Slack – the solution that effectively introduced the collaboration marketplace, announced the addition of another 1 million paid users to its platform. According to the company, they now have 8 million daily active users coming from over 500,000 organisations, and 3 million of those are paying for the service. That’s a huge increase from September 2017, when the brand only had 6 million users.
When Slack burst into the market four years ago, it offered us something we’d never seen before – a simple way for businesses to collaborate. Of course, now that the collaboration space is growing more rapidly than ever, Slack isn’t the only player in the game anymore. While their subscriber growth suggests that they’re still converting customers, Slack now have more threats than ever before to contend with too.
The Competitive Collaborative Market
These days, it seems like Slack is competing with almost every major brand in the UC space. They’ve got Google’s Hangouts to consider, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Atlassian Stride, Workplace by Facebook and so many more. At the same time, various new companies are considering throwing their name into the ring too, which has left collaboration tools with a projected worth of $3.2bn by 2021.
While many of the other collaborative tools on the marketplace don’t share the subscriber volume that Slack has achieved, they’re quickly catching up. Microsoft Teams has already been deployed by 200,000 organisations, and Slack’s growth is gradually slowing down. In fact, one graphic released by Slack suggests that the company’s annual growth has decreased from 83% in May, to only 45% now.
What’s Next for Slack?
Ultimately, Slack is in a unique position as its core service continues to grow in popularity. Various developers are already out there building integrations and apps that work seamlessly with Slack software, and SaaS solutions like Salesforce also have their own solutions for Slack. However, they’re not the only company making progress with their collaboration app.
Microsoft’s “Build” conference hit the industry only a short while ago, and during that event, the company announced various new apps and integrations for Teams designed to make the workplace collaboration experience more intuitive. Some of the new tools include things like pre-built solutions for Microsoft SharePoint and more. At the same time, Atlassian is also building up their Stride team management tool with new features and integrations.
Is Slack Set to Lose Their Winning Streak?
While the most recent update from Slack is certainly a positive one, it doesn’t mean that they’re out of the woods yet. Ultimately, the tool still faces some serious competition from the other collaboration services on the market, and Microsoft Teams in particular is hot on their heels. Though the upgrade in subscribers is great news, Slack was also cautious not to reveal an update on their annual recurring revenue, as it did in September. While this may have been an innocent enough omission, it might also have been a deliberate move from the company.
A spokesperson noted that the organisation is still seeing a very healthy ARR growth, but they don’t plan to use that number as an indicator of success moving forward.
