When comparing Gboard - the Google Keyboard vs Slack, the Slant community recommends Gboard - the Google Keyboard for most people. In the question“What are the best Material Design apps?” Gboard - the Google Keyboard is ranked 14th while Slack is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Gboard - the Google Keyboard is:
The Google Keyboard supports swiping along the keyboard to spell out whole words.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Swipe support
The Google Keyboard supports swiping along the keyboard to spell out whole words.
Pro Learns preferred words
After using a gesture a few times and clicking the correct word, Google Keyboard learns that the gesture should result in the word you've manually selected as the correct word. Swype doesn't seem to learn this, so even after 100 times clicking 'this' instead of 'thesis', it still produces 'thesis', where Google Keyboard learns that you meant to say 'this'.
Pro Material Design
Google Keyboard has material design themes the user can skin the keyboard with.
Pro Swipe to punctuation
Hold down the key in the lower left hand corner and a keyboard if punctuation appears. Swipe over to the one you want, lift your finger, and the original keyboard pops back. It's very fast, and makes it much easier to spot the punctuation mark you want - instead of trying to squint at the secondary symbols in the keys.
Pro 100% free from Google
This keyboard is not a free trial nor will it hold back any new features to sell you a paid version. The keyboard is completely 100% free.
Pro Minimalistic design
While other keyboard options may be very functional, their visual design tends to differ from the rest of your Google device. The Google Keyboard was designed by Google and it looks like it.
Pro Fast, low memory usage
Alternative keyboards tend to suck up system resources, often making them nearly unusable on older phones. Google Keyboard is very quick to open when typing and the keys rarely lag.
Pro Has built-in Google search
The keyboard has button that allows searching Google straight from the keyboard, and use the search results in the currently used app.
Pro Emoji search
The GBoard has an emoji search that's very convenient, saves time looking for a specific one if you don't know/remember what category it's in.
Pro Dynamic floating preview
The dynamic floating preview appears while gesture typing. Most gesture keyboards only show the preview above the keyboard in the suggested corrections. The dynamic floating preview is great because it makes it easier to gesture type by keeping your eyes focused on what you are typing.
Pro Can use alternative layouts not just QWERTY
For those that are used to typing on a Dvorak keyboard or prefer not to need multiple key presses to access special symbols they can enable these as additional quick switch options. Using the English PC layout for example gives the user a number row.
Pro One-handed mode
Makes it easier to type with no more than a thumb.
Pro Suggestions don't get worse over time
Google keyboard does not promise to be as "smart" as other keyboards besides offering a personalized dictionary. Surprisingly this is actually a good thing for some because with many "smart" keyboards predictions and corrections actually worsen over time. With Google Keyboard the experience will remain constant because it requires you to manually "touch again to save" before it changes your personal dictionary. This prevents mistakes from becoming part of your personal dictionary.
Pro 120 languages support
Pro GIF support
Pro Cloud backup
Pro Pre-installed on most Android devices
Most Android devices have GBoard installed.
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 Typing is not always smooth
Sometimes typing lags.
Con Horrible Word Prediction
Unable to remember frequently used words.
Con Adds periods in random places and there is no way to disable it.
Con Lacks some features
Does not add contacts, does not save clipboard, and doesn't show the correct spelling of words or underline them, even though it's in settings.
Con Very little customization
Google Keyboard allows you to enable or disable
vibrate on keypress
sound on keypress
popup on keypress
double space period
These are pretty useful basic settings but most other keyboards offer more options. Google also allows you to edit the personal dictionary.
Con Restricted customization (few skins)
Con Terrible layout in landscape mode
Con Takes up a lot of storage
If you are using multiple languages and predictive text, the app can use up a lot of storage.
Con Prediction isn't as good as SwiftKey
Con Uses a lot of RAM
Con Symbol order is (slightly) different from full-sized QWERTY keyboard
Instead of the first four symbols being !@#$%^& (i.e. shift+1 through 7 on a QWERTY keyboard), they're @#$%&. This is fine if you know the symbols in your password, but if you're like me and you just hold the SHIFT key and type a long number, you'll have to consult a real keyboard to figure out your password.
Con Other languages not available in transliteration mode
Unlike Google Indic Keyboard where you can type by transliteration, compact, and handwriting, you only get the fixed layout for other languages.
Con It doesn't have arrow keys
Several times it is much better to navigate through a long text using arrow keys than scrolling and tapping the place where you want the cursor to be. SwiftKey has arrow keys (via an option), Gboard has not.
Con Google, via the keyboard app, might be collecting data on us that it then sells to third parties which in turn can use that data to influence us
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.