Four Chat Tools, Four Pricing Models, and Plans with the Price Printed Here

Reduce each to a yearly number for your own headcount, then read what the price leaves out. Write down three figures: accounts needed, outside people who must sit inside your channels, and how far back you need to search. Slack and Microsoft publish prices you can check today. Google Chat has to be priced through Workspace, because it is not sold alone. Mattermost needs a quote for your seat count. Then add the cost none of them print, the hours someone spends running the tool afterward.

On ownership, rarely on software. A capable person launches it in two weeks, the whole company comes to rely on it, and then that person changes jobs. Two years later there are four hundred channels, several dead integrations, half a dozen former contractors holding guest accounts, and no one who can state the retention policy. Any of these four platforms can do the work. No one was assigned to keep tending it.

You do, in full. The Zoho Cliq subscription is in your name and we work inside it as administrators. Channels, history, files, bots, and integrations are yours, so switching providers or taking it in house means exporting nothing from an account we control. We would sooner earn the renewal than keep your data as a bargaining chip.

Often it is, and we prefer to say so now rather than after an invoice. Fifteen people in one office with no compliance duty will be well served by Slack Pro or Microsoft Teams Essentials, and managing that is not worth our fee. The picture changes when outside collaborators need controlled access, when a retention or eDiscovery rule applies, or when enough integrations exist that one failing costs you a day.

Microsoft, for most businesses. Teams Essentials runs four dollars a user a month paid yearly, and a company already on Microsoft 365 sees only a dollar sixty between the Business Basic plan with Teams and the one without. Nothing here undercuts that on price. What four dollars omits is someone shaping the workspace and noticing when part of it quietly stops working. That is all we sell.

Platforms get vendor support. What you configured on them does not, and almost every failure sits in the configuration. A bot that stopped posting after an API version was retired. A channel whose permissions drifted during a reorganization. A connector that silently quit syncing in April. The vendor will confirm its service is healthy, and it is. Someone still has to track down the actual fault.

No, and a phased move works better. Start with one department already fed up with its current tool, then the teams that talk to it most, then everyone else. Both tools run side by side for a couple of weeks so no conversation is lost mid project. Fix the channel and permission structure up front, because adding it to a busy workspace later is considerably harder.

Often, though it is proper work and not a light cleanup. We read the channel and team structure, see who holds administrator rights, find where guests and outsiders sit, test what retention and export settings really do, and check which integrations still run. You get our findings before we change anything. Sometimes rebuilding is cheaper than untangling, and you will have that in writing, not as a mid project surprise.

Two to six weeks for most businesses, longer where nobody has agreed who may talk to whom. Channel structure comes first, then guest and external access, then integrations into your other systems, then bots and slash commands. Bringing across years of Slack or Teams history is a separate project, scoped on its own because its size varies enormously from one company to the next.

Possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Someone who owns the workspace and keeps it current is most of the job. We tend to help with build work that keeps getting pushed back, and with cover for the two weeks that person is away. A second opinion on a structure, rather than running it, suits us too.

In two common cases. A small team in one place, with no outside collaborators and no compliance duty, should buy Slack or Teams and spend the savings elsewhere. And if your data truly cannot leave your own infrastructure, Zoho Cliq is cloud only and cannot meet that. Self hosted Mattermost is the right answer then, and we are not. You would hear both on the first call, not the third.

We say so before you pay anything. Chat feels chaotic mostly because decisions are made in six places and nobody has named the authoritative one. A new platform carries the chaos along with it. If you need someone to decide where work gets decided, that is a shorter and much cheaper conversation.

One published monthly plan, from $250 a month, priced by hours of Zoho work rather than by users. It is a management fee, not a license like the figures on the cards above, so your Cliq subscription runs beside it and we price that with you before you commit. A move off Slack or Teams, or a custom integration build, is quoted separately so the monthly number stays predictable.

Cancel any time and service runs to the last business day of that month. Everything stays put, since it always lived in your Zoho account. Channels, history, bots, integrations, and the permission structure remain, and we hand over documentation of how it was built so nobody has to reverse engineer it. No export to negotiate, no term to run down.

A rough headcount, including people who need an account but rarely log in. Whatever you use for chat today, in whatever condition. The names of those who should hold administrator rights. Which external parties belong inside your channels. And any retention, export, or compliance rule you already answer to, as that sets the tier before anything else does.