Basecamp tackles project management with a focus on communication and collaboration. Making to-do lists and adding to-do items literally just takes seconds. Basecamp is optimized to make the things you do most often really fast and really easy. Basecamp mobile is especially made for popular mobile devices like iPhone and Android.

Slack brings all your communication together in one place. It's real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. Create open channels for the projects, groups and topics that the whole team shares. Slack searches whole conversations, not just individual messages, so you can find what you’re looking for no matter who said what or when they said it.

2021. Slack now lets you DM employees in other companies
Slack is starting to roll out a new feature that lets anyone using the service DM each other. Slack Connect DMs will let Slack users privately message employees outside of their company. It’s designed for companies working with partners or clients, but you could even use it to message friends at other companies. This new DM feature builds on Slack’s work with Connect, which started appearing last year. Slack Connect is primarily designed to let businesses collaborate together through shared channels, and cross-organizational DMs is the next big part of Connect. DMs work by sending a special link to start a conversation and may require Slack admin approval depending on how your organization has set up Slack.
2020. Salesforce buys Slack for $27.7B
Salesforce, the CRM giant, is acquiring Slack in a $27.7 billion megadeal. The new deal also puts Salesforce more on par — and in competition — with its arch rival and sometime friend Microsoft, whose Teams product has been directly challenging Slack in the market. Microsoft, which passed on buying Slack in the past for a fraction of what Salesforce is paying today, has made Teams a key priority in recent quarters, loathe to cede any portion of the enterprise software market to another company. What really has set Slack apart from the pack, at least initially, was its ability to integrate with other enterprise software. When you combined that with bots, those intelligent digital helpers, the company could potentially provide Salesforce customers with a central place to work without changing focus because everything they need to do can be done in Slack.
2020. Basecamp launches Hey, a hosted email service for neat freaks

Project management software maker Basecamp has launched a feature-packed hosted email service, called Hey — which they tout as taking aim at the traditional chaos and clutter of the email inbox. Hey includes a built in screener that asks users to confirm whether or not they want to receive email from a new address. Inbound emails a Hey user has consented to are then triaged into different trays — with a central “imbox” (“im” standing for important) containing only the comms the user specifies as important to them; while newsletters are intended to live a News Feed style tray, called The Feed, (where they’re automatically displayed partially opened for easy casual reading); and email receipts are stacked in a for-reference ‘Paper Trail’ inbox view.
2020. Slack introduces simplified interface as usage moves deeper into companies
Slack introduced the biggest yet update aimed at easing the user experience, making it more of an accessible enterprise communications hub. The company has been trying to address the needs of the changing audience over the years by adding many new features, but admits that has resulted in some interface clutter. Today’s redesign is meant to address that. Among the new features, besides the overall cleaner look, many people will welcome the new ability to nest channels to organize them better in the Channel sidebar. As your channels proliferate, it becomes harder to navigate them all. Starting today, users can organize their channels into logical groupings with labels.
2019. Slack adds workflow automation feature
Slack released Workflow Builder - visual tool that allows any Slack user to automate routine functions by creating custom workflows. In just a few minutes, you can have a seamless way to standardize how you collect requests from your team, report any outage in real time, get new team members up to speed with welcome messages… and loads of additional applications. Before you jump in to build workflows from scratch for your team, the easiest way to get started is to download and import one of our pre-built workflow templates: welcome teammates to channels with automatic onboarding messages, request information with custom forms, collect incident reports in real time.
2019. Slack speeded up its group chat for Windows and Web

Slack is launching a major update to its web and desktop today that doesn’t introduce any new features or a new user interface. Instead, it’s almost a complete rebuild of the underlying technology.Slack promises that this new version will use up to 50 percent less memory than before and that Slack will load 33 percent faster. Joining an incoming call will also be ten times faster now. A lot of these changes will be especially apparent to users who are part of multiple workspaces. That’s because the developers designed the new architecture with the assumption that many users are now part of multiple workspaces. Those used to take up a lot of memory and CPU cycles when you switched between them, as each workspace used to get its own Electron process in the old app.
2019. Slack integrates with email
Slack's latest feature allows users to message coworkers via email. The feature, which will be rolling out over the next couple months, is meant to give people who don't use Slack a way to keep up with conversations their coworkers are having inside the messaging app. When they’re mentioned by username in channels or sent a direct message, Slack will route those messages into their email inbox so they don’t miss out on important information while they’re getting themselves set up. Initially, the Slack to email messages will only be one-way, meaning the recipient can view the conversation from their inbox but won't be able to respond directly. But Slack says it will eventually allow people to messages via email as well.
2018. Slack acquires email assistant Astrobot
Slack has acquired Astro, the startup behind email assistant, Astrobot. The deal, which marks Slack’s largest to date, will go a ways toward helping the popular enterprise chat platform achieve its vision of fully integrating workplace mainstays like email and calendars into its channels. Astrobot is a Slack app that integrates email and calendars directly into the chat platform. Among other things, it lets users search both at once, without leaving Slack. The standalone Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, and Slack apps will be shut down on October, with signups for new users being disabled immediately.
2018. Basecamp adds recurring events and image galleries
Project management service Basecamp added several new features. The first is Recurring events. You can add daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly repeating events to your Basecamp 3 schedule. You can choose to continue those repeating events until a certain date, or forever. The second new feature is Image galleries. You can put your images in a side-by-side gallery or even three-in-a-row, making it easier than ever to display your work or share photos. And the third is Automatic Check-ins. It is a simple, relaxed tool we use a lot to keep up with one another. The whole company gets asked things like: What did you do this weekend? What have you worked on? Small teams like Support get asked questions like: What was a common issue that you saw this week?
2018. Slack is buying, and shutting down HipChat and Stride
Slack is buying, and shutting down Atlassian's workplace group chats HipChat and Stride (that are Slack's competitors). Both tools will be discontinued and users - migrated to Slack. Hipchat was launched in beta form back in 2009, long before Slack’s debut in 2013. It mostly ruled its space in the time in between, leading Atlassian to acquire it in March of 2012. Slack quickly outgrew it in popularity though for myriad reasons — be it a bigger suite of third-party integrations, a better reputation for uptime, or better marketing. By September of 2017, Atlassian overhauled its chat platform and rebranded it as as “Stride”, but it was never able to quite catch up with Slack’s momentum.