Slack alternative
A Slack alternative where the message becomes a task, not scrollback
Slack is where the signal arrives. It is also where the signal goes to be forgotten by Thursday.
The short answer
Polaris is a free alternative to Slack for teams that want team chat attached to the work rather than beside it. Slack lists Free with ninety days of message history, Pro at seven dollars twenty-five per active user per month billed annually, and Business plus at fifteen dollars, checked 21 August 2026. Polaris includes chat at no cost and converts Slack messages into prefilled task suggestions.
- Slack Free
- 90 days of history
- Slack Pro
- $7.25 / user / month annual
- Slack Business+
- $15 / user / month annual
- Checked
- 21 Aug 2026
The ninety-day problem, and the real one
Checked on 21 August 2026, Slack's Free plan keeps ninety days of message history, Pro is eight dollars seventy-five per active user per month billed monthly or seven twenty-five billed annually, Business plus is eighteen billed monthly or fifteen annually, and Enterprise plus is quoted on request. The history limit is what makes teams start looking.
The deeper problem is not retention. It is that a decision, a request and a complaint all arrive in the same stream, at the same size, with the same urgency signal, and only one of the three ever becomes something with an owner and a date. The rest is archaeology.
Polaris does not attempt to be a better chat product than Slack. It attempts to make the chat stop being the last place a piece of work was seen.
Head to head
Slack prices from slack.com/pricing, checked 21 August 2026.
Slack
Polaris
- Cost
Free with 90-day history, then $7.25 to $15 per active user per month annually
$0, unlimited humans, full history
- Real-time chat
Channels, threads, huddles, calls, presence
Team chat in the product, without huddles or voice
- External collaboration
Slack Connect shared channels with other companies
Not available. This is a genuine gap
- Message to task
Save for later, reminders, or an app that creates a ticket elsewhere
Inbox catches the signal and prefills a task suggestion with bucket, lane, labels and owner set
- Tasks and docs
Not included, lives in the tools you connect
Included: workstreams, Focus lane, nested docs with versioning and review
- AI in chat
Assistive features on paid tiers
The Chief of Staff is on your roster from day one and turns noise into approved tasks
- Who acts on a message
A person who has to notice it
A person, or an AI worker assigned the resulting task
- App directory
Thousands of third-party apps
Fourteen connections, authorised once, org-wide, stored server-side
Comparison of Slack and Polaris by .
How a Slack message becomes owned work
Slack is in the Polaris connection catalog, so this works without leaving Slack.
- 1
Connect Slack once
Authorise Slack from the connections catalog. The credential is verified live at connection time and stored server-side, org-wide. Browsers cannot read it back.
- 2
The signal lands in the Inbox
A message your tools hear arrives in the Polaris Inbox as a prefilled task suggestion, with bucket, lane, labels and owner already set. Signals become suggestions and never silent tasks.
- 3
One click makes it real
Accept the suggestion and it becomes a task in a workstream with an owner and a date. Reject it and it goes away. Nothing is created behind your back.
- 4
Assign it to whoever should do it
Humans and AI workers sit in the same members table, so assignment is identical for both. If it goes to a worker, a cloud machine wakes for it and returns the result as a comment with any files it produced.
When you should stay on Slack
Slack does several things Polaris does not do at all.
You work with other companies in shared channels
Slack Connect is how a lot of agencies, vendors and partners actually communicate. Polaris has no equivalent, and losing shared channels would move those conversations to email.
Huddles and calls are part of the day
Ad-hoc audio, screen sharing and the low-ceremony huddle culture that grew around them are not in Polaris. Teams that live in huddles should keep Slack.
Compliance, retention and eDiscovery are requirements
Enterprise retention policies, legal holds, data export APIs and the surrounding administration exist because regulated organisations must have them.
Your alerting runs through Slack apps
Incident tooling, deploy bots, on-call rotations and monitoring alerts route through Slack's app directory. That plumbing is worth more than a subscription line.
Go deeper
Slack pricing, checked August 2026
The one vendor here that bills per active user, which helps more than most people realise.
Slack vs Microsoft Teams
This is not really a chat comparison. It is a question about which suite you already pay for.
Replacing Jira and Slack
Engineering teams on Jira and Slack have a tracker, a chat tool, and specs living in ticket descriptions.
Replacing Notion and Slack
A stack with a writing tool and a talking tool, and no place where a piece of work has an owner and a date.
Connect Slack to Polaris
Six scopes, no access to direct messages, and a bot that only reads the channels somebody invited it into.
Dependencies as dated items, not as things people said in a meeting
Two teams agree something in a call. Neither writes it down. Three weeks later each is waiting for the other. A worker makes the promise a tracked item.
Questions people ask
+Does Polaris replace Slack completely?
For most teams, no, and the page above says which parts are missing. Polaris has team chat but no huddles, no shared external channels and no third-party app directory. The stronger move is to connect Slack so the requests inside it become tasks with owners, and keep Slack for conversation.
+Will connecting Slack create tasks without me knowing?
No. A Slack signal arrives in the Polaris Inbox as a suggestion with bucket, lane, labels and owner prefilled, and it stays a suggestion until someone accepts it. Signals become suggestions, never silent tasks. That rule exists because the alternative is a task list nobody trusts.
+What does Slack cost a twenty-person team per year?
Slack Pro at seven dollars twenty-five per active user per month billed annually is one thousand seven hundred and forty dollars a year for twenty people, checked 21 August 2026. Business plus at fifteen dollars is three thousand six hundred. Polaris chat is included in free software with no seat count.
+Does Polaris keep full message history on the free plan?
Yes. There is no retention tier in Polaris because there are no tiers at all. The software is free with unlimited humans, tasks, workstreams and docs, and the only billing line is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour of delivered agent work.
Related
Slack pricing, checked August 2026
The one vendor here that bills per active user, which helps more than most people realise.
Slack vs Microsoft Teams
This is not really a chat comparison. It is a question about which suite you already pay for.
Replacing Jira and Slack
Engineering teams on Jira and Slack have a tracker, a chat tool, and specs living in ticket descriptions.
Replacing Notion, Linear and Slack
The default startup stack, three subscriptions, and a decision that has to be written down three times to stay true.
Connect Slack to Polaris
Six scopes, no access to direct messages, and a bot that only reads the channels somebody invited it into.
Tool sprawl
The expensive part is not the licences. It is that nothing is authoritative any more.
Polaris for remote teams
The problem was never the meetings. It is what happens to a decision made while half the team is asleep.