What is Slack and what is it used for?
Quick Answer: Slack is a business communication platform developed by Slack Technologies (acquired by Salesforce in 2021 for $27.7 billion). Launched in 2013, it provides channels, direct messaging, Workflow Builder, and integrations with over 2,600 apps. Over 200,000 organizations use Slack daily as of 2026.
What Is Slack?
Slack is a cloud-based business communication platform that organizes team conversations into channels. It was developed by Slack Technologies, founded in 2013 by Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov. Salesforce acquired Slack in July 2021 for $27.7 billion.
Company Background
Slack originated as an internal tool developed during the creation of a video game (Glitch) by Tiny Speck. The team recognized the communication tool was more valuable than the game itself and pivoted. As of early 2026, Slack reports over 200,000 paid organizations and is available in 150+ countries.
Key Features
- Channels: Organized conversation spaces by topic, team, project, or client
- Direct messages: One-on-one or group conversations
- Huddles: Audio and video calls directly within Slack
- Workflow Builder: No-code automation for forms, routing, and notifications
- Canvas: Collaborative documents embedded within channels
- Slack Connect: Communicate with external organizations in shared channels
- Search: Full-text search across messages, files, and channels
Pricing (April 2026)
- Free: Message history limited to 90 days, 1:1 huddles
- Pro: $8.75/user/month — unlimited history, group huddles, Workflow Builder
- Business+: $12.50/user/month — SAML SSO, data exports, compliance features
- Enterprise Grid: Custom pricing — org-wide deployment, DLP, eDiscovery
Primary Use Cases
Slack is used for team communication, project coordination, customer support (via Slack Connect), incident response, and workflow automation. It competes with Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Discord (for developer communities).
Integration Ecosystem
Slack's App Directory includes over 2,600 integrations: Jira, Google Workspace, Salesforce, GitHub, Zoom, Asana, and Trello among the most popular. The Slack API supports custom bot and app development.
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Workflow AutomationRelated Rankings
Best Automation Platforms for AI Orchestration 2026
This ranking answers one question: how many real business applications can an AI agent act on out of the box? It evaluates nine platforms as of August 2026 on the reach they give an agent, not on the workflow logic they can express. That boundary is deliberate, because two neighbouring pages on this site answer different questions. Best Process Orchestration Platforms 2026 scores multi-step process control, error handling and state management. Best AI Agent Platforms 2026 scores building and hosting the agent itself. This page scores the layer between them: the connective tissue that lets an agent already built elsewhere reach the applications a business actually runs on. A platform that leads one of those pages can place low here, and two of them do. Scores derive from application and action catalogue counts, the exposure model each platform uses to publish those catalogues to an agent, setup effort, failure handling and cost per agent action. Every figure was retrieved from a vendor-owned surface on 11 August 2026 unless an earlier date is stated against it.
Best Durable Workflow Engines for Production in 2026
A ranked list of the best durable workflow engines for production deployments in 2026. Durable workflow engines persist execution state to a database so that long-running workflows survive process restarts, deployments, and infrastructure failures. The ranking covers Temporal, Prefect, Apache Airflow, Camunda, Windmill, and n8n. Tools were evaluated on production reliability, developer experience, scalability, open-source health, and documentation quality. The shortlist intentionally mixes code-first engines (Temporal, Prefect, Airflow) with hybrid visual platforms (Camunda, Windmill, n8n) to reflect how production teams actually choose workflow engines in 2026.
Dive Deeper
Keystroke vs n8n in 2026: Agent-Built TypeScript vs the Visual Canvas
Keystroke, launched in July 2026 by Y Combinator W24 company Sprint Labs, is a code-first automation platform where AI coding agents write workflows as TypeScript in the user's repository. n8n, founded in 2019, is the most widely deployed source-available visual workflow platform, with 200,000+ users and a $2.5 billion valuation. This comparison covers the agent-authored versus canvas building models, durable execution, licensing (Elastic License 2.0 vs the Sustainable Use License), verified July 2026 pricing including Keystroke's usage metering, and the maturity gap between a days-old platform and an established ecosystem.
QuantumBPM vs Camunda 2026: Single-Binary Challenger vs the BPMN Incumbent
QuantumBPM (launched 2026, Coroid s.r.o., Slovakia) packages a BPMN 2.0 runtime and DMN 1.5 decision engine into one Go binary backed by Temporal and PostgreSQL. Camunda (Berlin, founded 2013) is the category incumbent: Camunda 7 (Apache 2.0, in maintenance) and the Zeebe-based Camunda 8 platform. This comparison covers product structure, architecture, DMN TCK conformance with recording dates, deployment, pricing, and vendor maturity, verified July 2026.
Migrating 23 Make Scenarios to Self-Hosted n8n: a 3-Week Breakdown
Anonymized retrospective of a DTC ecommerce brand migrating 23 Make scenarios to a self-hosted n8n instance over three weeks. Tooling cost dropped from $348/month on Make Teams to roughly $12/month on a Hetzner VPS, but credential and webhook recreation consumed about 40% of total project time.