Team messaging apps have gone a long way to convince coworkers and collaborators that there’s a better way to communicate than email. In this slice of the software sector, Flock has been trying to compete with the big players, like Slack and Microsoft Teams. Flock hasn’t, however, kept pace with the competition in terms of tidying up its interface and polishing its best features. Flock also doubled its price for a Pro account in two short years. While the price is still average for the market, and Flock’s feature set is by no means meager, this price hike strains the value proposition of the service. Slack, our Editors’ Choice for business messaging apps, has consistently worked to stay at the top of its game, improving areas where it had been weak and adding new features and integrations that keep customers satisfied.
If you’re new to team messaging apps, the thing to know is that they enable conversation among a group of people. Unlike email, conversations in team messaging apps generally take place in the open where anyone can see them, although it is possible to have private conversations, too. Conversations aren’t necessarily means to be synchronous or asynchronous, as the app supports both. Much of how a team uses a messaging app depends on the customs and etiquette the team establishes.
Pricing and Plans
Flock has a free plan, a Pro plan ($6 per person per month), and an Enterprise option that requires consultation with the company for rates. You can get a 90-day free trial of Flock Pro.
The free plan has limits, such as a search tool that only looks across the latest 10,000 posts and very few controls for your team administrator. This plan also doesn’t include screen sharing. You can have up to 20 people on a group video call in the free plan, but calls can only last 20 minutes each. The team gets 10GB storage space to share. Free plans can invite only one guest to join the account.
A Flock Pro account costs $6 per person per month or $54 per person per year if you pay annually. The price is double what it was just two years ago, although it’s still a reasonable price to pay for team messaging. It removes most of the limitations seen in the free account and increases storage space to 10GB per person. File uploads are limited to 100MB. Video calls are still capped at 20 people, although you can talk for as long as you want. The Flock Enterprise account is similar to the Pro account, but you get more administrator controls, 20GB of storage space per person, and active directory sync with Microsoft Azure.
Compared with other team messaging apps, Flock charges about an average price. Twist by Doist also charges $6 per person per month for its Unlimited account. Glip by RingCentral charges a little less at $5 per person per month. Microsoft Teams starts at $5 per person per month, but that’s for an entire Office 365 Business Essentials account, which includes other software products, as well.
Zoho Cliq is the budget pick in this category, charging around $1 to $3 per person per month, depending on the total team size. Slack has the highest price of these at $8 to $15 per person per month, depending on the tier of service.
Getting Started With Flock
Setting up a Flock account is fairly straightforward. You provide an email address and create a password. Formerly, Flock didn’t have you create a password. Instead, you received a login code via email each time you wanted to log in. It was unusual and off-putting, so I’m glad the process now follows norms.
Flock has apps for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. It also has a web app and a Chrome extension.
One of the first things you’ll notice in getting started is how Flock’s layout is more scattershot than many other team messaging apps’. There are two navigation menus on the left, another panel—sometimes two—on the right, and occasionally a few buttons at the top. It’s busy, although that’s a common complaint among team messaging apps—Slack in particular.
Although there’s a lot going on in the interface, the principles of how to use Flock are more or less the same as any other team messaging app. You create teams and channels, either public or private, and invite people to join or wait for them to opt in. You can have private conversations, too, either one-on-one or in groups.
Settling Into the Flock
Once you get comfortable with the interface, you can customize Flock a few ways to make it your own. You can change your status to alert others when you are out of office or on leave. There’s a Do Not Disturb option that you can switch on for a fixed amount of time (one hour, two hours, and so on). Sample the six audio notification options and choose the one you like best, or toggle off audio notifications entirely. You can also turn notifications on for video calls and whenever a teammate logs on. While you can’t change the color theme, you can switch to dark mode any time you like. Account administrators can add app integrations to the account, too.
Other team messaging apps, including Slack, Twist, and Microsoft Teams, offer more depth in the customization department. Slack is king among them. You can choose a color theme, add an emoji to a custom status, opt to see times in a 24-hour or 12-hour clock, adjust how images and names appear (to reduce screen clutter), change what’s visible in your sidebar, and create a schedule for when you want to be in Do Not Disturb Mode. Slack has more audio tones than Flock, plus the ability to push notifications to your mobile app when you’ve been inactive on desktop for an amount of time that you choose.
People who join your Flock account can be members or administrators. You can also invite guests, whose access is restricted to only channels that they have been invited to join.
Collaborating With Flock
When it comes to collaborating, Flock works as expected. Still, it would benefit from some additional polish.
After you write and post a message, you can edit it or delete it at any time. You can pin posts in a channel so that they’re within easy reach via a panel on the right. If you want to see who has read (or at least seen) a post and who hasn’t, there’s a button that tells you.
There’s quite a rift between the selection of emojis you can add to a posts (hundreds) and reacji that you use to react to a post (ten). Perhaps this sounds trivial, but the fact is, reacji are a concise and well understood form of communication for many teams. Thumbs up, thumbs down, and clapping all have clear enough meanings, but what reacji do you add when someone asks, “On a scale of 1-5, how effective was today’s training?” In Slack and other team chat apps, you could add a numeral reacji, and everyone in the channel would be able to easily see the results tally up. Slack also lets you add more than one reacji to a post, whereas Flock limits you to one per person. With Slack, your team can get pretty creative with how they communicate using reacji whereas with Flock there’s no room to stretch your wings.
When conversations take place in a stream of posts, it’s easy for one post to get buried by others. For example, if I post a question in a channel and my colleagues all have unrelated information to share around the same time, the channel may end up dominated by their conversation, and my question may go unanswered. The problem is exacerbated when people work in different time zones or cover different time shifts.
Twist handles this problem with an email-like layout that lets you keep similar posts in groups or conversations. Slack uses threads; using the example above, someone who sees my question can branch off from the stream and reply to it on the side. Microsoft Teams uses a Reply function, which Flock uses, too. In Flock, however, the way the Reply feature is implemented makes it a little hard to track conversations. When you reply to a post, your post appears at the bottom as the most recent post in the channel, and a summary of the original post appears indented below it. If you click the original to read all of it, Flock jumps you back in the stream to the original in its original position… and without the reply. If multiple people reply to the same post, it can get really confusing. This feature clearly needs work.
Aside from communicating in channels, you can also use Flock for video calls, audio calls, and screen-sharing. You can start a call in a channel, which means anyone who is a member of that channel can join while the call is ongoing. When the call ends, however, there’s no indication in the channel that it’s over. The notification inviting people to join is still there, and it looks like the call is still active. You don’t know the call has ended until after you’ve clicked to join the call, given the app permission to turn on your camera and mic; only then do you see a message that the call has ended. There should be some kind of notice much sooner. Perhaps the invitation should turn into a summary log of the call showing how long it lasted and which team members had joined.
Special Features
I mentioned that Flock has a right side pane and sometimes two. That’s where you’ll find pinned posts in addition to a few of Flock’s special features. A few of these special features add in-app collaboration, such team task management and file sharing.
Along the right edge of the app, you see Directory, Files, Todo, Notes, Reminders, and so forth. When you select one of them, the associated information appears in a secondary pane to the left. For example, when you click Directory, you see a list of everyone in your Flock account on the left. This new view doesn’t cover the main view of your active channels, so you can look through the directory without leaving a conversation.
Many of the selections are channel-specific. In other words, you have to choose the correct channel to get the associated content for that group in the sidebar. There’s a drop-down menu at the top. So you can effectively have open a Human Resources channel in the main window while looking at notes from the Editorial channel. When I did this, I found I quickly felt confused, as there was too much disparate information on the screen at once.
The double sidebar can get even more confusing as you add another layer. That added layer comes in the form of tabs. The Files option, for example, contains both uploaded files and pinned messages across two tabs. To-do brings up another two tabs, one for shared tasks and one called My To-Dos. Another option called Process Automation—for automated routine processes, such as reminding new hires to fill out and submit required forms— brings up two tabs, one for My Task and one for processes. Once you start using the features in the right rail, there’s a lot to keep track of.
Integrations
When it comes to connecting other apps and services, Flock does well. You can hook your account up to Google Drive, Trello, Asana, JIRA, MailChimp, Zendesk, Airbrake, and other popular apps for business and collaboration.
If you come across an app that isn’t supported, you can always turn to IFTTT or Zapier. These online services help you connect apps that don’t have built-in connections to one another. They also let you set up rules so that an action can happen between the apps automatically. For example, you could make a rule that says, “If someone fills out an application for a job using our company’s web form, then automatically alert the Hiring channel in Flock and link to the results.”
Good, But Losing Ground
Flock is an average team messaging app that could use a bit more polish in its design and features. It isn’t missing anything supremely important that you would find in other team messaging apps, but it’s lacking in richness and depth. It needs to strike a balance between having the right features and presenting them in a way that doesn’t clutter the screen. On top of this need for added polish, Flock’s price doubled in recent years, making it less attractive than it once was—and dropping its rating by a half star.
Our Editors’ Choice among team messaging apps is Slack. Start there if you’re shopping for an app. There are plenty of Slack alternatives to consider, too.
