Klusko vs Slack: a better chat app, or chat with the tasks attached?

Slack’s free plan shows 90 days of messages. Anything older drops out of view unless you pay. That’s the first thing most small teams bump into when they compare Klusko vs Slack, and it’s a fair place to start, though it isn’t the most important difference.

The bigger one is where your tasks live. Slack is a chat app, and a very good one. Klusko is team chat and project management in one app, built for teams of roughly 3 to 50 people who were tired of running Slack plus a task tool and still losing jobs between the two. We were one of those teams. Before Klusko we ran a 12-person business, and the task that went wrong was nearly always one somebody had agreed to in a chat thread.

What Slack has that we don’t

Quite a lot, and we’d rather say so here than have you find out in week two.

Huddles. Slack lets you drop into a quick audio or video call from a channel. Klusko has no voice or video calls at all. If your team settles things by talking for two minutes rather than typing for ten, you’ll miss that.

Integrations. Slack connects to thousands of other apps (the free plan allows 10 of them, as of September 2026). Klusko has no integrations and no API. If your sales leads or website alerts flow into Slack channels today, Klusko can’t replace that.

Slack Connect, which lets you share channels with people at other companies. Klusko has guests: you add someone to a project, and they see that project plus your public channels. That works for a client you’re doing a job for. It’s not the same as a shared channel with your accountant’s whole firm.

Maturity, too. Slack has been around a long time and has native apps on every platform. Our iPhone app is in testing and not on the App Store yet, and we have no Android app. If half your team is on Android phones in a van, that’s a problem today.

And Slack Pro now includes Lists, for tracking work inside Slack. We haven’t used Lists enough to judge it properly, so we won’t pretend to review it. What we can tell you is what Klusko’s task side has (below) and you can compare.

Where the tasks live

In Klusko, projects sit in the same app as your channels. Each project has five views: Board, List, Table, Calendar and Workload (capacity bars per person against the team average). Tasks have an assignee, start and due dates, a priority, tags, subtasks, attachments, comments and custom fields. Recurring tasks come back when you tick them off, so month-end invoicing or the Friday van check doesn’t depend on anyone’s memory.

The part we care about most is the join. Mention a task in a chat message and it becomes a live link, showing who has it and when it’s due. The command bar (Cmd or Ctrl + K) searches tasks, projects, people and messages at once. Your Inbox puts mentions and assignments in one list, with a preview, so you can clear it like email and get on. We wrote more about that in how to stop losing tasks in chat, and the tasks page has the detail.

The chat side covers what we think most small teams actually use Slack for, which is channels (public and private), DMs and threads with @mentions, plus reactions, GIFs, file sharing, an unread “new” divider and the little online dots that tell you whether it’s worth expecting a reply before lunch. It’s on the team chat page.

Is 90 days of history enough?

For some teams, yes. If chat is for “running ten minutes late” and nothing else, you won’t miss last spring’s messages.

But small businesses tend to agree real things in chat. A price. A change to a spec. Which supplier you said you’d stop using. When a customer disputes something from five months ago, that message is the evidence. On Klusko’s free plan, history is complete for up to 10 people, and on paid plans too. We don’t hide old messages on any plan.

What Klusko vs Slack costs a small team

As of September 2026, Slack Pro is $7.25 per user per month billed yearly, or $8.75 monthly. Klusko Team is £5 or £6 (about $7 or $8). The fair comparison, though, is Slack plus the task tool you’d pair it with, so we’ve added Trello Standard, the cheapest pairing we priced.

All per month. Klusko’s free plan covers the 5- and 10-person teams too, with 5 projects and 2 GB of storage. And right now every Klusko plan is free, because billing hasn’t launched; we’ll give at least 30 days’ notice before charging anything. If you use Asana rather than Trello, the numbers get worse, which we set out in our Slack and Asana cost breakdown.

Moving a team off Slack without a mutiny

People get attached to their chat app, and a switch announced on a Monday with no plan tends to end with half the team still in the old one on Friday. What’s worked for us is boring.

Pick one live project and its channel, and move only those first. Invite the people involved, put the open tasks on a board, and post in the old Slack channel that the conversation has moved and where. Give it two weeks. If the tasks are getting ticked off and nobody is asking “where did we say that”, move the next one.

We can’t import your Slack history, so decide early what you want to keep. For most small teams that’s a few pinned decisions and some files, which you can drop into the relevant Klusko project as attachments. Everything else can stay where it is while you still have access.

Keep your call tool. We don’t do calls, so if huddles were doing real work, point people at Teams or Google Meet for that and leave chat and tasks to us. The team communication page has a few more notes on setting up channels for a small company.

Side by side

Who we think should stay on Slack

Stay on Slack if your channels are full of alerts from other tools, if you talk in huddles all day, or if you work in shared channels with clients and suppliers. Also if your team is mostly on Android. None of those are things Klusko does, and you’d probably be annoyed with us inside a week if we pretended otherwise.

Look at Klusko if you’re a team of roughly 3 to 50, you pay for Slack and a task tool and still chase jobs through threads, and your integrations list is short or empty. If you want a Slack alternative with task management built in, that’s what we made. If you’d like to see the other chat options first, we compared Teams, Google Chat, Pumble and a few more in Slack alternatives for small business.

Say you run a nine-person estate agency. The Monday “who’s doing which viewing” message in Slack is where the week gets agreed. In Klusko, that message links straight to the viewings on the calendar, and in September next year it’s still there.

Questions