On Page Navigation
On Page Navigation
Slack prints its per user rate on the page. Microsoft prints two rates for the same plan, one with Teams inside it and one without. Google Chat does not have a price of its own, because it only arrives as part of Workspace. Mattermost quotes every tier, including the smallest. We charge three hundred dollars a month to run Zoho Cliq for you, and there is an honest qualification on that figure which we deal with further down this page.
Before you commit a company to a chat platform
Nobody chooses a chat tool badly. They choose one reasonably, roll it out in a week, and discover eighteen months later that there are four hundred channels, nobody remembers which of them are private, two integrations broke quietly, and the people who left in March are still in the directory. The software was never the problem. What follows is how to read the four platforms below, and where the money and the mess actually turn up.
1
Slack Pro is seven dollars twenty five per user a month on the annual term and eight seventy five paying monthly. Business plus is fifteen and eighteen. Microsoft Teams Essentials is four dollars a user a month paid yearly, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic, which carries Teams inside it, is seven. Google Chat has no rate to quote, because you buy Workspace rather than Chat. Mattermost publishes no figure on any tier. Whatever you land on, the count that matters is every person who needs an account, including the warehouse, the seasonal staff and the contractor who is only here until June.
2
A licence buys you an empty workspace. Somebody still has to decide whether client contractors get guest accounts or full ones, which conversations are retained and for how long, who may create a channel, and what happens to that channel when the project it was built for finishes. Every platform on this page can enforce those rules once you have made them. None of them will make them for you, and the cost of not making them appears on no pricing page.
3
Rollout is the part everybody plans for and the part every vendor will happily help with. What nobody owns is the year afterwards. Someone has to remove the leavers, fix the bot that stopped posting when an API version was retired, prune the channels that turned into ghost towns, and answer the person who cannot find the file from last April. In most companies that work lands on whoever is least busy, which means over time it lands on nobody.
Two of these four publish a per user rate you can act on today. One has no price of its own, because it is not sold on its own. One quotes every tier, including the entry tier. Read the four cards for what each vendor is metering, then read the honest note about our own number underneath them.
VS
Priced In Public
Per Person, Per Month
History Gated On Free
Slack is the default choice, and it is the only vendor here that makes the money question easy. Pro is eight dollars seventy five per user a month paying monthly, or seven twenty five paying annually. Business plus is eighteen and fifteen. The free tier is genuinely usable, right up until the day somebody needs a message from further back than the free history reaches and finds that unlimited search sits behind the paid plan. Everything is per person, every month, and the bill grows exactly as fast as you hire.
Learn More
VS
Cheapest Headline Here
Sold With Or Without Teams
Bundled Into Microsoft 365
Microsoft has the cheapest headline on this page and the hardest one to read. Teams Essentials is four dollars a user a month paid yearly. Microsoft 365 Business Basic, which includes Teams, is seven. Microsoft now also lists the same plans without Teams, at five dollars forty for Business Basic and twenty dollars thirty against twenty three fifty on the Copilot tier. That is the closest any vendor comes to telling you what its chat product is worth on its own. If you already pay for Microsoft 365, the marginal cost of chat is small, and you should weigh that honestly before reading any further.
Learn More
VS
No Price Of Its Own
Arrives With Workspace
Three Hundred User Ceiling
Google Chat is not a product you can buy. It arrives with Google Workspace alongside Gmail, Drive and Meet, and there is no separate line for it anywhere. We fetched the Workspace pricing page while writing this and the tier figures are drawn by script after the page loads, so we are not going to quote you one. What we can tell you is the shape. The Starter, Standard and Plus plans stop at three hundred users, a one year commitment saves sixteen per cent, and the Gemini features inside Chat begin at Standard rather than Starter.
Learn More
VS
Every Tier Is Quoted
Annual Seats Paid Ahead
You Host It Yourself
Mattermost is what you choose when the data cannot leave your own infrastructure. It is self hosted, open at its core, and it publishes no price at all. Professional says contact sales, Enterprise says get pricing, and Enterprise Advanced says request a quote. Licences are prepaid annual seats, and if your activated user count passes the seats you bought, you buy the difference forward at the next quarter. Professional stops at two hundred and fifty users. Every server needs its own key, staging included.
Learn More
What the flat three hundred covers, and what it does not
Three hundred dollars a month, per organisation, covering up to a hundred users and five bots or integrations. That is a management fee rather than a licence. You keep your own Zoho Cliq subscription in your own name, and every channel, message, bot and integration we build sits inside it. If you ever leave, nothing has to be extracted from an agency account, because nothing was ever held in one.
Here is the qualification we promised in the opening. Our three hundred sits on top of whatever Cliq itself costs you, while the figures on the cards above are the tool. Zoho sells Cliq at four tiers, the upper two carrying a ten user minimum, and its prices are drawn by script exactly as the Google ones are, so we cannot finish the arithmetic for you on this page and will not pretend otherwise. We will run it against your real headcount on a call instead. If you already use several Zoho applications, the Cliq licence often stops being a separate question, because Zoho One includes the Enterprise edition of Cliq inside the bundle.
A chat licence changes nothing on its own. Which channels exist and who may create one, where clients and contractors sit, what is retained and for how long, and which of your other systems post into chat rather than into an inbox. We decide those with you, build them, and hold them steady as the business changes. That is the actual work, and it is the part no pricing page mentions.
Every vendor on this page bills per person, so the cost of chat rises the month you hire and nobody notices until renewal. Our fee does not move. Up to a hundred users and five bots or integrations, three hundred dollars, whether you added four people this quarter or fourteen. Past that we talk, and we would rather have that conversation once a year than send you a slightly larger invoice twelve times.
Chat fails quietly. Messages keep sending, so nothing looks wrong, and the gap only surfaces on the morning a leaver still has access, or when the alert that should have fired for a new ticket turns out not to have fired for six weeks. We watch the integrations and the permissions rather than waiting for somebody to report them, because by the time anyone reports a thing like that it has usually been broken a while.
How do you compare four tools that price so differently?
Convert everything to one annual number for your own headcount, then read what each price leaves out. Write down three figures: how many people need an account, how many external people need to be inside your channels, and how far back you need to be able to search. Slack and Microsoft you can price today from their own pages. Google you price by pricing Workspace, because Chat is not sold on its own. Mattermost you price by asking. Then add the part none of them quote, which is the hours somebody spends running the thing afterwards.
How does a chat platform decision go wrong?
Almost never on the software. It goes wrong on ownership. Somebody capable rolls it out in a fortnight, everyone starts relying on it, and then that person changes role. Two years later there are four hundred channels, several integrations are dead, half a dozen former contractors still hold guest accounts, and nobody can say what the retention policy is. All four platforms here can do the job. What went wrong is that no one was ever assigned to keep doing it.
Who owns the workspace and the message history if you set this up for us?
You do, entirely. You hold your own Zoho Cliq subscription in your own name and we work inside it as administrators. The channels, the history, the files, the bots and the integrations are yours, so if you move to another provider or bring it in house, nothing has to be exported out of an account we control. We would rather earn the renewal than hold anything of yours as leverage.
Should we simply buy one of these instead?
For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say it here than after an invoice. If you have fifteen people, one office and no compliance obligation, Slack Pro or Microsoft Teams Essentials will serve you perfectly well and there is nothing here worth paying us to manage. This starts being worth it roughly where the second question arrives: external collaborators who need controlled access, a retention or eDiscovery requirement, or enough integrations that one of them breaking actually costs you a day.
Which one actually comes out cheapest?
Microsoft, for most businesses, and we are not going to dress that up. Teams Essentials is four dollars a user a month paid yearly, and if you already pay for Microsoft 365 then the difference between the Business Basic plan with Teams and the one without it is a dollar sixty. Nothing on this page beats that on price alone. What the four dollars does not include is anybody deciding how your workspace should be shaped, or noticing when part of it quietly stops working, which is the whole of what we sell.
What happens when something breaks after the rollout?
On a subscription the platform is supported and whatever you configured on it is not, and almost everything that breaks is what you configured. A bot that stopped posting because an API version was retired. A channel whose permissions drifted after a reorganisation. A connector that silently stopped syncing in April. The vendor will confirm their service is healthy, which it is. Somebody still has to go and find the actual fault.
Do we have to move everyone across at once?
No, and it usually goes better if you do not. The normal order is one department that is already frustrated with whatever it uses now, then the teams that talk to that department most, then everybody else. Both tools run in parallel for a couple of weeks so nobody loses a conversation mid project. The one thing worth settling up front rather than in stages is the channel and permission structure, because retrofitting that onto an active workspace is considerably harder than starting with it.
Can you take over a chat workspace somebody else built?
Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the channel and team structure, who holds administrator rights, where guests and external people sit, what the retention and export settings actually do, and which integrations are still alive. Then we tell you what we found before touching anything. Occasionally the honest answer is that rebuilding the structure costs less than untangling it, and if that is the answer you get it in writing rather than as a surprise halfway through.
How long before it is actually running your chat?
Two to six weeks for most businesses, and longer where nobody currently agrees who may talk to whom. The channel structure comes first, then guest and external access, then the integrations into your other systems, then the bots and slash commands. A migration carrying years of Slack or Teams history is its own project and is scoped separately, because the size of that varies enormously between one company and the next.
We already have somebody technical in house. What is left for you?
Possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns the workspace and genuinely keeps it current is most of this job. Where we tend to be useful alongside one is the build work that keeps getting deferred, and cover for the fortnight they are away. We are also perfectly happy to be a second opinion on a structure rather than the people running it.
When would you tell us to walk away?
Two cases, and both are common. If you have a small team in one place with no external collaborators and no compliance obligation, buy Slack or Teams and spend the money elsewhere. And if your data genuinely cannot leave your own infrastructure, Zoho Cliq is cloud only and cannot meet that, so self hosted Mattermost is the right answer and we are not. You would hear both of those on the first call rather than the third.
What if the tool turns out not to be the problem?
We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. Communication that feels chaotic is usually chaotic because decisions are being made in six places and nobody has agreed which one is authoritative. Moving that to a new platform moves the chaos, it does not remove it. If what you actually need is somebody to decide where work gets decided, that is a shorter conversation and a much cheaper one.
What does this cost through you, stated plainly?
Three hundred dollars a month, per organisation, covering up to a hundred users and five bots or integrations. It is listed on the managed Zoho Cliq page and on this one. Unlike the figures on the cards above it is a management fee rather than a licence, so your own Cliq subscription sits alongside it and we will price that with you before you commit. A migration off Slack or Teams, or a custom integration build, is scoped and quoted separately so the monthly number stays predictable.
What happens if we decide to leave?
Thirty days notice ends it. Everything stays exactly where it is, because it was always in your Zoho account rather than ours. The channels, the history, the bots, the integrations and the permission structure all remain, and we hand over documentation of how it was built rather than leaving the next person to reverse engineer it. There is no export to negotiate and no term left to run down.
What do you need from us to start?
A rough headcount, including the people who will need an account but will rarely log in. Whatever you are using for chat today, in whatever state it is in. The names of the people who should hold administrator rights. A sense of which external parties need to be inside your channels. And any retention, export or compliance requirement you are already under, because that shapes the tier before anything else does.
