Yammer Or Slack - which one is best for Team Messaging

Better communication creates better solutions!

Enterprise collaboration platforms act as a gateway to connect team members of the organization and to the wide number of users across the globe. A single platform mingles all at one place to build empowering solutions to the world!

Technology is primarily engaging people, a possible reason why we see an immense rise of chat collaboration applications these days. The ultimate use could be personal or workplace engagement- tools are available for every need at every place to stay always connected.

The results of poor communication across teams could prove expensive to the organization. To attend such situations, we have many enterprise-ready chat applications like Yammer, Slack, Flock, etc., to ensure the best business productivity.

People knew Yammer since 2008 when it has been launched at the TechCrunch50 by one of the founders David Sacks. Later in the year, 2012 Yammer has been acquired by Microsoft for US$1.2 billion.







Slack has been launched in the year 2013 with more than 30% of paying customers. It is a cloud-based application that serves all team sizes founded by Steward Butterfield.

Though teams are segregated as per project, client, remote location, or based on geographical area, these collaboration tools keep them connected.

And in case, where if teams of the entire organization would want to communicate with each other; to ascertain this scenario, we have a private social networking team collaboration application like Yammer to fill this gap.

Slack has also been integrated into a myriad number of social media networks to stay upgraded.



Having said this, it is time to draw upon the differences between the two for facilitating informed decision making. Take a look.

Product Tour – Which application has a seamless workflow approach?

Yammer-Product Tour

Yammer is available across diverse platforms such as Windows, Mac and Mobile phones. It is a part of your Office 365 suite and comes in the variants of Yammer users, Yammer groups and Yammer networks. Yammer is exclusively built to have its presence in both internal organization’s users and external networks. The latest entrant in the block is its Windows desktop application, which enables the easiest way to join group conversations.

Yammer is a tough competitor when it comes to ranking the best social network for the workplace where it brings remote teams together. The sign-up process of Yammer is quite simple. Anyone can simply connect with this private social networking application with their work email. Yammer sends a verification mail to a new user to complete the sign-up process. Once you login to the application, Yammer asks you to join the relevant groups to keep you updated.

With Yammer, you can:

Write your first post

Follow your co-workers

Start a Group

Check your Inbox

Check Private Messages

Check Notifications

Browse External Networks

Create a new network and invite people.

View recently accessed files.

Slack – Product Tour

“A single workspace for your small-to-medium size company or team”, is what Slack Says. Small organizations or teams can rely on Slack totally for an unlimited period of time. Based upon the pricing plans the users choose, they can create a wide number of workspaces and switch between them, and also could share channels among diverse workspaces.



The hassle-free sign-up process allows a new user to join an existing workspace or a new workspace with any of the public domain mail ids. Slack facilitates an URL for each workspace, and now the Slack users can log in to the application with these workspace URLs. With Slack, your teams are better connected with all the information being transferred just at their fingertips. The project name you give at the time of the Sign-up process can be seen as a channel within the application's interface.





With Slack, you can:



Add Public and Private Channels

Invite people

Talk with Slack bots

Integrate a wide range of Apps

Install Google Drive

Check Analytics

Customize Slack

Sign into another workspace

Access the application with feature-based keyboard shortcuts.

Our Verdict

Yammer allows the users to prioritize conversations and announcements through Inbox from the application itself, whereas we don’t see this provision for Slack.

Features Comparisons – Who is the leader?



Yammer

One of the primary functionalities of Yammer would be connecting and engaging people across organizations via private social networks. An exclusive social networking platform for businesses and companies to communicate on myriad topics of the world! The users can toggle between Discovery, All and Following feeds to view the conversations.



Few Functional Features:

Secure and transparent communication across teams to organize projects.

Simple to use UI and easy to understand UX.

Offers two kinds of networks: internal and external.

Each internal network is allotted with one primary email domain.

Integrates with other tools of Office365.

Invite people to join networks.

People Directory to send an invite

Like or share conversations across groups.

Poll and Post

Slack

Communication in Slack happens through channels and it supports a vast app directory to enhance teams collaboration. It offers high-end data security like 2FA and SSO to protect all your organization’s information. Slack keeps a back-up of your work for further retrieval through Archiving feature.



Few Functional Features:

Organized Conversations

Private and Public channels

Searchable message history

Slack app directory with more than 1500 apps to integrate.

Voice and Video calls.

Screen Sharing

Configure Slack to suit your business needs.

High-level data encryption while in transit.

Admin-level settings and permissions

Our Verdict

Though Yammer is simple to use, Slack’s feature-stack is quite vast, powerful and functional. For better team communication, we might need highly workable and convincing collaboration features like Troop Messenger.

Pricing Comparisons – Can Slack replace Yammer?

Yammer

Yammer comes absolutely free with its basic version for an unlimited amount of time. Any user can log into Yammer with their work email id and add other co-workers to start conversations across the internal and external networks.





Subscription to Office 365 is not required to start using Yammer.

But, of course, to gain enterprise and administrative access, one needs to purchase an Office 365 suite license.

Slack

Slack as a freemium application has pricing plans to accommodate everyone’s need. It offers limited numbers of features for free for an unlimited amount of time, but to experience the full-level feature stack, one needs to opt for paid plans. Slack comes with three different pricing plans of Standard, Plus and Enterprise Grid with features segregated according to each.





The free plan comes with few basic features along with 5GB storage(total), 10k searchable messages, 10 app integrations, and two-factor authentication.

The standard plan is at $6.67 per active user/per month

Plus plan is at $12.50 per active user/per month

The Enterprise Grid Plan offers 1TB of storage per member, along with the features which suit enterprise-level companies.

Our Verdict

Yammer is cheaper when compared to Slack!

Integration Comparisons – Which tool supports more?

Yammer

Integrations help to get your work done easily and effortlessly! We know Yammer is as a part of Office 365 suite and it also supports a good number of integrations.

Integration with Share point enhances Yammer usage experience. Users can add their Yammer feeds to Share point pages.

Yammer simply lets you integrate with other operations of Office 365 even while you are in conversation on Yammer. Users can open Outlook to set a meeting invite, can go with Skype video conferencing, work on excel sheet, upload files and many more...

One of the integrations includes Yammer feed. It extends an embeddable JavaScript widget to display a snapshot of a specific feed to applications like Skype for Business, CRM, and CMS tools.

You can integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Yammer to add a social network layer for enhanced communication across business owners.

Yammer can be integrated with other applications such as Microsoft Flow, Yammer Connect, Sales force.com, and Yammer APIs. Check out the app directory for all Yammer Apps.

Slack

Slack says, “Add apps, get work done”. There is an endless number of apps that you can add to your workspace to pull reports, make calls, store data in the cloud within the Slack itself.

Slack users can pick from a wide category of App integrations; such as apps for daily tools, Essential apps, New&Noteworthy apps, brilliant bots, app collections and from many more...

Slack helps to integrate Google Drive, Microsoft One-Drive, DropBox, and Box applications for file management.

Other integrations like Jira-Integration+ for Productivity, Azure Pipelines for Developer tools, Kudoboard for HR and Team Culture, Zoom for communication, etc., can be bought to the Slack.

Our Verdict

Comparatively, Slack supports a number of integrations to Yammer. The App Directory of Slack is quite immense.

UI/UX Comparisons – which gives the best intuitive and immersive user experience!

Yammer

Yammer user interface is quite simple to use and easy to understand. The user is allowed to create an internal or external group or even can post or send a private message from the functionalities derived in the left pane. An easy to navigate user interface helps Yammers to get into to the use of the application faster.

Slack

Slack’s interface is promisingly impressive with colourful background hues. The user can invite people, create a channel or search for a group of channels from the left user-pane. Slack bots welcome the first timers to facilitate the necessary support services, and they also help the user to check Slack help centre page from the UI itself only.

Our Verdict

Slack’s interface appears more appealing than Yammer.

Security Comparisons – Which one to trust more?



Yammer

Yammer from Office365 comes with enterprise-level security, and compliance to provide secure online space for business enterprises, whereas the basic version doesn’t extend any admin security controls.





All conversations and feeds in transit and at rest are encrypted with AES-256 bit key encryption. Yammer data is totally secured under strict guidelines at Microsoft’s global network of data centres with round the clock video surveillance, biometric and pin-based locks, strict personal access controls, and detailed visitor entry logs.

Slack

All workspaces data is super-secured at Slack. It does provide safety to data through security bots. Slack is a certified ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, ISO/IEC 27018 and HIPAA accredited team collaboration business chat application. Slacks GDPR policy is made available for the users at their website.

The other security features include; SAML-based SSO, SCIM provisioning, Granular app management, Custom Message Retention, Slack Enterprise Key Management (Slack EKM) and Support for Data Loss Prevention(DLP).

Our Verdict

Yammer and Slack are both up to the standards in providing data security and data prevention and loss.

Support Comparisons – who is available round the clock?

Yammer

Yammer users need to describe their issue by navigating to Contact Office Support page of Microsoft. Its help centre educates Yammers with an in-detailed Feature-training material like attaching a file to a message, Enable or Disable email and Phone notifications, Keyboard shortcuts and more to go on...

Slack

Slacks help centre leverages an extensive help-support for its users. Slack users can post their queries to Slack bots within the application itself. In the Slack help-centre page, the users can find Slack education column from which they can get to know about Slack Demo, Slack Foundry and Slack Tips.

Our Verdict

An interesting point to be noted here would be; Slack’s help-centre support is quite extensive and advanced when compared with Yammer.

Analytic Report Comparisons – Which tool share the market share?

Yammer

We know that many users of the world use Office 365 for their daily office work procedures. According to recent analytics, it is observed that the Fortune 500 companies across the globe collaborate via Yammer.

Slack

Slack is one among those trusted business chat applications brand across the world used by diverse sizes of organizations. Slack’s analytic reports say that there is an immense change in the work culture after adopting Slack. At around 80.4% of respondents conveys, “the use of Slack has increased transparency in work collaborations which finally has yielded productive results”.

Our Verdict

Yammer is the social networking people collaboration application, there are chances that it might dominate Slack in this arena.

Search Comparisons – which is more powerful?

Yammer

The search functionality of Yammer seems to be simple and limited. Yammer users can enable search option on internal and external network groups and start conversations as per the choice they make.

Slack

Slack’s search functionality provides search on channels, messages, and files to simply selection. Simplify your file search from the search facility of your files and all files.

Our Verdict

Yammer and Slack’s both make a good search result to a certain extent. When it comes to the case of Search comparisons, Troop Messenger has the most advanced search options to filter images, videos, contacts, location, text, files, and URLs.

Wrapping it up

Yammer and Slack both are good for team communication. Each has got its own set of pros and cons. Like if we take Yammer, it is popular across the world for its private social networking among internal teams and external networks. Slack has also gained its global share consistently. The latest entrant in the block, The Troop Messenger is no less competitor to any other business chat applications. Give a sure shot for it to attain reliable, secure and seamless team communication!

To sum it up, it is up to the reader’s discretion to choose the best-suited collaboration tool as per their teams need.

Disclaimer



The aim of the article is to be informative. We intend users take an informed decision for an effective and productive experience. The comparison shown between Yammer vs slack in the blog is only towards that end and has no intention of pitting one against the other team collaboration app brands. The images, logos, any concepts etc., used in this blog, purely belong to their respective companies or applications (Yammer and Slack).

Readers are advised to consult and confirm from the respective service providers regarding details of features, latest updates, prices, and their policies before utilizing any of their services. This further informs the reader that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog solely belong to the author’s perception, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.



