Atlassian has long maintained that it offers a perfectly good alternative to Slack, the popular workplace messaging platform with 5 million users and a $5 billion valuation. But with a new team communication platform called Stride, Atlassian is trying to slow down Slack again.
Announced by Atlassian on Thursday, Stride is the fifteen year old public company’s evolution past HipChat, the messaging tool it acquired in 2012. Atlassian is pitching Stride along three major lines of improvement: better messaging tools, natively integrated video and phone conferencing, and a light version of workflow management intended to make message threads more actionable. In the process, it’s competing not just with Slack and its fellow messaging apps, but conferencing tools like UberConference and Zoom and, to an extent, the Google and Microsoft enterprise suites.
