A Slack alternative for small business: team chat and video calls inside the app you run the shop on

Short answer: if your team is under about a dozen people and most of what you talk about is customers, bookings, orders, stock and shifts, you probably don't need a separate chat app and a separate meeting app. Wemu now has team chat and voice and video calls (Beta) built in, right next to the work itself.

Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet are excellent tools. They were built for office teams whose work lives in documents. A café, salon, clinic or trade business is different: the conversation is almost always about a specific customer, job, invoice or order. When the chat lives in another app, that context gets lost in screenshots and "which booking do you mean?".

What Wemu team chat does

• Channels and direct messages for the whole team, a branch or two people.
• Threads, @mentions and reactions, so a question about Saturday's roster doesn't get buried under lunch orders.
• Photos and files attached to messages, and search across the conversation.
• Tasks in the chat: turn a message into a task, assign it and see it tick off without leaving the thread.
• On the phone too: the Wemu Team app carries the same channels, threads and voice notes for staff on the floor.

New: voice and video calls (Beta)

Press the call button in any chat and everyone in that channel gets a ring. From there:

• Voice or video with up to 4 people on a call.
• Share your screen or a single browser tab to walk someone through a report or a setting.
• Noise filter that takes out coffee grinders, hair dryers and traffic.
• Background blur for calls from the back office or the car.
• Share a Wemu item into the call: drop a task, invoice, customer or quote in and everyone opens the same record.
• Direct, peer-to-peer connection between the people on the call, so audio and video don't take a detour through a meeting server.

Slack vs Teams vs Google Meet vs Wemu

What it costs a team of eight

Per-user pricing adds up quietly. Eight staff on Slack Pro is about US$58 a month billed annually, and that's before the booking system, the POS and the rostering app. Microsoft 365 Business Basic for the same eight is about US$56 a month. Many teams pay for one of those and a meetings tool.

In Wemu, chat and calls come with the plan you already pay for to run the business, so adding the new junior or the weekend casual doesn't add another per-seat chat bill.

When you should keep Slack, Teams or Meet

We'd rather you pick the right tool than switch for the wrong reason. Stay where you are if:

• You run regular calls with more than 4 people, all-hands meetings or webinars.
• Your work lives in Word, Excel or Google Docs and the chat is mostly about those documents.
• You rely on hundreds of integrations, bots or shared channels with other companies.
• You need call recording, transcripts or dial-in phone numbers.

Plenty of owners do both: Wemu for the day-to-day of the shop, and a Meet or Zoom link for the monthly meeting with the accountant.

Why chat belongs next to the work

1. 1Less app-switching on the floor. Staff already have Wemu open to clock in, check the roster and take orders.
2. 2Context comes with the message. Share the actual booking, customer or invoice instead of a screenshot of it.
3. 3One place to onboard and offboard. Add a team member once and they get the roster, the till and the chat. Remove them once and they lose all of it.
4. 4Wemu AI can help. The same assistant that answers "who's working Saturday?" sits in the same app as the conversation about it.

How to start a call in Wemu

1. 1Open Team chat in the Wemu web app and pick a channel or direct message.
2. 2Press the phone icon for voice or the camera icon for video. Everyone in the chat gets a ring.
3. 3Allow your browser to use the microphone and camera the first time.
4. 4Use the call bar to mute, turn the camera on or off, share your screen, blur your background or switch on the noise filter.