When Ryver first debuted a few years ago as a business messaging app, free was its selling point. At the time, the company said it would eventually roll out paid plans and add task-management capabilities, which it has done. At the same time, however, the company took away the free option. What’s left is a team messaging app with a lightweight to-do app built in that’s average at best. As far as alternatives to Slack go, Ryver isn’t a top choice. It works fine, but it’s in need of a user experience overhaul. Important features and settings are difficult to find, poorly named, or nonexistent. It just can’t compete with the best team messaging apps.
Slack remains our top pick in this category and our Editors’ Choice winner for its depth of features, customizations, and integrations. Slack is more expensive than just about any other team chat app, but it’s also better than everything else on the market.
How Much Does Ryver Cost?
Ryver sells its service for monthly and annual fees. You can get also a 14-day free trial, with no payment details required. For teams (meaning both members and guests) of up to 12 people, Ryver costs $49 per month. For groups of 13 or more people, the cost is $99 per month. If your team needs enterprise features, you can contact Ryver for custom pricing on an Enterprise plan, which adds support for single sign on, premium customer support, advanced team management options, and a dedicated testing sandbox. All plan types support only five people per audio or video call, so you may need to look into better video conferencing software if you use Ryver as your team chat app.
How Do Ryver’s Prices Compare?
Most other business messaging apps charge per person per month, rather than a flat monthly rate, with prices hovering around $6. Flock and Twist, for example, both charge $6 per person per month. The budget pick in this category is Zoho Cliq, which costs $3 per person per month for the first 500 people. The price goes down for additional team members, depending on how many you have.
Microsoft Teams costs $5 per person per month with an annual contract, as part of Microsoft 365 Business Essentials. That particular plan doesn’t include installable Office apps—just web apps. To get desktop apps, it’s $12.50 per person per month with an annual contract.
Slack costs the most of these at $8–$15 per person per month, depending on the tier of service. It’s also worth noting that most team messaging apps offer a free account of some kind. Slack, Flock, Zoho Cliq, Twist, and Microsoft Teams all do.
Getting Started With Ryver
Ryver is available as a web app, macOS and Windows app, as well as Android apps and iPhone apps. In setting up an account, you must have a company name or team name. This name becomes part of the unique URL everyone uses to log in. You invite people to join by adding their email addresses into an invitation window. As you set up your account, you create three places to have conversations: 1) Forums, sometimes called channels in other apps; 2) Teams; and 3) People, also known as direct messages.
Forums are open for everyone to join. Teams are private, meaning by invitation only. If you’re familiar with Slack, Forums are like public channels and Teams are the same as private channels. The People area is simply where your direct messages live.
Just like in any other team chat app, you can tag people in any post to a Forum or Team by using an @ symbol before their name. If you type @here, anyone who is online at the moment and has joined that Forum or Team receives a notification of your post. You can add emoji to your post and respond to other people’s posts with reacji, just as you can in Slack and other apps.
Additional Ways to Converse on Ryver
Within every Forums and Teams, there’s a possibility you’ll have up to three tabs: Chat, Topics, and Tasks. Admins get to decide whether to include all three or not.
Chat is where the ongoing conversation lives, and it’s the default tab. It’s where you and your teammates discuss whatever it is you want to discuss. The flow of conversation looks like a feed.
Topics are for conversations that need to be contained within a defined topic, where it’s easy to refer to them or add to them without getting distracted by the ongoing Chat feed. For example, image a Sales Team uses their Chat for daily conversation, such as asking questions and posting updates about progress made with sales. The Topic tab might be a better place for all sales team members to post updates about their quarterly performance or maintain a conversation about set rates for sales versus allowable points of negotiation. In this way, important information on specific topics that people may want to look up is neatly contained without getting lost within the daily chatter of the Chat feed.
Last are Tasks. Tasks is an area for task management. If your team doesn’t use a collaborative to-do list app already, Ryver gives you one—or really, the option to have one in every Forum and Team. There are task templates to help you get started.
Tasks in Ryver are fine for jotting down a few to-dos here and there, but they are no replacement for project management software or even some of the best collaboration apps available today.
Additionally, the way Ryver spreads tasks across Teams and Forums makes it difficult to keep a good handle on them. You do get two unique views of all tasks in a Task Stream, showing all tasks, and Personal Tasks, which only shows tasks you’ve written down for yourself. Still, it all still feels broken-up and disordered.
Among other team messaging apps, Microsoft Teams is perhaps the one that works hardest to integrate tasks into team messaging. By adding the Tasks app to your Microsoft Teams account, you can see and manage your individual tasks from To Do and Outlook alongside your team tasks from Planner. To be fair, however, we find that Microsoft Teams needs of some user experience improvements, just the same as Ryver.
Navigating Ryver
Ryver comes with a bot, just like Slack and other apps, that you can ask for help. In Ryver, it’s called Eddy Bot, and it stays quiet most of the time. In our testing, it wasn’t helpful in answering basic questions, such as, “How do I find forums to join?” or “How do I disable notifications by email?”
Navigating Ryver is the most difficult part of using it. For example, to turn off notifications by email, you have to go into the settings, navigate to Notifications, where you won’t see a clear and visible option to do so. If you’re persistent, however, you might click on an option that looks like it’s disabled (because it’s in light gray) called When I’m Offline to find a dropdown menu with just one option: to turn off notifications by email. It would make world’s more sense to make the setting visible and put a simple tick box or yes/no toggle next to it.
Similarly, to find open forums to join, you have to click on the subhead Forums in the left sidebar. It doesn’t look like a clickable link—it looks like nothing more than a label.
Yet another area where Ryver falls short of offering a good user experience is in making calls. You can start a group call (with only up to five people) from just about any view, which doesn’t always make sense. For example, you can start a call from your personal task list, which would invite…whom exactly to join a call? A better option would be to remove the call button from pages or views where it doesn’t make sense to include it because no one would be invited to join.
Integrations and Watches
If you need to integrate Ryver with other business apps, you can do so via Zapier. Zapier is an automation tool, similar to IFTTT and Microsoft Flow. It lets you connect otherwise disparate online services without having to know any coding.
Ryver does have one native integration called Watches (formerly called News Streaming), which we like quite a bit. With this feature, you get alerts when keywords appear in online publications that you choose to follow (Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Ars Technica, and so on) and from RSS feeds that you set up.
For example, you could set up a Google Alert for your company’s name, use the company name as the keyword, and pull the RSS feed of the Google Alert. That way, Ryver will alert you and your team whenever your company name pops up in the Google Alert. You can add Watches to any Forum or Team.
It is possible to get the same feature in other apps, although typically it isn’t offered as a native feature. For example, you can create a similar news alert in Slack using integrations, webhooks, or third-party automation tools like Zapier.
What’s Missing From Ryver
As busy as Slack sometimes looks, it offers a high degree of customization, much higher than what Ryver offers. In Slack, you can connect to multiple accounts at once and choose a custom color theme for each of them. Slack also has a rich set of tools for fine-tuning your notifications, including adding keyword alerts, and adjusting whether images and gifs appear by default in your feeds, among other customizations.
Slack’s notifications are a big deal. In Ryver, you can turn notifications on or off for each Team or Forum to which you belong, and you can choose whether you want to receive notifications for direct messages and @ messages. You don’t get notification options for keywords, however, which help clue people into conversations that might matter to them. Without keyword notifications, a lot of important information might pass you by.
Not a Top Choice
You can do better than Ryver. It can get the job done, bit nothing about it is especially compelling, and it needs work in the user experience department.
Though it’s been a few years since Ryver debuted, it still doesn’t compare with Slack in terms of customizations, variety of features, notifications, and app integrations. As a result, Slack remains PCMag Editors’ Choice for workplace messaging.
