When comparing Relay for reddit vs Slack, the Slant community recommends Relay for reddit for most people. In the question“What are the best Material Design apps?” Relay for reddit is ranked 4th while Slack is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Relay for reddit is:
A great feature of Relay is the UX for swiping between the post and the reddit comments. It's very fast to go back and forth between the views.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to flip between content & comments
A great feature of Relay is the UX for swiping between the post and the reddit comments. It's very fast to go back and forth between the views.
Pro Excellent material design UI
Relay uses screen space efficiently and can be navigated quickly. It is mostly designed for viewing a single subreddit at a time and making that experience as pleasurable as possible, with easy access to a subs from a dropdown menu at the top.
Pro Tons of features and functionality
With support for multiple accounts, interface themes, and inline picture previews, Relay for reddit offers a large amount of features for any power reddit user.
There are also many unique functionalities that set Relay apart from the competition.
●It has a 'Remove unread' option to swipe away all read threads. This is especially useful when it's a large and busy subreddit with tons and tons of submissions, to the point where it can get overwhelming. This a convenient option for making your reddit-browsing experience a little easier.
●It offers compatability with the Multi-Window feature which is present on Samsung & L.G phones (soon to be present AndroidOS-wide). This greatly enhances multi-tasking.
●It offers an excellent Spoiler tag support and an AMA mode (conspicuously missing from its biggest competitor).
Pro Allows you to view a parent comment
To keep a better context of the conversation, Relay doesn't hide the parent comment while browsing.
Pro Animations make for more pleasurable usage
The abundant animations make browsing more enjoyable because it transitions so nicely.
Pro Fast GIF loading
GIFs are automatically converted to gfycat format; they therefore load much faster than on other apps.
Pro Clutter-free and well thought-out UI
The moment the user opens Relay for reddit and begins exploring all of its ins and outs, it becomes quite clear how wonderfully designed this app is. There is excellent UX for redditors who prefer discussions and news, rather than pictures, videos, and gifs.
● You can alternate between a cards and a lists UI with a compact list view optional.
● A drop-down menu of all your subreddits is present at the top for quick and easy access. If the user is adequately familiarized with the list, he/she can simply swipe on the banner so to quickly switch between subreddits.
●The comment format option is situated right next to the drop-down menu.
It's an all around wonderful application with many Material Design elements employed.
Pro Automatically loads optimized images based on screen size
The app will automatically load a lower resolution image that is a closer match to your screen size to save bandwidth, with a button to load the original image if you need more detail.
Pro Easily save battery with night time theme
The available night time theme allows the background to be dark with light colored text, which uses less battery on AMOLED screens.
Pro Easily moderate from the app
Moderators on Reddit are allowed more functions over a normal user on Reddit, which is possible to be used in Pro for Relay. With these features included in the app it's possible to approve comments, check modque, and get specifically labelled moderator messages.
Pro Colour coded collapsible comments
Pro Smooth as butter
Opening links, animations, and transitions, as well as scrolling, all work well with no glitches or missed frames. The app feels extremely smooth thanks to the attention to detail in all of its inner workings.
Pro Drag & drop files in channels
You can upload a file to any channel over HTTPS simply by dragging and dropping.
Pro Fantastic search functionality
You can deep search messages, files and snippets. Given Slacks integration into many external services, Slack is good enough to act as the central search interface for your entire team.
Pro @mentions
You can ping people to get their attention even if they are not online by @mentioning them. Slack supports desktop notifications.
Pro Very polished user experience
The entire Slack interface is polished and intuitive to use. There are very few bugs or inconsistencies in the UI and it's very fast to use. There is nothing in particular that is new with Slacks implementation of team chat, but the execution of the groups (called channels), search, external service integration and notifications is close to perfect.
Pro Apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac OS, Linux, and Windows
Slack has apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac OS, Linux, and Windows to give you the full functionality of Slack with some extra features not found on the website on most major platforms.
Pro Supports multiple teams
You can be signed into multiple teams simultaneously and quickly switch between them.
Pro Freemium plan
Free forever, only restriction on searchable message archives, up to 10k of your team’s most recent messages and 10 apps or service integration. Great for trying out first.
Pro Robust integration with a huge number of tools
Slack integrates with tools like Trello, GitHub, Dropbox, Mailchimp, and dozens of others, so you can have a centralized event feed of your project right alongside your chat. This is tremendously useful for keeping context with your discussions.
Pro Emoji reactions to limit excessive posts and notifications
Pro Multiple channels for different groups
Pro Syntax coloring
Pasted code can be colored based on syntax.
Pro Edit messages easily
It allows you to change what you sent by hovering to the message and selecting "Edit message" under the ellipsis (...).
Pro GIFS
easily embed gifs with /giphy
slash command.
Pro IRC connectivity over SSL
Pro Flexible, granular notification settings
Notifications are handled separately for mobile and the web app. You can receive notifications for all messages, just direct messages, or based on filters, and you can have different settings for different channels: you don't have to get notified every time someone pushed to GitHub or every time someone posts to off-topic chat, unless you want to.
Pro Inline link previews (photos, mockups, etc.)
When a link is added, some content in the link is shown such as image - like how Facebook does it when you share a link.
Pro Slackbot extensible chat robot
The "Slackbot" can is an extensible robot that can be set you remind you about tasks, auto respond to certain phrases and a variety of other functionality.
Pro Dev team is invested, responsive, and friendly
Having submitted both feedback and support requests for bot development, I can personally attest that the team takes feedback seriously, and responds quickly to communication. This is vital for any closed-source or hosted project.
Pro Shows local time of each participant
You can click on the profile of a user to see their local time. An especially useful feature when members of your team are working in different timezones.
Pro Self chatting
Creative implementation which is very good for personal journaling or drafting/collecting ideas. Previously, to do this, users needed to create a private channel with themselves. Note that some other team-chat apps may disallow creating group/channel with no 2nd person(s).
Pro Can Create Diagrams with Creately
You can just create flowcharts, org chart, mind maps, UML charts, infographics and many more by typing /creately new <document name>
Pro It can surprise you
There's a checkbox in preferences under advanced options that may surprise you.
Cons
Con Can not up/downvote comments
Con Can't disable sliding animations
Sliding animations are baked in & can't be disabled, as some don't like animations.
Con Non native image uploading
All images need to be loaded externally when wanting to view full screen, this means another app will need to be loaded, which can be slow and consumes RAM.
Con Poor feedback for network errors
Sometimes comment submission will fail silently and it isn't clear whether it went through.
Con Not open source
Accessing your reddit acount with proprietary software might not be safe.
Con No gallery swipe view
There is no way to swipe through a gallery of posts pics, which means each pic has to be individually clicked on and loaded, which takes time.
Con Sharing link/comment options buried too deep
At present, the sharing menu is buried deep inside: swipe an article > Click More > Swipe again > then Share.
Con "Native" desktop apps are web apps
While it's great that Slack provides installable apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, they're just the Slack web app wrapped in Electron shell. This means they don't offer the same level of native UX that a truly native toolkit app would.
Con Expensive when you need to upgrade
At $6.67 per user / month (or $8 if billed monthly) , Slack is significantly more expensive than the competition if you need features such as unlimited integrations (more than 10) or unlimited message storage (more than 10,000). However, the free version of Slack includes unlimited users.
However if you need only unlimited messages you can use storage services like https://slarck.com to upload then browse and search your entire message history, while staying in Slack's free plan. So with a combo of Slack+Slarck this con is not that major.
Con No self-hosting available
If you are worried about third-parties getting access to your data you should consider self-hosting. With self-hosting you are in control over where your data is stored, who has access to it. You will also not be vulnerable to exploits of a third-party provider.
Con Hidden max limit of free users per channel
Slack says that their free accounts support an unlimited number of users, which is true. However they don't mention that there is an undisclosed maximum number of users per channel (8462). For a large open source community, this is something to keep in mind.
Con Proprietary (non-free/libre)
Con Linux client is very RAM intensive
Con Slow and lags sometimes
Con No E2E encryption
Data is sent of SSL only, not E2E encrypted.
Con API doesn't allow custom widgets in chat
Con API is overall very poor
Can't do much with integrations.
Con Awful performance and constant glitches, since it is Chromium-based
You will experience a lot of hangs and glitches and it eats immense (for as basic as UI is) amount of RAM.