Google Chat vs. Slack: Which is right for your business? [2026]

When Slack launched in 2014, it promised a better way of working: fewer emails, async communication, and easier remote collaboration. (Did you know that Slack stands for "Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge"?) It generated serious buzz, quickly gaining millions of users and inspiring competitors like Microsoft Teams.

All this was motivation for Google to join the party, too. It repurposed one of its existing consumer apps, Google Hangouts, for business use. Eventually, the app was rebranded to Google Chat and rolled out to Google Workspace's millions of users. And over time, Google Chat adopted many of Slack's features, while adding some perks of its own.

I've used both Google Chat and Slack extensively. For this update, I tested the latest features of each app by building workflows, querying AI agents, managing projects, and sending chats to fictional colleagues. Here are the strengths and limitations of each so you can decide which makes more sense for you.

Table of contents:

• Google Chat vs. Slack at a glance

• Slack offers an overall better chat experience

• Slack's project management features are more robust

• Google Chat is better for traditional meetings, but Slack is better for async

• Google lets you easily automate across apps; Slack is better at chat-based workflows

• Slack has more advanced AI features

• Both have impressive privacy and security options

• Both are priced similarly, but Google Chat comes free with Google Workspace

• Both apps integrate with Zapier

• Google Chat vs. Slack: Which should you use?

Google Chat vs. Slack at a glance

Here's a quick overview to help you compare these two apps:

• Google Chat is best for Google Workspace users at enterprise organizations, who get free access while benefiting from Chat's native connection to other Google apps. While it's a newer product than Slack, Google Chat is improving quickly: it now offers thread-based conversations, integrated video calls, task management, Gemini AI features, and cross-app automation through Workspace Studio. And the Google Workspace marketplace offers ~100 apps that expand Google Chat's capabilities.

• Slack is best for remote teams and startups. With a state-of-the-art chat experience, built-in video huddles, an integrated CRM, and project management tools, Slack has evolved into a powerful productivity suite. It's highly customizable and full of personality—making it easier for your team to feel like they're participating in a true virtual office—and its workflows and Slackbot AI assistant can save serious time.

Slack's thoughtful features and design make for a better chat experience

After spending time using both Slack and Google Chat, I came away with one thought: design matters.

Slack was created from the ground up to be a beautiful, helpful workspace chat tool. While Google Chat can do many of the same things Slack can, like threads, emojis, and tagging, it doesn't have the same attention to detail. It's almost as if someone at Google HQ realized that, like Dr. Frankenstein, they could combine existing parts—Hangouts, Drive, and Meet—to create a Slack-like tool for Google Workspace users. The end product is certainly functional and a great fit for certain users, but the experience doesn't have the same level of thoughtfulness as Slack.

Take creating a new channel, for example. Rather than leaving you to figure out channel setup on your own, Slack offers one-click templates for different channel types. If you're kicking off a new project, for example, the Project Starter Kit includes prebuilt tabs for messages, a project overview, a project tracker, and project-specific workflows.

Once your channel is ready, all relevant people are automatically invited, and you can get to work planning your project rather than spending time on setup.

There's not much hand-holding when you get started with Google Chat. While it's easy enough to create a new "space" (Google's equivalent of Slack's channels), there are no templates to speed up the process. Overall, the vibe is functional but utilitarian.

User experience is a tough thing to judge objectively. For example, some people will appreciate that Google Chat's interface follows the same design and organization principles as the rest of Google Workspace. (If you already know how to use Google Drive and Gmail, there's almost no learning curve.) But to me, Slack's design feels more intuitive and familiar. It's easy to navigate from channels to DMs to video chats, or to use Slack's shortcuts or customization features to speed up your workflow.

Beyond the superficial, you'll find lots of similarities between Slack and Google Chat. Both have direct messages and group messages. Slack's channels and Google Chat's spaces make it easy to group different sorts of conversations together, and both can be set to either private or public. Both apps let you group related replies into threads, edit or delete messages, and chat with external users like clients or vendors. Plus, you'll have access to emojis and GIFs either way. (Where would remote office culture be without memes?)

One of Google Chat's advantages is its built-in feature to summarize unread conversations, which comes in handy if you find 100+ messages from your team after coming back from lunch. (Slack offers this too.) Google Workspace users will also appreciate the integration with connected products like Google Calendar, which allows team members to automatically see when their colleagues are busy.

Apart from these, though, Slack's feature set tends to be stronger. Both apps let you use slash commands to speed up your workflow (like /away), but Slack's commands are more robust, making it easy to quickly send reminders, set Do Not Disturb messages, or invite new people to a channel. There are thousands of Slack apps to help with collaboration, productivity, culture-building, and goofing off. And even if you have a love-hate relationship with chat apps because they distract you from deep work, there's a reason to use Slack: it now offers a one-click Focus Mode. Anyone messaging you can see that you're in Focus Mode, so it's an elegant way to set expectations, and you also have the option to allow your boss and other VIPs to keep pinging you. (Or not.)

Some Slack features are sorely missed by users who make the jump to Google Chat. One of those is Slack's ability to reply to your team instantly when they ask common questions (like "What's the Wi-Fi password?"). Google Chat has no equivalent. After migrating from Slack to Google Chat, one user reported, "I had a ton of auto-responses to common questions from my staff ('where is this?' 'how do I?' stuff) and it was wonderful. I don't see that option in Google Chat anywhere."

Slack is also more customizable than Google Chat. Slack's settings let you adjust details like emojis, display names, and whether or not links should be underlined. Notifications can be easily tweaked on a per-device basis, and you can opt to be pinged when certain keywords are used. Bigger changes to the app's design are possible too. You can add frequently-used icons to the side panel, or change your theme to a different color.

Slack's project management features are more robust

While Google Chat offers lightweight task and project management, Slack's newest features are comprehensive enough to help it compete against dedicated project management apps.

Slack's Canvas, available on paid plans, is a kind of lightweight Notion page attached to each channel. You can start from scratch or pick from channel-specific templates like Weekly Sync, Employee Onboarding, or Sales Enablement Hub. A product launch channel, for example, might use its Canvas to outline goals, stakeholders, important dates, and files. Once your Canvas is set up, it's easy to onboard new contributors and keep your team on the same page.

Slack's Lists feature is a lightweight project management tool, complete with deliverables, dates, statuses, and task owners. You can choose from a range of templates: some look like traditional project management tables, while others have a Kanban-like interface, allowing you to drag and drop tasks into different stages of completion.

Slack also offers an AI CRM, powered by Salesforce. Free and Pro plans can pull Salesforce customer records directly into channels, though you do need to have an existing Salesforce account to do that. But the real CRM features are found on the Business+ plan and above, and the interesting thing is that here, you don't need an active Salesforce subscription. Instead, Slack spins up a Salesforce instance behind the scenes to power your CRM activities; if you ever end up wanting to migrate to the full product, your data is already there.

You can use Slack CRM to track leads and deals, turn support emails into tickets, and get AI to help you research customer accounts before meetings. Much of what used to require jumping over to another app and context-switching can now be done just by asking Slackbot, Slack's AI work assistant, to update a record or add a new lead. (More on Slackbot shortly.)

Google Chat's project management tools are far more basic, but they're easy to use. Each Google Chat space comes with built-in tabs for file sharing and task management: you can easily assign to-do items to anyone in the conversation, and when you add dates to each task, it automatically adds that task to the Google Calendar of the person responsible.

The Shared tab is a central home for files you've uploaded in the chat, making it easy to reference them (and avoiding the need to scroll through your chat history to find PDFs and slide decks). When you add tasks and files, those activities are automatically broadcast in the Chat tab. This can get a bit messy, but it's good for keeping everyone aware of what's happening.

To make sure key information doesn't get lost, you can pin important messages and resources to your Board. While this is a nice feature, it feels limiting if you're comparing it to the versatility of Slack's Canvases. (At a minimum, it would be great to see Google Chat add an editable text box here to allow managers to give a big-picture overview.)

Still, there's something to be said for a chat app just being a chat app. And if you need more than that, Google Workspace has plenty of complementary apps (like Tasks, Keep, Drive, and Sheets) sitting one tab away, plus integrations and automations that expand what Chat can do.

Google Chat is better for traditional meetings, but Slack is better for async work

Until a few years ago, Google Chat's video capabilities gave it an edge over Slack. Its native integration with Google Meet (an underrated alternative to Zoom) makes it supremely easy to launch meetings from within the app.

But Slack's video meeting tool, called "huddles," presents a real alternative—at least for internal meetings. What's especially useful are the integrated chat threads: everything you write in the chat box during the meeting is preserved and automatically published to the channel where the huddle takes place, making it easier for those who didn't attend the meeting to see what was discussed. And if you have a Slack Pro plan or above, you can also let Slack's AI take notes and provide key takeaways for you automatically.

Huddles isn't a full-on competitor to Zoom. Rather than a replacement for meetings, it's intended to replace informal interactions like walking over to your colleague's desk. Huddles fits nicely within Slack's focus on asynchronous communication: each huddle lasts an average of 10 minutes (as opposed to Zoom's typical 52-minute meeting length). They're also less intrusive than regular meetings. You can start a huddle, ping your colleagues to jump in whenever they're ready, and continue going about your workday; while you're waiting, you'll be treated to smooth jazz hold music.

If you want to be even less disruptive of your colleagues' schedules, you can also go totally async by dropping prerecorded videos or audio recordings ("Clips," in Slack-speak) into any conversation. (Google Chat offers something similar, but Slack's implementation is slicker.)

Slack can also support traditional video meetings via integrations with apps like Zoom. But Google Chat's native integration with Google Meet gives it an edge here. Kicking off a meeting is incredibly simple: just click the video icon in Google Chat and it embeds a Google Meet link. If you ever want to reference chat logs from a past meeting, you can access them by clicking on the dedicated "Meetings" section on the sidebar.

Google Meet is a better option than huddles if you need advanced video meeting features like whiteboarding or breakout rooms, if you're setting up a meeting with users outside your organization, or if you need to invite more participants than Slack's 50-person huddle limit allows. Google's free tier lets you invite 100 participants, and its paid tiers offer anywhere from 150 to 1,000 participants, depending on your plan.

Google Chat has also followed Slack's lead by developing its own version of huddles, which is called—wait for it—"huddles." It works more or less like Slack's version, making it easy to set up no-frills chats that are easy to hop into and out of.

Google makes it easy to automate across apps; Slack is better at chat-based workflows

Slack's workflow capabilities once gave it a clear advantage. But Google Chat has recently gotten much more competitive with the launch of Google Workspace Studio, which lets you automate tasks throughout Google Workspace—including Chat.

Slack's Workflow Builder, available on paid plans, is where its automation activity happens. You can automatically welcome new members to a channel, gather employee feedback and product ideas, or create approval workflows by tying in apps like Docusign. To create a workflow, you can design one yourself or use one of Slack's 60+ prebuilt templates. Slack now offers the ability to create conditional workflows, and there are a handful of templates that can jumpstart that specific process for you.

Another helpful use case is to deploy the Weekly check in workflow template to automate the process of asking your team for updates. If you're using Slack to manage distributed teams, this is precisely the sort of hands-off automation you want because it enables light-touch management. Your team has more time to do their work, you still stay informed, and the workflow is channel-specific so it doesn't distract people you don't need an update from.

Slack also lets you use AI to automatically generate workflows if you're on the Business+ plan. In my tests, it usually worked smoothly; when it didn't, it was because I hadn't set up the underlying channels or teams I was referencing. (I'll go more into the AI features of each app in a minute.)

Google's Workspace Studio, which is available on Business Starter plans and above, makes it equally easy to set up workflows. If anything, its interface is even more straightforward than Slack's.

The difference—and this might be a pro or a con, depending on your needs—is that Google Workspace Studio is mostly focused on automating actions across multiple Workspace apps. A typical Workspace Studio template connects at least two Google apps (like Meet and Chat), and it also lets you add AI steps to your workflow by adding an "Ask Gemini" or "Ask Gemini Notebook" action at any point.

You can still create workflows that only happen within Google Chat. For example, I was able to build a workflow that automatically welcomes members who've just joined a certain space. But in general, Slack is more intuitive for that sort of thing.

Slack's AI features are more powerful

You can access a handful of Gemini AI features in Google Chat, including conversation summaries, in-line translation to enable colleagues in different countries to collaborate, and an "Ask Gemini" feature that lets you interact with the knowledge accumulated in each chat space. (You do need to be on the Business Standard plan or above, though.)

Google Chat's AI-powered in-line translation might be the most immediately useful feature for the large enterprise organizations that tend to rely on Google Chat. You can add dozens (or hundreds) of team members from different countries into the same Google Chat space, allow each of them to type in their own language, and automatically translate all those languages into a single default language. (Slack does this too, on its Business+ plan.)

While Google Chat's AI features are handy, there aren't many of them, and they don't impact productivity in the same way that Slack's AI features do. Slack's meeting transcription features and AI-powered thread and channel summaries come with any paid plan. Move up to Business+ and you get AI search, daily channel recaps, translations, workflows, file summaries, and writing assistance.

The bigger change is Slackbot (also available on Business+ and above). It's been useful for years, mainly for answering simple questions and running chat-based automations. But as of early 2026, it's now a more ambitious "personal AI agent for work." It can dig through your messages, files, and channels to answer questions, or prep you for a meeting by summarizing what's been said about the customer. It also works across connected apps like Notion, Google Drive, and Salesforce. If your company has Salesforce and licenses Agentforce agents, Slackbot can also hand off work to them.

Both have impressive privacy and security options

If you're concerned about privacy or security, you can't go wrong with either Slack or Google Chat. Slack's website is full of certificates showing compliance with enterprise-grade data protection standards like ISO, GDPR, and SOC 2. And Google Chat benefits from the same stringent security provisions as the rest of Google Workspace. Both apps feature an impressive roster of enterprise clients on their homepage to give you confidence.

If you're a Google Workspace user, you'll be pleased at how easy it is to manage Google Chat's security and privacy features and to assign privileges. Google Chat inherits the bulk of its organizational settings from the privileges you've already defined in Workspace. Chat-specific features include the ability to assign specific admins for each of your Google Chat spaces.

Features developed for other Google products also benefit Google Chat: for example, you'll get built-in Gmail-level security to protect users from phishing, malware, and spam, which Google says blocks more than 99.9% of attacks. Data loss prevention rules, which are available on Enterprise plans, let you stop users from sharing sensitive information based on criteria you specify.

While not quite as easy to set up as Google Chat, Slack's privacy and security settings are robust. They're also more detailed: for example, you can control who can send channel-wide messages, though restricting this beyond the #general channel requires the Business+ plan. (It's a nice feature to prevent recently-hired interns from accidentally broadcasting their lunch plans to hundreds of people.)

It's worth mentioning that if you need HIPAA compliance, Google Chat is a more affordable option. The Google Workspace Business Plus plan has all of the security and admin features you need to be HIPAA-compliant in Google Chat (once you've signed a Business Associate Agreement), though you may need to do a bit of backend configuration. Slack only supports HIPAA compliance if you use its pricier Enterprise+ plan.

Both are priced similarly, but Google Chat comes free with Google Workspace

Google Chat is included in the Google Workspace bundle, which also includes Gmail, Drive, Meet, Calendar, Sheets, and other Google productivity apps. Pricing for Google Workspace starts at $7/month/user (billed annually) on the Business Starter plan; at this tier, you get workflows but no Google Chat AI capabilities. The $14/month/user (billed annually) Business Standard plan gives you more file storage, a higher number of Google Meet participants, and access to more of Google's AI features—including those embedded in Google Chat.

Slack's free plan gives you 90 days of message history, 10 app integrations, and 1:1 audio and video meetings. By upgrading to Slack's $7.25/month/user (billed annually) Pro plan, you get unlimited message history, group meetings, basic AI capabilities and workflows, and project management features. The Business+ plan, at $15/month/user (billed annually), gives you access to a built-in CRM, conditional branching in Workflow Builder, and Slack's full suite of AI tools—including Slackbot. There's also an Enterprise+ plan with features for large organizations, like unlimited workspaces, audit logs, and granular roles.

It's also worth mentioning that Slack only charges you for users who take an action within a 28-day window, and you're credited back for inactive seats. So if your sales and customer support teams use Slack but your legal and finance teams don't, you're not on the hook for a bunch of unused licenses. Google's annual plan doesn't let you drop seats mid-term; its monthly plan does, but it costs 20% more and it won't adjust seats for you dynamically like Slack does.

Even so, Google Chat is clearly a better deal if you're already a Google Workspace customer, in which case you can use it for free.

Slack has more integrations, but Google Chat integrates seamlessly with Google apps; both apps integrate with Zapier

Google Chat integrates natively with other Google apps like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. If you're a Google Workspace user, this is a big advantage: you can easily share Google Drive documents in Chat, for example. You can also access more integrations via the Google Workspace Marketplace, which features some apps built by Google (like Zendesk, Salesforce, Asana, and GIPHY) and around 100 others built by independent developers.

While Slack doesn't benefit from a native connection to Google's ecosystem, it offers a staggering 2,600 integrations (including Google products like Drive and Calendar). Some of the more popular Slack integrations include Notion, Dropbox, Asana, and Microsoft Teams.

And using Zapier, you can securely connect either Google Chat or Slack to 9,000+ other apps so you can automate all your notifications and pull your chat context into all your workflows—no matter where you spend your time. Learn more about how to automate Slack and how to automate Google Chat.

Google Chat vs Slack: Which should you use?

Go with Google Chat if you're a Google Workspace user at a large organization. While Slack has a better chat experience and more AI features, Google Chat is improving fast—and it comes free with the plan you're already paying for. Sticking with Google Chat can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, and with Workspace Studio, you can create sophisticated cross-app chat workflows that take advantage of Google's entire suite of products.

Go with Slack if you're managing a distributed team. Its chat experience is more thoughtfully designed than Google's, and you'll save time with Slack's workflows, apps, project management tools, and integrated CRM. Slackbot is a more capable in-app assistant than anything in Google Chat, and Slack's interface and automations make it easier to maintain your company culture, onboard new employees, and make your workplace chat app feel like a true remote office.

Related reading:

• Slack vs. Teams: Which should your business use?

• Slack vs. Discord: Which should you choose?

• A guide to Google Meet vs. Google Chat vs. Google Messages

• What is Gemini for Workspace?

• The best Slack alternatives

This article was originally published in June 2024. The most recent update was in August 2026.