Slack vs Abacus Private Cloud: 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.

Michael C.: Hello, I am Michael. I am the principal in a small law firm. I give Abacus Cloud a two-star rating. And for more reviews, look below. We rely very strongly on the Microsoft Office package. We also use and used QuickBooks, both online and desktop. That was primarily how we ran the office. I wanted a more efficient case management program, and I wanted an integrated program that integrated well with Outlook. This is what I was promised with Abacus. I chose Abacus because I wanted an integrated case management accounting program so that all of our functions could be speeded up and easy to use and to manage a large number of cases. The first part was that integration took about seven weeks, which was a real surprise to us for how long they wanted to do it. Then when we actually had to turn on the machines and to access them, it was extremely time-consuming, like half a day at a time for each computer. It was really a very, very difficult process, and it seemed to be absurd to us. I would say stay away from Abacus Cloud. We're locked into a three-year contract. They don't work with us. They don't fix anything. It's impossible to use the program. We probably use 10% of the package because we can't get to it. There's no training available of any merit. I think there are other off-the-shelf items that'll do just as good a job and save a lot of money and a lot of headache.