Team chat is the tool a small company picks fastest and lives with longest. Somebody opens a free workspace in the first week, the whole team is in it by the second, and three years later every decision the company ever made is in there somewhere. By then the choice has been made for you, and the price of changing it is every conversation you would leave behind.
This is a guide to choosing deliberately. It is not a ranked list; the mainstream options are all good at what they are built for, and the one that suits you depends on how your company works. It is written by a company that sells team chat as part of a suite, so where our own tool is not the answer, the section on it says so.
Where the history goes, and for how long
Start here, because it is the limit people discover last. On a free plan, several products keep only part of your history: Slack’s free plan keeps 90 days of messages, and Zulip’s Cloud Free plan keeps the most recent 10,000 messages searchable. Pumble’s free plan keeps unlimited history. Paid plans lift the limit everywhere, which is usually the reason a small company first pays: not for a feature, but to get back a conversation from four months ago.
The question to ask is not “is there a limit?” but “what happens to the messages when we stop paying, or when we leave?” Look for an export that gives you the channels and direct messages in a readable form, and check whether it is on every plan or only the top one. A chat tool with no way out is a chat tool you will never leave, whatever it costs by then.
What a guest or client can see
An agency, a consultancy or a startup with a fractional finance person will want outsiders in the chat. The detail that matters is what an outsider sees once they are in. Three things to check:
- Scope. Can a guest be limited to one channel, or a named few, and nothing else? Can they see the member directory, the other channels’ names, or anyone’s profile?
- Price. Some products give a single-channel guest for free and charge a seat for a multi-channel guest; Slack and Pumble both work that way on paid plans. If you run a channel per client, the difference between “one channel” and “two” decides whether a guest is free.
- Removal. When the engagement ends, can an admin remove the guest in one step, and does the guest’s access to shared files end with it?
Microsoft Teams Essentials lists unlimited chat including guest access, per Microsoft’s Essentials page, and Google Chat lets you message people outside your organisation from inside Workspace. Both are good answers for a company already on that vendor’s suite; the point is to try the guest experience yourself before deciding, from the guest’s side, with a throwaway email address.
Per seat or per organisation: what a new hire costs
Most team chat is priced per user per month. On annual billing, Slack Pro is $7.25 per user a month ($8.75 billed monthly), Google Chat comes inside Google Workspace Business Starter at $7 per user a month, Zulip Cloud Standard is $6.67, Microsoft Teams Essentials is $4 paid yearly, and Pumble Pro is $2.49. The figures are from each vendor’s own pricing page, read on 6 and 9 October 2026; the Slack figure is on Slack’s pricing page.
Per-seat pricing is fair for a company that stays the same size. For one that is hiring, every new person is a price rise in the chat tool and in every other per-seat tool at the same time, which is the pattern described in the hidden cost of eight SaaS subscriptions. The alternative is a price per organisation, where chat is part of a flat fee and a new hire costs nothing extra. Orbiz works that way: Huddl, its team chat, is included for every member in one flat price per organisation, from $99 a month for up to 10 people on annual billing, with guests at no charge.
Whichever model you pick, work the sum at next year’s headcount, not this year’s, and include the guests you expect to have. A $4 seat and a $7 seat are the same decision at ten people and a different one at sixty.
Beside the work, or its own island
A chat tool is either a place where work is talked about or a place where work is done. If your projects, files and people records live in other systems, the chat is an island: every link out of it lands somewhere that needs its own login, and every @mention is a person who has to go and look. Integrations bridge the gap, and Slack’s App Directory is the deepest of them, which is why it is the right choice for a team whose work runs on integrations.
The other approach is chat that sits beside the work on the same login. In Orbiz, a channel per client lives next to the Cadence board for that client, the Filespace folder for their files and the timesheet for the hours, and the people in the channel are the same organisation members every other tool knows. Neither approach is better in the abstract. A team with a dozen integrations it relies on should keep them; a team that mostly pastes links between four tabs will notice when the tabs become one.
Search, notifications and calls
Search is only as good as the filters. Check that you can narrow a search by channel, by sender, by date and to messages with a file attached, and check that the search covers direct messages as well as channels. Then check it against the history limit above: a search over 90 days of history finds 90 days of answers.
Notifications decide whether people keep the app open or mute it. The minimum is a per-channel setting of all messages, mentions only or nothing, a mute for a while, and do-not-disturb hours. A tool that can only be on or off trains a small team to turn it off.
Calls are the honest fork in this decision. If your company talks on calls started from chat several times a day, that is a requirement, not a nice-to-have, and it narrows the list. Slack’s huddles are audio and video with screen sharing in any channel or direct message, Microsoft Teams Essentials runs meetings with up to 300 participants, per Microsoft’s Essentials page, and Google Chat sits beside Google Meet. Huddl has no voice or video calls in this release; the Orbiz tool is text, threads, files and search, and a company that lives in calls from chat should keep a meetings tool beside it or choose differently.
Admin controls and leaving
The admin questions are dull and they are the ones that bite. Who can create channels, and can that be limited? Who can invite a guest? Can an admin see which guests exist and what they can reach? When someone leaves the company, does removing them from the chat happen with their other accounts or as a separate step someone has to remember? And, again, can you take your history with you?
A suite answers the leaving question differently from a standalone tool: in Orbiz, deactivating a member ends their access to Huddl and to every other tool at once, because there is one account. A standalone chat tool needs its own offboarding step, which is fine if someone owns it and a risk if nobody does.
Where each option shines
| Product | Where it shines | Published price basis |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | Integrations and calls inside chat; the reference product most new hires already know | Free: 90 days of history. Pro $7.25 per user a month, annual ($8.75 monthly) |
| Microsoft Teams Essentials | Companies on Microsoft 365, and teams that live in scheduled meetings | $4 per user a month paid yearly; meetings up to 300 people, per Microsoft’s Essentials page |
| Google Chat | Companies already on Google Workspace, with Meet and Drive beside it | Inside Workspace Business Starter, $7 per user a month, annual |
| Pumble | Small teams who want unlimited history without paying, and a low paid tier | Free with unlimited history; Pro $2.49 per user a month, annual |
| Zulip | Teams that want every conversation organised by topic, and an open-source option | Cloud Free: 10,000 messages of search history; Standard $6.67 per user a month, annual |
| Orbiz Huddl | Companies that want chat beside projects, files and people on one login, with no per-seat bill | Included in the Orbiz flat price per organisation, from $99 a month on annual billing |
Prices were read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 6 October 2026 (Slack, Microsoft, Google) and 9 October 2026 (Pumble, Zulip), in US dollars. The longer shortlist with the rows each product wins is on our Slack comparison, and the feature-by-feature pages are Orbiz vs Slack and Orbiz vs Microsoft Teams.
Where Huddl fits, and where it does not
Huddl is the team chat inside Orbiz: public and private channels, direct messages with one person or a group, threads, reactions, pins and saved messages, files dragged into the composer, and search across every conversation you belong to with filters for channel, sender, date and attachments. A guest is invited by email to the huddls and channels you choose, sees nothing else, cannot open any other Orbiz tool, and costs nothing. There is no history limit; that is Orbiz’s published position for every plan. Notifications are per channel, with mute, status and do-not-disturb.
It is not the answer for everyone. There are no voice or video calls in this release, there is no app directory, and there are no shared channels with another company’s workspace; Orbiz brings the other side in as guests instead. If any of those is how your company works, one of the products in the table above is the better choice, and the comparison pages say which. If your chat is mostly text about projects, clients and people that already live in Orbiz, and you would rather not count seats, Huddl is built for that.
A checklist before you pick
- How much history does the plan you will actually pay for keep, and can you export it on that plan?
- What does a guest see, what does a guest cost, and how many channels can they be in before the price changes?
- What does the bill look like at next year’s headcount, including guests?
- Does the chat sit beside your projects and files, or does every link lead to another login?
- Can search be filtered by channel, person, date and attachment, across direct messages too?
- Can a person set a channel to mentions-only and set do-not-disturb hours?
- Do you need calls from chat every day? If yes, the list is shorter and Huddl is not on it today.
- Who can create channels and invite guests, and does offboarding happen once or per tool?
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