Google Chat vs Slack: Which one to go for?

Google Chat or Slack in 2026: here's the honest version. Slack is the better chat product, but its free plan only keeps 90 days of your messages, so most teams end up paying $7.25 a user. Google Chat is free on a personal Google account, and if your team already pays for Google Workspace, it's included on every plan at no extra cost. The real difference between the paid tiers now isn't features, it's how much AI you get. Below: current prices for both, the limits that actually matter, and which one fits which kind of team.

Google Chat vs. Slack: Pricing

The two products are not sold the same way, and that is the first thing to understand. Slack sells seats. Google does not sell Chat at all: it sells Google Workspace, and Chat comes inside it at every tier. So the table below is Slack's plans against the Workspace plans that carry Chat, the only like-for-like a buyer can act on.

Basis, so you can check it: the Workspace figures are Google's annual-plan prices billed monthly, from Google's own pricing page as served in the United States and captured on 26 July 2026, where it states "All prices $USD" and the annual plan saves 16 percent. The Slack figures are Salesforce's published USD prices for Slack, billed annually, read 28 July 2026. Both vendors run promotions that come and go, and none are included above: a discount limited to your first three months is not what the tool costs.

One limit worth knowing before you commit: Google caps Business Starter, Standard, and Plus at 300 users, so a growing company eventually has to talk to sales whether it wants to or not. Slack sets no equivalent seat cap on Pro or Business+.

Google Chat vs. Slack: Features

Message history: the limit that actually matters

If you've read that Slack Free caps you at 10,000 messages, that limit was retired in 2022; the current limit is time, not volume.

Slack Free is no longer a 10,000-message cap. It is 90 days of message history, a change Slack made in 2022, and the two limits fail for opposite teams.

Under the old cap, a quiet team of four might never hit the limit in years while a busy team burned through it in weeks. Under a 90-day window, both lose everything older than three months, on the same schedule, forever. If your reason for keeping history is "we need to find what we agreed with the client last spring," Slack Free cannot do it at any team size, and Pro is the only fix.

Google Chat treats history as a policy, not a plan feature: it is on by default, can be turned on or off per conversation, and behaves identically on every Workspace tier. Higher tiers add control over it, not more of it, with Vault retention and eDiscovery at Business Plus.

Spaces, channels, and working with people outside your company

Both tools give you the same two shapes: direct messages for people, and a persistent group room for topics. Slack calls it a channel, Google calls it a space, and day to day they behave alike.

The interesting difference in 2026 is external collaboration, which used to be a clean Slack win. On Slack Free it is capped at one-to-one, with group external messages arriving at Pro. Google Chat now issues guest accounts: invite an external, non-Workspace user into a direct message or a space and they get an account inside your domain marked with an external label, able to join huddles and edit Drive files shared there.

AI, which is what the paid tiers are now actually selling

This is the axis that has replaced message history as the reason to upgrade, on both sides.

Slack tiers its AI rather than selling it as an add-on. Basic AI, including conversation summaries and workflow generation, is on Free and Pro. Advanced AI, adding daily recaps, file summaries, and AI search, arrives at Business+. Enterprise-grade AI, with enterprise search, is Enterprise+ only.

Google does the same with Gemini, and here is the detail buyers miss: Gemini in Chat, which summarizes and translates conversations, is not supported on Business Starter. Chat itself is identical there; the AI inside it is not. A team choosing Workspace's cheapest plan specifically to get Chat is choosing the version without the assistant.

Slack vs. Google Chat: Integrations

Slack's app directory remains the larger and more varied of the two, and on paid plans installs are unlimited. On Slack Free it is up to ten, a real constraint for a team that wants a build tool, a calendar, a CRM, a status page, and an on-call rotation all reporting into one place.

Google Chat is narrower but deeper in one direction: it is wired into the rest of Google Workspace. Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Docs all reach into Chat with no setup, and starting a Google Meet call from a conversation is one click. If your company already runs on Workspace, much of what you would go shopping for in Slack is already there. Slack wins on breadth, Chat on depth inside Google, and which matters more is decided by what your team already uses rather than by either vendor's app count.

Google Chat vs. Slack: Search

Both tools search across messages, files, and people, and both filter by sender, date, and file type. Slack's is the more powerful of the two for a chat-first team, with time-range filters and the ability to include or exclude specific channels.

The catch is what there is to search. On Slack Free, search cannot return what the 90-day window has already hidden, so the better engine is pointed at a smaller archive. Chat's filters are more modest, but from Business Standard up, Gemini in Chat sits alongside them and answers questions about a conversation rather than returning keyword matches.

The verdict, on the 2026 facts

There is no universal winner here, but the facts do point clearly for specific teams.

Choose Google Chat if you already pay for Google Workspace. Chat is not an extra line on the bill, and it is the same product on every tier. For a team on Business Standard or above, that is a competent chat tool with an AI assistant inside it for nothing beyond what you already spend. Adding Slack Pro on top at $7.25 a seat is a real cost for a capability you partly own already.

Choose Slack if chat is where your work actually happens. If your team lives in channels, connects a dozen tools, and treats the chat log as the record of decisions, Slack is the better product, and it is not close. But budget for Pro: Slack Free's 90-day window deletes exactly the archive that made you value chat, and a team that would notice that limit should never have been on Free.

If you are choosing on price alone, read the seat math carefully. Slack Pro at $7.25 and Workspace Business Starter at $7 look identical but are not comparable purchases: one is a chat tool, the other is an entire email and productivity suite that includes a chat tool without the AI. The genuinely cheap options are the free ones, and they are cheap in different ways. Google Chat on a personal account is free and fully featured for small-group messaging. Slack Free is free and forgets.

The layer both of them ignore

One honest note before you pick a chat tool: this choice matters less than it feels like it does, because the work that actually involves your customers is not in Chat or Slack, it is in email. Teams agonize over the chat decision and then run support@ and sales@ through a shared login with no owner, no statuses, and no record of who said what. Whichever side of this page you land on, that is the layer worth fixing first. Drag does it in the Gmail your team already uses: shared inboxes as boards, every client email assigned to one owner, AI drafting included, $12 to $24 per user per month, and it works the same whether your chat tool is Google's or Slack's. Seven days free, no card.

For the mechanics rather than the pitch, our Gmail shared inbox guide covers every route, including the free ones.

Pick your chat tool on the facts above. Then fix the layer they both ignore: your team's email. Drag, in the Gmail you already have, free for 7 days, no card.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google Chat free?

Yes, on a personal Google account, with DMs, spaces, and app messaging included; Google's own comparison lists webhooks as the notable Workspace-only feature. Inside Google Workspace, Chat is identical in every tier; what changes by tier is Gemini, which is not supported on Business Starter.

What are Slack's free plan limits in 2026?

The one that matters is history: Slack Free keeps 90 days of messages and then hides the rest, a limit that replaced the old 10,000-message cap in 2022 and that many comparison pages still get wrong. Free also restricts external collaboration to one-to-one and includes only basic AI.

Which is better for a small team, Google Chat or Slack?

If the team already pays for Google Workspace, Chat is the better value by a wide margin: it costs nothing extra and behaves the same on every plan. If the team does not use Workspace and treats chat as its main workspace, Slack Pro at $7.25 a seat is worth the money. The combination to avoid is a small team on Slack Free that expects to look things up later.

Do we need a chat tool or a shared inbox?

Most teams need both, and they solve different problems. Chat is for internal conversation, which is why neither Slack nor Google Chat gives a customer email an owner, a status, or an auditable history. A shared inbox does that for the addresses your customers actually write to. If support@ or sales@ runs through a shared password today, fixing that will change more about your week than choosing between two chat tools.