive tasks ,like sending a welcome message to a new team member ,without needing to code.

But the automation is pretty rigid. It’s all based on rules you set up. It can tell you a new support ticket has been created, but it has no idea what the ticket is about or how to solve it. This means you’re often juggling (and paying for) a dozen other apps just to build a workflow that actually gets things done.

Search and file sharing: Finding the needle in the haystack

On its paid plans, Slack’s search is pretty decent. You can hunt for keywords across all your channels and even search inside files like PDFs and Google Docs.

The downside is that search is completely reactive. A team member has to know exactly what to search for and then be willing to scroll through a list of results to hopefully find the right message or file. When your team is trying to move fast, this is a real drag. You don’t always need a list of links; sometimes you just need a straight answer.

This is where adding an AI layer can make a huge difference. For example, a tool like eesel AI can integrate with Slack and your other knowledge sources. Instead of just searching, it finds and delivers direct answers, saving everyone from the endless cycle of "I know I saw it somewhere…"

Slack review: Slack pricing in 2025

Let’s talk money, because this is a big one for a lot of teams. Slack is one of the pricier options out there. It has a free version, two main paid plans, and a custom enterprise plan. The biggest catch with the free plan? It only saves your message history for 90 days, which makes it a non-starter for any business that needs to keep a record of its knowledge.

Here’s how the plans stack up:

Feature	Free	Pro	Business+
Price (Annual)	$0	$7.25 / user / month	$12.50 / user / month
Message & File History	Last 90 days	Unlimited	Unlimited
Integrations	Up to 10	Unlimited	Unlimited
Group Huddles	1-to-1 only	Up to 50 people	Up to 50 people
Workflow Builder	❌	✅	✅
Slack Connect	1-to-1 only	✅	✅
Security & Compliance	Standard	Standard	SSO, Data exports

These prices saw a hike in late 2024, so it’s more important than ever to be sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

Pros and cons: A balanced Slack review

No tool is perfect. After looking at the features and countless user reviews, here’s a straightforward breakdown of Slack’s biggest wins and most common frustrations.

Pros ✅	Cons ❌
Easy to Learn and Use: The design is clean, and new users can pick it up in no time.	It’s Expensive: The paid plans cost more than most of the competition.
Great for Real-Time Chat: Nothing beats it for quick messages and live conversations.	Constant Notifications: It can easily become a major distraction without some serious channel management.
Huge Integration Library: Connects to thousands of other apps, letting you centralize notifications.	Limited Free Plan: That 90-day message history limit is a dealbreaker for many businesses.
Very Customizable: You can tweak themes, notifications, and the sidebar to your heart’s content.	Basic Built-in Features: Things like video calls and task management are too simple for most, forcing you to buy other tools.
Powerful Search (on Paid Plans): Advanced search options help you track down specific info.	Knowledge Gets Lost: Conversations are unstructured, so important answers are easily buried and hard to find again.

Our Slack review on making Slack smarter than just a chat app

Slack is a fantastic container for all the conversations happening at your company, but it doesn’t do much to organize or make sense of that knowledge. Support teams, in particular, often feel like they’re on a hamster wheel: answering the same questions, digging through old threads, and bugging experts for answers.

The fix isn’t necessarily to ditch Slack, but to make it smarter by adding AI on top of the tools you already use.

An AI platform like eesel AI can plug into your whole setup ,including Slack, your help desk, and your knowledge bases ,without you having to move a single document.

Put an AI assistant in Slack to handle internal questions

Imagine if, instead of posting a repetitive question in a busy channel, your employees could just ask an AI assistant. eesel’s AI Internal Chat integrates right into Slack and learns from your trusted knowledge sources like Confluence, Google Docs, and past support tickets. Your team gets instant, correct answers 24/7, which lets your experts get back to focusing on the hard stuff.

Connect Slack to your help desk for smarter automation

A lot of support teams use Slack to escalate and discuss tickets. eesel AI can act as a bridge between your chat and your help desk, whether it’s Zendesk or Freshdesk. For example, an eesel AI Agent can try to solve a customer ticket on its own. If it gets stuck and needs a human, it won’t just send a generic ping. It can summarize the problem, tag the right on-call engineer in the right Slack channel, and include a direct link to the ticket. That’s automation that actually speeds things up.

The final verdict: Is Slack worth it in 2025?

Slack is still a top-notch tool for real-time team communication. Its user-friendly feel and giant integration library make it a great central hub for your tech stack. It’s probably the best fit for fast-moving companies that live on instant messaging and have the budget for both Slack’s paid plan and the other tools you’ll need to fill its gaps (like project management and video conferencing).

But its biggest weakness is the chaos of knowledge it creates. For teams that want to do more than just chat and actually use the information from their conversations, Slack by itself isn’t enough. To stop knowledge from disappearing and to cut down on repetitive work, adding an AI platform like eesel AI is how you turn your digital HQ into a workspace that’s not just busy, but genuinely efficient. Start your free trial or book a demo today to see it in action.