Slack vs OpenProject: Which is a better fit?

Speaker 1: I'm Cam, senior director in our company, anywhere between 20 and 25 employees across the world at any given time. I couldn't go a day without Slack. That's five stars for me. Before Slack, we actually had to use two different software options. We used Sococo for our virtual meeting offices, and that served a purpose. It was good for a little bit, but then as we got bigger, we also had to use Skype. And so a natural progression was moving on from both of those into one that offered the same exact offerings, if not even more, and that was Slack. So previous to Slack, Sococo, Skype, and a couple other different instant messaging systems, all provided by Slack going forward. Everything from the pricing to the ease of deployment to how quickly we could get up and running, and just how generally available Slack is, whether it's desktop or the app, and from a mobile phone, you could have a web browser, anything you wanted to. You're never away from Slack, technically. And so, while that might not be a good thing for the work-life balance, it definitely made it much easier to deploy than anything else we researched, and we got forward. And now, it's just part of everyday life. The reason we chose Slack, one of them at least the biggest one was how quickly we could move everything from previous options or previous programs we used to deploy the day of. So I think that was on a scale of one to five, five being the easiest. It was a five. If not, even higher than that. It was as easy as possible to deploy Slack, get everything set up from our exec team, and then trickling it down. It took maybe a matter of a half hour to get everybody on board and inside of Slack, and it's still even faster now. So that was probably the biggest factor to getting us over to Slack in the initial phase. Recommending Slack, or if you're choosing between Slack and something else, just try the free version of Slack and understand that that is good enough to probably get you in the door and keep you in the door as well. The paid version and the other offerings from Slack make it even more integral to your business, so I would highly recommend giving it a shot. Just in general, the ease in which you could get started and the ease in which you could continue going forward without skipping a beat in your business needs, whatever your business needs might be, it's Slack and Slack going forward.

Jacob: Hi, my name is Jacob, and I am the chapter administrator for LANFest Colorado. We are a roughly 500 person strong company and we use OpenProject a lot, so I'm going to give it a five. So, before OpenProject, we were actually utilizing a variety of things, the most mundane of which was email, sending emails back and forth, trying to collaborate on projects. We then switched to Google Drive, but that just didn't quite do what we needed to. Myself as the chapter administrator, I needed to see the overall view of the entire project and what was going on, and Google Drive just did not allow me to do that. Some of the reasons that we chose OpenProject were fairly simple. One, because of the fact that it's open-source and can be deployed on your own host, it's free if you have the infrastructure. So we were able to deploy it that way, compared to other services which charge a significant amount. Us being a 501(c)(3) charity, we try to cut costs wherever we can. So it certainly was a easy decision. Additionally, it had features that we did not have using Google Drive. Again, that overarching view of the entire project, the ability for me to assign tasks to people rather than it just being on a spreadsheet. Getting started with OpenProject wasn't, admittedly, the easiest at first. I am not a Linux person. I am a Windows Systems Administrator in my normal life. So getting some of the HTTPS set up, and things like that, did take a little bit of technical knowhow. However, because of the nature of my team and what it is that we do, I have people that can do that. So I did outsource it to other employees and we managed to get it up and running very quickly. If you're considering getting OpenProject, there's a few things I would recommend you do first. First and foremost, do you need it? And I'm not saying that OpenProject is not necessary, but it is definitely a learning curve. It is definitely a very large time investment to learn how to use the software. If you only have a small team, five people, maybe this isn't the software for you. But as you start to scale, as you start to get bigger and bigger with your projects, this is definitely something you need. And of course, if it's cost related, if you're worried about costs or anything like that, if you can self-deploy this, it is relatively easy and, of course, free.