Well, that&#x27;s kind of the point. Slack has built a moat. IRC is libre and free, but also can get far more arcane than the RFC suggests and to get something like Slack&#x27;s feature set, you have to either build or strap together a lot of moving parts. Discourse is targeted at gamers and is not good for businesses. Ryver is way behind. MS&#x27; offering is laughable. Slack also has exactly the kind of differentiating features that don&#x27;t particularly matter to ICs, but which corporate values highly—like auditing, retention policy, and permissions stuff. There&#x27;s a specific subset of &quot;good product&quot; which has the word-of-mouth marketing result that Slack gets, and that&#x27;s not the same as being &quot;good&quot; in a vacuum.<p>People don&#x27;t use the alternatives to Slack because they&#x27;re not as good as Slack, on various axes, is the short version. Slack has made themself hard to compete with.