Slack vs. Forums: How to Choose

If you want to build a strong community, you need to create a place for members to get together regularly. Fortunately, these days we have numerous robust tools to facilitate conversation, but it’s important to select the tool that works best for your team and community.

While forums can generally be configured to offer post notifications, conversation is generally slower than real-time, with some delay between posts. Depending on your community, this may feel less gratifying when people are trying to work together on an immediate issue.

On the other hand, a chat program like Slack works very well for interpersonal communication, which can build a sense of teamwork and friendship on a smaller scale. Asking “How was your weekend?” feels awkward on a forum post, but it’s completely natural on Slack.

With some exceptions (e.g. Discourse), there is often a need for some degree of moderation to prevent spam, off-topic posts, or rude comments.

Ultimately, Slack is an accessible and easy-to-use platform for facilitating team discussions. Its efficiency can help a scattered team feel more unified, fostering a real sense of collaboration. While it’s not perfect, it is one of the better options out there, but you’ll have to decide if it’s right for you.

Forums generally provide easy ways to organize content by topic, author, date, and more, which makes it simple to search for previous conversations. This makes it possible to have structured conversations, such as Q&As, and it also greatly increases the reusability of previous posts and conversation threads, turning the forum into a repository ... See more

When team members need to get quick answers to questions, provide fast updates, or get someone’s attention right away, Slack is the way to go. Instead of having to juggle emails, text messages, and other forms of communication across a number of platforms, Slack provides a streamlined place for conversations.

If you’re building a large-scale community with a global audience, forums are probably going to work better. They enable your audiences to have structured conversations and collaborate without requiring people to be online at the same time.