A quick look at the prices, Stride is under half the price of Slack. No idea if quality correlates with price here since I've never touched Stride.

I don't know about Stride, but the quality of Slack has really been declining lately. Especially the quality of the desktop client.

If I was in charge of the decision for what communication tool to use at my company, I would take a long hard look at every single alternative to Slack.

I believe it's cheaper, isn't it?

You might also look at mattermost, if you are OK with hosting yourself (it's not hard, and upgrades are easy).

have you considered rocket chat? It's a slack you can either have hosted for you, or host in house.

I thought Stride was the same price as Hipchat?