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Just as we sign a £100K+/annum contact with them...

At least it happened before we've migrated.

There are so many open source solutions, Mattermost, Rocketchat, etc, why are companies willing to pay $100k/yr for Slack? What was the defining feature that others didn't have? Even Discord feels like it has far more features than Slack.

Name recognition, employee familiarity (I've used Slack at every job I've worked since early 2015, I pretty much know what to expect from it always), and punting maintenance costs (this is probably the biggest factor).

I love IRC and XMPP. I'd love to run one of those, or some new service (Matrix?), at work. However, my time is arguably better spent doing anything _other_ than maintaining such services, and the same goes for most engineers at most companies, sadly.

Side factor: the mobile clients for IRC and XMPP almost universally suck, at least on Android. I imagine if those problems had been solved in a reliable way, more companies may consider them (assuming the allocation of engineering resources problem isn't a problem).

There may not be one defining feature. For some it may be look and feel/attention to detail. It could be the number of well supported Slack integrations, or various enterprise features wrt message retention and deletion, SSO and auditing.

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