Can Atlassian's Stride compete with Slack?

Stride bundles voice, video, text, file sharing and new features for a lower price than the market leader

Atlassian, the enterprise software firm behind Trello, has developed a Slack competitor in the form of a team-based tool called Stride. Designed for collaboration, it incorporates voice, video, text chat and file sharing.

Unlike the existing HipChat platform (which Atlassian bought in 2012), Stride has been built specifically for enterprise use. Although it is primarily designed for team-based work, it can scale from startup-size to businesses with ‘tens of thousands' of employees.

Comparisons to Slack are almost invited by Stride's layout, which features ‘rooms' for different chat topics or teams, as well as individual messaging options for different users. However, Atlassian has designed some clever key differences.

Possibly the most useful change is the addition of ‘Actions' and ‘Decisions', which are similar to Discord's pinned messages and will help users to locate important information and alerts that they might have missed. Actions and Decisions are located in the sidebar (on a per-room basis); anyone in the chat can pin an Action item for a user, or a note about a group Decision. Clicking the link will fast-scroll to that moment in the chat history.

Another feature is ‘Focus Mode'; this mutes all notifications and then puts all of the important messages, Actions and Decisions that got made while you were away in centre stage when it is turned off.

Regular features that you would expect to see on a Slack competitor, like document collaboration, Markdown and even Giphy support, are also built in.

Like its other enterprise products, Atlassian had adopted a freemium model with Stride. Free users can make use of almost all of the product's features, but are limited to 5GB of file storage and 25,000 stored messages. The paid version, at $3 per user per month (much cheaper than Slack), has no limits and includes guest access, screen sharing and advanced user management.

Observers have noticed the clear advantages Stride has over some versions of HipChat, and Atlassian has announced that it will sunset its HipChat Cloud product in the near future, encouraging users to transition to Stride.

It's not all roses, though; the lack of telephony in Stride immediately puts it behind products like RingCentral and Unify.