Stride

It's no secret that Atlassian is one of the most successful enterprise-grade software companies out there with a wide array of best-selling products such Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Fisheye/Crucible, and Bamboo.

When it comes to team collaboration and communication/GTD solutions, the company has long since offered Hipchat which was a bit simplistic and lost a lot of influence to the more modern and more organization-orientated Slack.

This is exactly why Stride was created, and straight off the bat, we'll say this: it really looks like the team behind Stride did their homework. In short, besides being an uber-efficient all-encompassing collaboration and communication solution, Stride aims to solve some of the biggest problems of apps of this sort, most of which are related to the overwhelming amount of information that comes your way.

You might be tempted to believe that this is just your average Slack-wanna-be app, since the design is extremely intuitive, with a very minimalist feel to it. And, sure, all the tools you've come to expect are here as well.

You're provided with a very smooth mix of group chat and direct messaging features, as well as voice and video chat conferencing tools, all of which can be effortlessly accessed.

There are other nifty must-have tools as well such as group screen sharing (up to 20 members supported), support for file transfer, the possibility to set notifications by room and to share various statuses. You're also provided with the option of using Markdown to write and edit messages, as well as with diverse emojis.

So far nothing revolutionizing, right? Wrong - here's where Stride takes things up a notch. Definitely one of the app's most exciting features is the Actions and Decisions. Basically, it allows anyone in the team to be brought up to speed with some of the most important decisions that have been made so far. It works by pinning both actions items and the name of specific users alongside a note (it's a lot easier than it sounds).

The other highlight comes in the form of a so-called "Focus Mode" or snoozed notifications, as you may already know. By enabling this mode, all notifications are instantly muted so you can get some real work done. When disabled, you're readily presented with a list of some of the most important messages, actions, and decisions that took place while you were in the zone, so to speak.

Another fact you might be interested in is the app's deep integration with a broad range of Atlassian tools such as Alias, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket, Jira Cloud, and Statuspage. Of course, support for some third-party tools such as GitHub and GIPHY is also present.

All things considered, we can safely say that Stride is definitely one of the best team collaboration tools out there and, there's no getting around it, a very strong alternative to Slack.

It doesn't only bring to the table some interesting features meant to change our perception of what a complete collaboration app should be like, but it's also very cheap, in fact, quite cheaper than most of the competition.

Last but not least, it's accessible via a web-app, or via smooth-running clients for all major desktop and mobile OSes such as Windows, macOS, Linux, and, respectively, iOS and Android.