Flowdock vs. Glip (discontinued)

Flowdock is well suited for small teams and to environments that doesn't need too much reliability. I think it has some management problems that can make your life difficult if you have to manage a big amount of users. If you want just a tool communication with basic features (without using any integration or robust features) it can be suitable for you. You should try Flowdock using its free version for a small team and compare with others similar products. Flowdock delivers team chat and collaboration features, but is not necessarily the best product. Maybe some usability problems that disturb me won't be so relevant to you.

Incentivized

Glip feels right at home with a marketing and creative team. You must first ask yourself, are you tired of emailing all the time? Would working in real-time save you time? Do you share files all the time with your colleagues? If you answered yes to any of these questions then Glip can definitely benefit you.

• Possibility to integrate with external services such as e-mail (send messages to a flow inbox from your e-mail), twitter, github, confluence, jira, single sign-on, etc. Using those integrations you can easily improve your team productivity by centralizing all useful information in just one point.
• Very easy to configure. You can get it running for your company or team in a few minutes. Furthermore, almost all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android) have an app to install and there is a web version that can also be used.
• Powerful communication tool. You can separate differents subjects in to separated "flows" or channels. In addition, you can invite people to join just one channel increasing privacy for others members.
• Free version up to 5 users. If you are a non-profit organization or have a student project, they say that is possible to work with that too. In other case, you have to pay per user/month.

Incentivized

• The chat functionality of Glip is fantastic, and even their mobile app is really good. The software is truly platform-agnostic. My team uses Mac, Windows and Chrome OS as well as iOS and Android.
• The task functionality is well-designed and intuitive. It's very helpful to have access to tasks regardless of device or location, and the ability to create tasks from messages is surprisingly handy.
• The notes functionality is a great way to store information that the whole team or just a few members need access to. We also use it for mark-up occasionally, since it has the ability to leave comments pinned to a location on the document or image.
• We have the option of inviting clients to join Glip. This isn't something my team uses at this point, but it's an option.

Incentivized

• One thing a little bit annoying is that a lot of links to others Flowdock sections (preferences, external services, etc) will open a new window/tab. Each click may take you to a new window and you can get lost easily.
• There isn't a quick access list to members of your organization to start a private chat. I took a while to find how to do that. The interface and usability could be better.
• There isn't an app for Windows Phone.
• Sometimes you try to load some conversation and it doesn't show anything. It is not frequently but happens sometimes.

Incentivized

• Allow the ability to move a conversation when a hyperlink is involved. Currently not able to do this. Glip is aware and hopefully working on it.
• Add a more robust search feature to find old conversations. Search query time could also be sped up.
• Add reminder notifications. When tasks are added, it is sometimes easy to overlook older tasks.

Incentivized

I go with the flow because I'm a newer employee and Flowdock works as advertised. If it were my decision to choose a team communciator for the organization, I'd recommend we go with Slack for its robust features and ever-changing/evolving software integrations. Slack is the outright innovator in the space and will continue to hold that role for some time.

Glip has saved us so much time that my team could no longer live without it. I don't know what we would do. All of us used it constantly all day every day. It is one of the best tools in my arsenal!

Mobile UI is not as pleasant as others, it looks washed out and that makes it seem like it lacks some features.

Incentivized

We have a free account so I understand why we are not at the top of the list. But we have had issues before that took forever for them to get back to us. Once I had to make a Twitter account just to tweet at them about the issue and they finally got back to me. After several weeks. And the issue was something we just had to wait out for a few more days. Normally you have to submit a ticket through their support page and maybe they will get back to you and maybe not. We had one issue where the standard user on the iMac was getting popups every few minutes about installing a helper tool. The only way to fix this was to delete and reinstall Glip as an admin user. This was frustrating because it took time to do this for me as the IT person, and after reaching out to a few times, I was finally given an answer two years after I had asked about it! Finally some devs reach out to me on Glip and told me to just put the app in the user folder instead of the app folder which is managed by the admin account. They said it should be fixed now and I believe it is.

Incentivized

Slack is a similar software.

Private chat or channels are well implemented in both softwares and both are also very easy to setup.

Besides of some usability problemas I think Flowdock is still better than Slack in this user experience and design.

The second point is the price. Flowdock is half price of Slack ($3/month). If you are a student or a non-profit organization, you are able to get some special license.

Incentivized

The team tasked with selecting a collaboration tool shortlisted Glip along with Microsoft Teams, and Webex Teams because they performed well and were reliable in our demanding Enterprise footprint. Glip also has a global presence and many applications to integrate with and many of the features were on par with its competitors.

Incentivized

• Increasing productivity by reducing idleness, e-mail flooding, miscommunication and accidentally deleted files. We have increasead about 30% our productivity since whe start using Flowdock.

Incentivized

• Glip has made it immensely more practical to manage team meetings, coordinate tasks, and hold video conferences. While some other apps might have a simpler user interface, you pay the price in having to adopt multiple applications to get the job done.

Incentivized