RingCentral Video vs Slack

Connect in real-time with unified real-time chat

Team messaging with unlimited team members

HD voice and video, up to 24 hrs meeting duration

A manager on a RingCentral Video video meeting with her team while at home

In today’s digitally transforming world, it’s hard to imagine a working environment that doesn’t use at least one communication tool. The cultural shift away from the office towards remote and dispersed teams has rendered email an inefficient tool to facilitate communication and collaboration in the online workspace.

As businesses become more entwined in an online world, we become more reliant on communications software to stay connected internally and externally. To streamline business operations and facilitate efficient teamwork, we need an online workspace that allows us to do more than just chat.

Nowadays, there are countless business software team chat applications on the market. With all these choices, you’ll want to find the solution that offers the best value for money. Today we’re comparing RingCentral Video (by RingCentral) and Slack, both business communication and collaboration software.

In this article, we’ll examine how these two online workspace tools stack up against each other in a digital world filled with team messaging platforms. Ready? Let’s dive right in.

RingCentral Video Vs Slack Overview

If you’re only just hearing about RingCentral Video, you’re probably looking for detailed RingCentral Video comparisons to better understand which team communications solution is best for your business. You’ve come to the right place.

Before we dive into the functionality of each communication platform, here’s an overview of what each offers.

RingCentral Video is a team communication and collaboration software by RingCentral. With text chat and video at its core, RingCentral Video allows teams to plan, share, and organize work tasks through a variety of excellent features. With RingCentral Video, teams can:

Connect in real-time with unified real-time chat and video sharing
Share files
Manage tasks
Schedule events to encourage efficient and productive team collaboration

What’s more, RingCentral Video can scale to facilitate any kind of business. Whether you’re running a small startup, a small-medium business, or a Fortune 100 enterprise—RingCentral Video offers a robust business communications solution for every business.

The creative team is meeting via video call while messaging each other on RingCentral Video

Slack is a popular communication tool that’s also used by businesses of all sizes. It focuses on connecting users in channels organized by themes (project, department, etc.) so that users can effectively connect with the people they work with regardless of location. Slack’s functionality includes:

Team messaging with unlimited team members
Supports 1:1 voice and video calls
10,000 message history
File sharing

The table below shows what you get from each software on their free plans.

A comparison of features between RingCentral Video vs. Slack's free plan
	RingCentral Video by RingCentral (free plan)	Slack (free plan)
Message history limit	Unlimited	10,000
Video calls	Unlimited video chat with up to 100 people	Unlimited 1:1 voice and video sharing. Group video conferencing only available with paid plans
Platforms supported	Windows, Mac, Linux. iOS, Android	Windows, Mac, Linux. iOS, Android
Team members	Unlimited	Unlimited
Guest users	Unlimited	Not available
File annotation	Yes	No
File storage	Unlimited	5GB
Screen sharing features	Yes	No, only available with paid plans
Integrations	Unlimited /48 integrations including Google Workspace & Microsoft 365	Up to 10 third-party custom integrations

Now we know what each platform is, let’s dig a bit deeper into some key features offered by both RingCentral Video and Slack.

Team Messaging

RingCentral Video’s built-in instant messaging feature allows you to real-time chat with colleagues, clients, and other external parties. With unlimited message functionality, you won’t have to worry about running out of space or having your message history deleted unsuspectingly.

With RingCentral Video, you can share files, create teams (and add unlimited guests), and more directly from the real-time chat window. You can also create a conversation with yourself to keep all your most important files, annotations, and reminders in one easy-to-access place.

The list of people that are part of the Marketing Team messaging thread in RingCentral Video

RingCentral Video’s chat features a rich text editor, so users can write using all the formatting they might need to bring organization and emphasis to their messages. What’s more, RingCentral Video allows you to customize messages with:

A wide range of emojis to add personality to your messages
Gifs to keep things light-hearted

The best things about RingCentral Video instant messaging? You can switch from a team chat to a video chat powered by RingCentral Meetings with a single click, taking real-time internal communications one step further. The ability to switch between modes of communication makes RingCentral Video a powerful Slack alternative. We’ll dive into all the great features of sharing video with RingCentral Video in the next section.

An employee is being invited into a video chat in RingCentral Video

So how does Slack vs RingCentral Video compare when it comes to messaging?

Slack’s chat software product also provides excellent instant messaging capabilities, including slack search to find important messages and files in seconds.

However, Slack’s 10k message history limit offered in its freemium plan can be frustrating for teams that communicate via team chat. Once you hit 10k messages, your chat history, along with shared links and files, will start to disappear. With RingCentral Video’s unlimited message history, you can send unlimited messages, and be able to reference them whenever you need to.

Video Conferencing

In today’s globally-connected business landscape, teams aren’t always located in the same geographical location or time zone. Video conferencing is no longer optional. It’s an essential tool for facilitating communication and collaboration among remote or dispersed teams. So it goes without saying that robust video capabilities are a must-have for any business communications platform.

Key features of RingCentral Video’s video conferencing feature:

HD voice and video
Up to 24 hours meeting duration
Call up to 100 participants

RingCentral Video users can enjoy video calling tools backed by RingCentral’s enterprise-grade security and reliability. On the free Pro plan, you’ll be able to run HD video meetings with a 24-hour time limit —although we hope your business meetings never take that long– and invite up to 100 attendees. With the Pro+ plan, this increases to 200 attendees.

A manager is meeting with her remote team via RingCentral Video video chat

You can start a video conference call with one person or a whole team by clicking “Start video chat” in the chat app. Participants can join a video conference in seconds via their browser; no downloads required. You can even transfer the call between different devices (for instance, from a PC to a mobile device, or vice versa) with a single click.

Employee is on a RingCentral Video video call while out of the office

There’s also a screen recording feature, so you can record important meeting highlights and store them safely in the cloud for up to a week (or a year with the paid plan). The fun doesn’t stop there. You can also use artificial intelligence features to:

Reduce background noise
Add virtual backgrounds
Include closed captioning

An employee is having coffee with a colleague via a video call

RingCentral Video’s video conferencing function sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Now let’s check out how it compares to Slack.

To be honest, there really isn’t a comparison to be made. Slack is first and foremost a messaging tool. The platform does offer video call capabilities, but with limitations (in both free and paid versions) that’ll impact how your teams work together.

Slack’s native video means you won’t have to download software or another app to use this function, but remember the free plan only allows for one-on-one video chats. If you want to connect with whole teams or more than one person, you’ll require a paid plan. If you do invest in a subscription, you’ll be able to conduct group video conferences with screen sharing straight from the group chat. However, regardless of the plan, there’s a limit of 15 participants per call.

Screen Sharing

Screen sharing is a must-have feature for teams working together remotely or those collaborating with external talent.

With RingCentral Video, you can easily share your screen during a video conference. Moreover, you can also make annotations on-screen to highlight important information—which makes sharing work or explaining ideas much easier. You can share your screen or screenshots in a video call with up to 100 participants—all for free. This makes it an ideal tool for hosting:

Team meetings or business conferences
Team building events
Webinars

The screensharing feature lets you choose the screen or app you want to share

Slack’s video feature also allows users to share their screen. Again, however, this is only with a paid plan. Even then, Slack’s video tool only supports up to 15 participants—so you can only share your screen with small teams or groups.

File Sharing

When you’re a part of a busy team that’s constantly sending information back and forth, robust file-sharing capabilities are essential to any collaboration tool.

RingCentral Video features its own file storage and sharing alongside integrations with other file sharing platforms. These include:

Box
Dropbox
Microsoft OneDrive
Google Drive

You can share files from any of these platforms within a RingCentral Video conversation, and add annotations for better collaboration. With RingCentral Video, you can share and store an unlimited amount of files. Oh and—before we forget— it’s also fully searchable, so you can find documents and files in seconds.

John Smith is sharing the requested diagram file in the Creative Team messaging thread on RingCentral Video

Slack lets you share files too. But there’s a limit. With Slack, you can upload and share files up to 1GB in size. With the free plan, you’ll have a 5GB sharing limit, and up to 10GB with a paid plan. If you need to search for and access previously uploaded files, Slack organizes them in list format—so you can comfortably search for older items.

Team Collaboration

In today’s digital world, everything is online. Online collaboration space is essential, whether we’re in the office or working as part of a remote team. Luckily, there are plenty of online platforms that enable us to work together in real-time. So, how do RingCentral Video and Slack compare when it comes to collaboration?

In RingCentral Video, conversations are called “teams”. You can create as many teams as you like and set them to public or private depending on your needs. For example, you could have one group that includes everyone (where all tasks are visible) and another organized for a management or software development team that’s kept private. When teams are public it means everyone can join simply by clicking a link. Private teams, however, will require an invitation.

RingCentral Video allows for a free flow of communications among teams. By unifying text and video chat, it allows users to collaborate on projects of all shapes and sizes without limitations.

With RingCentral Video, users can seamlessly switch between PC and mobile devices to continue work on the go and stay connected, wherever, whenever. You can start voice calls and video chats, schedule events, send links and notes, and share files from the conversation window on any device. The result? Enhanced productivity and streamlined workflows. Moreover, RingCentral Video email and third party integrations enable teams to easily implement RingCentral Video into their existing text stack, without requiring any technical knowledge.

The website redesign team is collaborating for an update on the homepage headline through RingCentral Video

Slack’s team collaboration functionality is more limiting due to the fact that communication isn’t unified. That being said, Slack does offer great team organization through its “channels”, which are all easy to see and navigate in the left hand panel. Like RingCentral Video, Slack allows users to switch between devices too with its great mobile app.

While most of the time you can communicate with messages, talking face-to-face is often much easier. Lack of video (beyond one-to-one) and a limited chat history mean that Slack’s communication capabilities are no match for RingCentral Video’s integrated approach. Moreover, when it comes to organizing projects and working together, Slack falls behind due to its limited third-party integrations (at least in the free version), and file sharing limit.

Task Management

If you’re managing a remote or international team, task management tools are a must-have feature for any collaboration platform you decide to incorporate into your business tech stack. Task management tools increase accountability, streamline workflows, and improve collaboration by ensuring everyone knows what they need to do at all times.

RingCentral Video features a built-in task manager that allows you to effectively create to-do lists and assign project tasks to one or more team members, add deadlines, and track progress.

Tasks can be accessed via the user’s dashboard and can be organized using drag and drop, colors, and filters. You can also reply, share, and like tasks, as well as move them to other conversations.

However, if you’re accustomed to using a particular task manager tool already, you’ll be glad to know that RingCentral Video integrates with various task management tools. Easily integrate RingCentral Video with platforms like:

Pivotal Tracker
Asana
Jira
Trello

Slack, on the other hand, offers task management capabilities in the form of third-party app integration. It doesn’t feature its own task manager for organizing teams and tasks, so you’ll need to integrate with project management software like Asana, Trello, Jira, or Wrike if Slack is your major team communication software product.

Ultimately, both platforms offer robust third-party integrations when it comes to the most popular project management tools. But RingCentral Video’s built-in task manager and unlimited integrations take the cake when it comes to task management.

Customizable Workspace

One of the most important things about an online workspace is customization. You want your online workspace to reflect your team, right? Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, RingCentral Video offers a fully customizable workspace to meet your team’s needs.

Divided into three main columns, the left column displays your contact management list, conversations, tasks, notes, and all files that you’ve sent and received. The right panel will pop up once you open a conversation, showing the last 10 things that have been shared, as well as any pinned messages. It can also display tips and advice to help users become accustomed to the platform. You can also organize sections and conversations by dragging and dropping, so you can make those most relevant easily accessible in seconds.

What’s more, RingCentral Video can facilitate an unlimited number of users and guest users, so you can stay connected internally and externally, even as your team grows.

Slack offers customizable “channels”. You can easily create, edit, and delete a channel within Slack’s free plan. However, if you want to provide guest users access you’ll need to invest in a paid plan.

Slack’s workspace is easy to navigate, with a similar interface and organization to RingCentral Video. In terms of customization, we think they’re pretty equal, apart from the fact that Slack doesn’t allow you to add guest users (with the free version). This feature is handy for international businesses working with freelancers or international clients who aren’t part of your permanent team.

Integrations

RingCentral Video offers unlimited integrations with its free plan. Yes, you did read that correctly! Various integrations are available to streamline your business operations and simplify communication and collaboration across departments.

What’s more, RingCentral developers are constantly enhancing RingCentral Video APIs and expanding integration capabilities in various business app software categories. Here’s an overview of the integrations RingCentral Video Pro currently offers:

File sharing integrations: Including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and OneDrive/OneDrive for Business.
Time-tracking software: Allow employees to keep track of the hours they work and ensure they’re working during business hours with tools like Harvest.
CRM software and help desk integrations: Integrate with customer relationship management systems like Zoho (when using RingCentral Video as part of RingEX) and Zendesk to streamline the way you run your business.
Task and project management: Despite having its own task management functionality, RingCentral Video offers integrations with commonly used tools like Asana and Trello.
Integrations to develop, deploy, and manage applications: Tools like Github, Heroku, Jira, and more.

Adding the Airbrake integration to RingCentral Video

Slack’s free plan offers integrations—but with limits. With Slack’s free plan you can use up to 10 integrations. If you want to take things up a notch, you’ll need to be willing to pay for the standard or plus plan. If you do that, you’ll be able to access more than 800 integrations of all kinds—from marketing automation software apps (like Hubspot) to apps for human resources and team culture.

Pricing

Slack pricing is one of the biggest drawbacks of the platform. Without spending money on a monthly plan, Slack’s free version is very limiting. See Slack’s pricing model below.

Slack's features and pricing plans
Free $0	Standard $6.67	Plus $12.50
Message history limit of 10,000 One-to-one video and voice calls only Limit of up to 10 integrations No guest access	Unlimited message history search and apps Video chats up to 15 participants Guest access	24/7 customer support 99.99% uptime Single sign-on

Beyond the free plan, Slack’s pricing model starts from $6.67 per user per month. If you want to get rid of limitations like message limit and integrations, you’ll need to invest in a monthly plan. Moreover, if you require more advanced features like 99.99% uptime and 24/7 customer support, you’re looking at spending up to $12.50 per user per month—a cost that can quickly add up.

RingCentral Video offers much better value for money. With the free version, you’ll have access to a whole host of advanced features including the ones we’ve mentioned above. With the free version, you can use RingCentral Video with an unlimited number of co-workers and guests, enjoy unlimited storage, and host meetings of up to 100 participants. Here’s an overview of what you can expect from RingCentral Video Pro (free) and RingCentral Video Pro+ (paid) plans.

RingCentral Video Pro+'s features and pricing plans
RingCentral Video Pro $0	RingCentral Video Pro+ $11.99
Unlimited video meetings up for up to 100 participants 24 hr meeting duration Unlimited integrations Instant join in with no downloads required Switch between PC and mobile access with a single click	Everything offered with RingCentral Video Pro, plus: Host up to 200 participants 10GB cloud recording storage per user Single sign-on Advanced analytics

Customer Support

Both platforms offer robust customer support, to ensure you’re always looked after if you have questions, concerns, or issues with the platform. RingCentral Video offers live online support with live chat, phone support, handy video tutorials, and a knowledge base that users can access to find answers to their own requests. When you upgrade to RingCentral Video Pro+, you’ll get all of this as well as 24/7 live agent support that includes web tickets, live chat, and phone. With RingCentral Video Pro+, RingCentral Video’s always right there behind you.

Slack also offers the same customer support channels, but without phone support, which can be frustrating for those who prefer speaking to human agents on the phone to find answers to their requests. When you upgrade to Slack’s standard paid plan, you’ll get priority support—however, it’s not 24/7. 24/7 support and 99.99% guaranteed uptime is only offered with the Slack Plus or Enterprise Grid plans.

Slack Vs RingCentral Video: What’s the verdict?

There’s no doubt that Slack’s a great tool for keeping teams connected. However, if you’re looking for the best free team messaging and collaboration app, RingCentral Video offers everything that Slack does, but with fewer limitations, more integrations, and plenty of extra features to take your workspace to the next level.

With RingCentral Video by RingCentral, you can enjoy unlimited message, HD video calls, file sharing, and a variety of task management tools—without spending a cent. If you’re looking for a solution with more features, look no further than RingCentral Video’s paid plan: Pro+. With RingCentral Video Pro+, you’ll have access to all the great features of the free plan, along with top features like single sign-on, advanced analytics, and 24/7 support. This makes it a great Slack alternative that your team will love.

Why not get started with the free version? You’ve got nothing to lose. As your team grows, or you require premium features further down the line, you can easily upgrade to RingCentral Video Pro+ for just $11.99 per month.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, you don’t have time to waste switching between business apps or even user interface tabs in a single app. RingCentral Video brings together all your communication and collaboration needs in a single easy-to-use interface. It doesn’t get more simple than that, does it?

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