10 Best Online Communication Tools For Teams In 2023

monday.com is an intuitive platform where teams can track processes and workflows, communicate within and across teams, and bring all of their tools together under one system. Its simplistic design and flexible features mean teams can get started in minutes.

Teams can communicate easily by mentioning one another on updates and host conversations in context around certain projects or tasks. Sharing files is easy with Google Drive and Dropbox integrations and continuing the conversation on other platforms is made simple with Zoom and Slack integrations.

monday.com acts as a central place for teams to track projects, manage time, build and share reports, send messages, and easily understand and improve their workflow.

monday.com has over 40 integrations including Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Zendesk, Typeform, and many more that are accessible via Zapier. monday.com allows teams to collaborate and communicate from everywhere—ensuring transparency and real-time updates.

monday.com costs from $6/user/month and comes with a free 14-day trial. They offer a free plan for up to 2 users.

Workmates is a cloud-based employee engagement solution by HR Cloud. This is specifically designed for startups and small businesses to help strengthen corporate work cultures applicable to office, field, and remote work settings.

The different features that are available to users include centralized directory creation to allow employees access to any information they may need and a range of employee engagement functionalities that include a dashboard to access different posts and resources, push notifications, and integrated calendar and productivity tools.

Users can improve employee engagement and collaboration through the centralized communication dashboard. The Kudos posts displayed in the dashboard effectively deliver news of acknowledgments to specific team members, and the latest posts and announcements section allows everyone to stay updated with recent news and changes within the company.

Users can seamlessly integrate existing collaboration applications with the software to improve employee collaboration further. If a team has already extensively used applications like Google Suite and Slack, they won’t have to start from scratch, as these solutions can be integrated.

Pricing starts at $3.50 per user per month. A free demo is available.

Wrike is an award-winning, easy-to-use collaborative work management software trusted by 20,000+ organizations worldwide. The tool is suitable for teams of anywhere from five to an unlimited number of team members. It allows users to customize workflows, dashboards, reports, request forms, and more.

Wrike’s simple interface enables users to chat in real-time, and offers threaded messages and @ mentions for ease of communication. Wrike also features shared workflows and file sharing. Within Wrike, teams can share and assign tasks, have in-task discussions, and share and proof digital files together.

Wrike has an easy-to-use, intuitive interface and navigation with distinct spaces, folders, and tasks. Toggle quickly between the home screen and timesheets, dashboards, calendars, reports, and the notification stream. The tool also offers a variety of specific solutions depending on the team or organization — including marketing teams and professional service teams.

Wrike offers 400+ pre-built native integrations, including integrations with the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with sales and marketing software from Salesforce and Marketo.

Pricing starts at $9.80 per user per month. There are four different price points, including a free version and plans which offer the ability to invite free external collaborators to a paid account.

Troop Messenger is far more than a simple chat interface. It was designed to improve the communication of internal teams of all sizes, from small teams to large corporations, and it delivers a robust feature set for doing so.

Overall this tool does a standout job with its feature offering and hits all of the criteria I look for in a communication tool, plus more. The main features include instant messaging, voice-video calling, video conferencing, file sharing, and desktop sharing.

But something I find especially useful in this tool are its more advanced messaging features. I like both the 'respond later' option as well as the 'burnout' option which lets you set a message to send at a later time. The self-messaging feature is also unique—a simple but useful feature that lets you send reminders and notes to yourself. Finally, there's a way to send bulk text messages and files to multiple users at once, using the 'forkout' feature. And the advanced search in this tool is really good, too.

Troop Messenger supports many native and third-party integration such as employee monitoring and tracking apps, attendance management systems, Google Drive, Dropbox, and LDAP. It's available across Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, and iOS.

Troop Messenger costs from $2.50/user/month. It's worth noting that although it’s a SaaS model, it offers the delivery models of self-hosting, API, and custom application.

Livestorm is a web-based communication and conferencing platform that enables teams to create a complete video communication strategy.

The tool is geared towards marketing, sales, customer success, or HR teams, and allows teams to create online events for their audiences. Livestorm can accommodate meetings, webinars, conferences, online training courses, podcast interviews, product demos, and more.

The tool is browser-based and teams can access it from a variety of devices. Other notable features include the ability to create custom landing pages; send promotional emails and reminders; host engaging online events with integrated chat, polls, and Q&A functionalities; and analyze event performance through an advanced analytics dashboard.

Livestorm offers a free plan that includes limited functionality, and paid plans start at €89 (~$108 USD).

Blink is a communication tool for the unique needs of deskless workers, who, until now, didn’t have the same quality technology as their colleagues in HQ. In just one app, it includes workplace messaging, a social media style company Feed for top-down communications, directory, cloud storage, workplace analytics, polls, and more.

Blink is built around the concept of workplace messaging as the central functionality so peer-to-peer direct messaging, group Chats, and top-down communications via the company Feed, all play an important role. Moderators and admins who post in the company Feed also have the option of turning on and off push notification for each post depending on importance. Blink also features polls, powerful integrations, and digital forms for reporting.

Analytics for admins features prominently through the app: post by post analytics, Org-wide and Team analytics within the Admin Portal, and Hub analytics that measures interactions and adoption within the document storage and reporting section of the app.

Blink is a straight-out-of-the box Saas communication software; no technical knowledge is necessary to get started and to invite colleagues to the platform. Its user-friendly, brandable interface is designed with familiar social media style features (think emojis and like buttons) that encourages engagement from employees—even less tech-savvy ones.

You can use existing integrations with 3rd party systems such as Jira, Trello, Office 365 and G-suite or build new integrations to your existing systems using Blink’s public APIs. Blink supports Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac, and you can access Blink via your browser.

Blink costs from $3.40 user/month. They offer a free 14-day trial and you can book a demo through the homepage.

Flock is one of the most robust communication apps, going far beyond a simple messaging system. This communication app stands out with its chat module which is designed to streamline and centralize communication from different groups and across different teams. Going a step beyond “back and forth” communication, Flock enables you to turn messages into useful resources with bookmarks, and convert discussions into tasks.

Flock’s features include video and audio calls, group and individual chats, and an intuitive screen sharing module. It also includes many nice-to-have communication tools, like the ability to create an anonymous poll, share it with your team, and download the results. You can also use tags in conversations to indicate high priority info. Another useful feature is the ability to automatically generate email lists of members in a particular discussion board, allowing you to quickly send out group emails to the right people.

Flock integrations include Trello, Airtable, Paperform, Slack, Asana,GitHub, Facebook Lead Ads, Twitter, Reddit, Evernote, Dropbox, Google Doc and Google Calendar, Office 365, and many more.

Flock costs from $6/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial. They also have a free plan with limited features to get started as well.

Microsoft Teams is another trustworthy communication software from a highly competitive developer. MS Teams offers communication services for enterprises of all sizes, and it can stand on par with Slack and popular Slack alternatives.

With its windows-style visuals, MS teams supports the team with live communications, and great threading of past and current data. Video conferencing, messaging, threads, file sharing and screen sharing, everything is there. Even if its push notification system falls a bit behind, integrations with other software like OpsGenie (for routing critical alerts to the right people) make up for it.

MS Teams integrates with the whole MS package, of course, but also with Adobe Creative cloud, Trello, SurveyMonkey, Folly, Wrike, Jira and many, many more. As a communication tool, it integrates with lots of communication channels: email, Google apps, social media platforms, etc. And, of course, it integrates with your essentials on the cloud: Dropbox, Drive and OneDrive.

Microsoft Teams costs from $4/user/month and offers a 30-day free trial as well as a freemium plan with limited features.

Cliq, by Zoho, markets itself as an app for smaller enterprises, but their visually beautiful solution for streamlining team communication could be a fit for larger organizations as well. Going beyond the capabilities of employee communication tools, Cliq offers the ability to grant permissions to external guest users, who can easily access and navigate the easy-to-learn app in order to participate in discussions and conferences.

This team communication tool offers audio and video conferencing, private, group and board messages, and a good system for managing both internal and external contacts. Their discussion threading and search is up to standard, and their built-in calendar works well for simple scheduling, though users often like to integrate their own calendar system (such as Google Calendar). In terms of value for the price, Cliq is compelling—with unlimited storage and unlimited video calling, even in the free version.

Cliq by Zoho also integrates with many of the mainstream apps: Appear.in, BitBucket, Box, Meetup, Stack Overflow, Trello, GitLab, Twitter, various email services, Dropbox, and Google Drive.

Zoho Cliq costs from $3.00/user/month.

Hive is a robust tool for project management, collaboration, and flexible task coordination. It lets users organize projects in a Gantt chart, Kanban board, table, or calendar, and also easily switch between each layout, depending on the communication style they prefer. Updates are reflected across all project views so the whole team is informed no matter what option they use.

Hive enables users to easily collaborate by sending messages directly to individuals or groups. Need to share a document? Upload it directly to a task, project, or message. Hive’s Forms feature eliminates constant emails and collects all necessary information through simple fill-in-the-blanks.

It’s worth noting that if you’re switching to Hive from another tool, you can import tasks from tools including Asana, Trello, Basecamp, Smartsheet, and a few others. Hive integrates with Google Drive, Salesforce, Jira, Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, One Drive, Box, and more than one thousand other tools through Zapier.

Hive costs from $12/user/month.