Basecamp versus Slack
Communication formats
Slack
- Immediacy of the chat format
- Terrible search
- Organization is hard to enforce, groups fracture, distraction galore
- Messages are short and context is lost all the time
- Integrations can be fun like giphy
- Planning is impossible except in tiny cases
- Overall distracting, but popular
Basecamp
- Somewhere between email and text message for immediacy, clearly not intended for continuous realtime conversation
- Search works and gives relevant results
- Organized for focused workflows
- Group membership and notifications are geared to keep information overload as low as possible
- Messages are much longer and can keep the context of the conversation
- Planning is accomplished with todos that are checked off for progress reporting
- Integrations are not on the same level as Slack
- Focused and opinionated on how you should work. If you like the flow and format of reporting and focus times it is the best choice available.