Twist

The true async alternative to Slack

Comentários: I love it and do does the team.

Vantagens:

It's just a totally different mindset. No "online" indicator, no "typing..." indicator. No need to madly dash off one-liners. Instead, calm and focused work. The Inbox makes sure nothing falls through the crack, the notification settings are sensible, the interface is neat and the whole philosophy of Twist and the team behind it (Doist, the same company that makes Todoist) are well aligned with the needs of remote and async teams.

Desvantagens:

It's a smaller company, with no venture backing, so some nice-to-have features are missing, as are some integrations: Everybody makes their product integrate with Slack, because that's the big incumbent.

Asynchronous chat

Comentários: The whole team loved it because now instead of being distracted every time someone sends a message in some channel, people could finally spend time doing productive work and checking their email and Twist notifications when they want.

Vantagens:

Threaded conversations are a killer feature. It's not a Slack-type thread where you can easily get lost, especially when trying to keep up with more than one thread. Twist threads resemble forum where you open or subscribe to topics and participate in meaningful conversations. Another feature I absolutely love is selecting people to notify when creating a new thread. It makes you consider who this message is important to before sending unlike with other messengers where everyone gets notified unless they mute the whole channel.

Desvantagens:

When we migrated from Twist alternative that was "noisier" and synchronous, we had a separate channel with real-time status updates from our CI server, uptime notifications, and real-time errors. This was a bit hard to do with Twist since it wasn't meant for that.

Customer Support is Absolutely Terrible.

Comentários: Terrible customer service!

Vantagens:

The intention is good, but if customer support cannot fix the technical issues that arise that limit the users from seeing what you put on the channels, then the platform is basically worthless as the communication tool that it was meant to be.

Desvantagens:

When there is an issue that you need resolved, do not count on customer support to help. You will have to either figure it out yourself, or just live with it. Customer service will only email you. It takes days to go back and forth when it could easily take 1 phone call to resolve an issue. They will NOT speak to you over the phone.

Easy and useful

Comentários: I like it. It's perfect for companies employing 10-500 people. If there were more, I guess they would need some more functions, or groups, but in my case, it was really good. I just needed contact to my PMs usually. They contacted a few more people, but I think they liked Twist too.

Vantagens:

It's perfect for jobs like mine (copywritting/translating). Communication must be quick and easy. I could notify anyone in my own thread or go to someone else's tread and do the same. It's really crucial, when PMs and editors change for every project. Everyone could see the threads, so if someone needed help, they could find the informations without having to ask anyone. The are private messages too of course, so it's not like you can't send private data.

Desvantagens:

I had troubles with mobile app. Some users were added to notifications by deafault and I didn't really know how to cancel it, when I just wanted to notify one of them.

An excellent digital tool for asynchronous team communication

Vantagens:

The one thing I'd like to mention, which isn't about a feature itself but more about a company philosophy (or, at least, it appears so), is Twist's emphasis on asynchronous, so on communication that doesn't happen at the same time. When it comes to the platform itself, my favorite feature is the Integrations that are available in Twist – one in particular: the Team Check-In. With the Team Check-In feature, you can create specific automated and recurring posts being published on Twist. This is powerful, especially if you're thinking about hosting a weekly standup meeting with the members of your team, you could use the automated Team Check-In coming into the picture and then have other members interact with something that was shared as part of the Team Check-In Automation.

Desvantagens:

I personally think that Twist is a very valuable tool for team communication, especially for the asynchronous. However, there's one feature I feel could be improved: the ability to navigate different threads. Finding a specific word, sentence or piece of advice you shared somewhere on Twist should be something that's found quickly and easily – but, unfortunately, that isn't often the case.