5 Cool Skype Alternatives For Business Use

Skype is traditionally one of the most popular and commonly used messenger both among users and businesses. However, many users do not even think about switching to other applications. And they should! For business correspondence, there are more suitable solutions. Software Focus has collected several messengers, which are ideally suited for communicating with colleagues.

Slack

Slack is a pretty young project. Launched in February 2014, this messenger quickly won the title “Skype and a corporate e-mail killer”. And it is due to the unique integration capabilities. If Skype is used as a general chat and file transfer tool, the Slack can be synchronized with other popular web tools. For example, the messenger may notify users about changes made by someone in the shared document in Google Docs, Dropbox or GitHub. All this is in a correspondence window. Thus, Slack turns into a versatile platform for the development of any communications related project. Slack supports integration with approximately one hundred third-party services.

Cons: unfortunately, it is not possible to use Slack for everyday communication. It is practically not used outside the corporate environment, so the contact list of the average user will hardly show a lot of acquaintances and friends.

HipChat

HipChat is another messenger designed exclusively for business. Although this project is not one of those that are on everyone’s lips, HipChat statistics indicates a high popularity in the corporate environment. Thus, the messenger crossed the mark of 1 billion messages as far back as in 2014. Like Slack, it allows users of a certain team or department to observe changes in synchronized documents of third-party web services, to invite “guests” with limited rights into project, etc. An interesting feature of HipChat is the ability to format the text right in the chat box.

Cons: the size of the transferred data is limited to 50 MB. For comparison, in Skype there are no restrictions on file size at all, and in Slack it is set at the mark of 1 GB.

Facebook Work Chat

This messenger is aimed at users of Facebook at Work platform, a corporate social network like LinkedIn. For the user to be able to work with the Work Chat, a Facebook at Work account is required. The messenger allows for group and individual conversations and file sharing. The peculiarity of the project is a list of the contacts made in the format of directory of employees of various companies.

Cons: Work Chat is still being in development, so many possibilities inherent to corporate instant messengers, will be implemented over time here.

Telegram

If maintaining the confidentiality of the information in a messenger is the main objective, Telegram will be the optimal choice. It supports integration with multiple web services including iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive. A big plus of Telegram is the ability to send files of up to 1.5GB.

TigerText

TigerText is a rather unusual project that is also well suited for companies concerned about confidentiality.

This is a kind of hybrid of corporate Slack and Snapchat. In TigerText you can configure the function of self-destruction of messages after a certain time. Thus, corporate correspondence is securely protected from fraud.