Slack is for the team. A community needs a different shape.

What it’s for

Connect keeps the part of Slack you actually liked — fast channels, threads, reactions, pinning, DMs and group chats — and fixes the parts that broke when you pointed it at a community. Per-tenant pricing instead of per-seat: a 500-member community is $0 on Free, a 2,500-member one is $119/month flat, not $8/seat. Public communities are indexed by default (sitemap, OG tags, JSON-LD) so people find you from search. And the things worth keeping live on durable surfaces Slack never had — long-form articles, threaded Q&A with accepted answers, a social feed with posts/announcements/events/polls, all under full-text search. AI catch-me-up summarizes channels for returning members (Growth+, your own provider key, no markup); the built-in Kanban board and video calls mean you're not bolting on three more SaaS tools.

Where it falls short

Connect is not where your internal company team should live — for the inside of a company, Slack's integration ecosystem and Enterprise Grid are still ahead, and that's a deep, deliberate moat. If your community is a dozen people, this is overkill (a Slack free workspace or WhatsApp is fine). And moving off Slack means leaving the network effect of a tool your members already have open all day — that switching cost is real and we won't pretend it away.

What it’s for

Discord is free, fast, and already installed on every member's phone. If the reason your community felt cramped in Slack was that you wanted live voice rooms, big always-on channels, and zero per-seat cost, Discord is the obvious move — no seat math, unlimited members, the strongest real-time-presence feeling in the category.

Where it falls short

Ephemeral by design. The resource someone shared last month is effectively gone, search is chat-only, and there's no custom domain or SEO — your community is invisible to Google and lives at discord.gg/yourserver. No structured Q&A or article surfaces. And the 2026 age-verification rollout has pushed some communities to reconsider. Great for live energy, wrong for anything you need to keep.

What it’s for

If the biggest thing Slack cost you was discoverability, Discourse is the strongest answer in this list. It's a forum-first platform that's open-source and self-hostable (free if you run it yourself; hosted from ~$20/month), every thread is a clean, indexable web page, and it's the gold standard for public support and knowledge communities. Search and archive are first-class — the exact opposite of Slack's 90-day amnesia.

Where it falls short

It's a forum, not a chat tool. Real-time chat exists as a plugin but it's secondary and won't feel like the Slack channels your members are used to. No DMs at the speed people expect, no social feed, AI features are add-ons, and self-hosting means you're now running infrastructure. If live conversation was the heart of your Slack, Discourse will feel slow.

What it’s for

Circle moved closer to a real Slack replacement than it used to be — chat spaces now ship with threaded replies, reactions, presence, and AI post summaries, and every plan includes unlimited members (no per-seat anxiety). If your community is something you charge for and you want the surface to look polished by default — courses, paywalled spaces, branded membership — Circle is best in class.

Where it falls short

There's a 2% transaction fee on community revenue on top of Stripe, plenty of features (email hub, custom profile fields, sender email) are paid add-ons, and the custom domain sits on Professional+ ($89/month). No embed SDK to drop the community inside your own product. The chat is good now, but the platform is still membership-shaped first, chat second.

What it’s for

If leaving Slack is also a chance to consolidate — courses, events, livestream, memberships, payments — Mighty packs the most features per dollar in the category, with unlimited members and AI on every plan from $79/month. One platform, one invoice, one integrated experience.

Where it falls short

Transaction fees of 0.5–2% apply on every plan, with no way to reach zero. The UI is dense and the navigation busy — the breadth costs clarity. Real-time chat isn't the centre of gravity the way it was in Slack, there's no embed SDK, and the entry plan caps you at 3 hosts and zero API access. You're buying breadth, not Slack-grade chat.