Slack vs Google Play Music

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.

You can upload a file to any channel over HTTPS simply by dragging and dropping.

You can ping people to get their attention even if they are not online by @mentioning them. Slack supports desktop notifications.

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.

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.

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.

Pasted code can be colored based on syntax.

You can be signed into multiple teams simultaneously and quickly switch between them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It allows you to change what you sent by hovering to the message and selecting "Edit message" under the ellipsis (...).

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.

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.

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).

You can just create flowcharts, org chart, mind maps, UML charts, infographics and many more by typing /creately new <document name>

easily embed gifs with /giphy slash command.

There's a checkbox in preferences under advanced options that may surprise you.

Google Play Music is a free service for storing and streaming ones library that has zero advertisements in the interface as well as the playing music.

Google Play Music can make smart recommendations for playlist by the user just picking an artist or song they want recommendations formed from.

GPM can be used as a normal music player but also as a streaming service like Spotify.

Plays local music as well as from DLNA sources, so I can play from my home servers as well.

Google has added the option of uploading songs through the browser with the help of a Chrome extension download as well as directly through the desktop Chrome app.