Slack vs Basecamp – Who Is the Winer?

When I first read about Basecamp I got carried away. The company behind the famous project management tool offers impressive perks to its employees – from flexible work to $5,000 for a vacation.

It looks like Basecamp team is living la dolce vita. So I wondered what kind of product do happy (I hope!) Basecamp employees design and promote. With that question, my journey of exploring the tools started.

If you read Chanty blog before, you know that we love to dive into different apps. It helps us in designing a better tool for our customers – a simple, fast and smart team chat. We do our best and work hard so you can enjoy seamless and productive communication on any platform (Mac, PC iOS, Android, and web). You should totally give Chanty a try.

Usually, we explore communications apps to learn more about our colleagues-slash-competitors. But while working on Tasks feature in Chanty (successfully released), we also studied tons of project management apps. Recently, we wrote the in-depth comparison of Slack vs Asana. Now, it’s time to look at Basecamp.

Slack vs Basecamp: general overview

At Chanty, we are well-aware of Slack, as this tool has generated quite a buzz. As of March 2024, Slack had over thirty million daily active users. Apparently, this number might grow, since Slack acquired Stride, offering Atlassian’s team chat users to migrate to its platform.

Stride’s users are encouraged to switch to Slack

Slack is often praised for having multiple integrations and friendly UX. Although some consider it cumbersome, slow and overcomplicated. At Chanty, we receive many game-changing complaints about Slack.

But still, Slack is a popular tool claiming to be “the hub for your team and your work.” This is exactly what unites it with Basecamp that positions as a tool that “combines all the tools teams need in a single, straightforward package.”

Through the years, Basecamp has made quite a journey. When it started in 2004, it was simply an internal tool used by 37signals team. Now it has already nearly 16 million users worldwide in 2024.

Of course, the tools have different basic functions. Slack, is first and foremost a communication app, while Basecamp is a project management software. However, the apps do have some similar features.

In some ways, they might even substitute each other. Slack has some ways of handling tasks, while Basecamp is able to tackle communication issues. How? Let’s find out.

Slack vs. Basecamp: a quick preview

For those of you in a hurry, have a look at a quick comparison of both tools.

Now, let’s dive into a detailed comparison of the two.

Slack vs Basecamp: pricing

When I write comparison articles, I usually study the Freemium plans of tools. That’s not the case with Basecamp pricing. It offers a plan that will be better for smaller teams or freelancers with monthly payment per users and a plan for large-sized teams paid annually.

Slack, on the other hand, has a Freemium and 2 paid tiers. The Pro plan is $8.75 user/month, while Business+ is $15 user/month (billed annually).

Since Slack charges per user and Basecamp bills for a team, it’s a tricky question which tool is more cost-efficient. It depends on your particular needs and the size of your team. Basecamp can be your choice if your team is more than 50 users. If it’s smaller, Slack can be your choice in terms of pricing.

Slack vs. Basecamp: signing up

Getting started is simple within both tools. You sign in by entering your email on a landing page. The registration is 5-6 steps. You enter your name, company name, job title. No credit card info is required if you are interested in the Freemium version of Slack or in the free trial of Basecamp.

Signing up in Basecamp

However, when signing up to Slack, you’ll be required to check your email for the confirmation code. Also, in Slack you’ll need to create your Workplace name, which is not the case with Basecamp. In both tools, you’ll be able to invite your colleagues to join you right during the sign-up.

Sending invitations in Slack

Now, let’s jump to what you see within the Workspace (Slack) or Home screen (Basecamp) – the dedicated places for everything that’s happening in your company.

Slack vs. Basecamp: layout and design

Slack and Basecamp’s layouts offer quite different approaches to team collaboration and organization.

In Slack, the layout is horizontal, with two main Workspace panels. The left panel is smaller and dedicated to contacts, channels, and apps, while the right panel is where the majority of conversations and tasks happen.

Basecamp, on the other hand, has a vertical layout. On the Home Screen, users see three main panels: HQ, Teams, and Projects. This setup divides the workspace into different sections for communication and task management. 

Basecamp has a vertical layout

In some reviews, Basecamp’s design is criticized for being “haphazard” comparing to other “modern-looking tools.” I wouldn’t agree with this, as Home Screen seems pretty well-crafted to me. However, the whole concept of dividing the workspace into these 3 particular menus needs some getting accustomed to. But so does Slack’s layout, especially if you’ve never used a team chat tool. The variety of different features is hidden behind the buttons in Slack.

Slack interface

In both tools, there are some adjustments you can make in design and layout. Basecamp allows you to show items (projects or teams) as cards or as a list. You can also add or remove sections (HQ, Projects and Teams) and choose a theme.

Options for customizing your HQ in Basecamp

In Slack you can customize the left bar in any color you choose.

Options for customizing your workplace in Slack

Both platforms offer customization to a certain extent. Slack allows users to personalize the sidebar, while Basecamp enables customization in how items are displayed and allows users to add or remove sections like HQ or Projects. Both layouts require some adjustment if you’re new to these tools, but they cater well to different needs: Slack for dynamic, real-time communication, and Basecamp for more structured, project-based management.

In summary, Slack’s layout feels more dynamic and customizable, focusing on real-time interactions, while Basecamp is minimalistic and organized around projects and teams. Each design has its strengths, depending on your workflow.

Basecamp vs Slack: onboarding

Once you enter Basecamp’s Home Screen, you’ll stumble upon a short onboarding video – a modal box with a transparent background will pop up. The video seems quite comprehensive and worth watching if you don’t know much about the tool.

Slack will also greet you with a modal box, suggesting to explore the tool. You’ll be welcomed to the tutorial via green Explore Slack button.

Slack offers a tutorial when signing up

Unlike Basecamp, Slack won’t offer you an introduction video. Hitting on the button “Explore Slack”, you’ll get to chat to a Slack bot. You can ask it a question or type in a keyword or two, to get the answer to your questions.

Slackbot in Slack

Unless you “Skip the tutorial”, Slack will also offer you a product tour consisting of 3 steps. It comes in the form of tooltips – the boxes with pointers. There will be just a few pieces of advice about messaging and adding your teammates.

The product tour in Slack

Now, let’s move on to the key features of tools.

Basecamp vs. Slack: task management

Setting tasks in Basecamp

When it comes to handling tasks, Basecamp shines. (This is a project management tool, after all). If Slack’s basic feature is Сhannels, Basecamp’s wouldn’t exist without To-do lists. Within them, you create tasks, notify assignees, set due dates, etc. You can create a To-do list within HQ, a specific team or project.

Creating a To-do list in Basecamp

However, there is one thing I found inconvenient in Basecamp. If I want to create a To-do, I need to generate a To-do list first. No cutsies. Not a single task apart from a To-do list exists.

Creating a To-do in Basecamp

Another important Basecamp’s feature that complements To-dos is Schedule. Every project includes a calendar plan that displays any dated tasks and events for that project.

Schedule feature in Basecamp

Of course, you can add notes and file attachments to Tasks and Projects. (We’ll discuss Documents and Files feature later). However, being a popular project management tool, Basecamp is blamed for not supporting hierarchal to-do lists, subtasks, or dependencies.

Setting tasks in Slack

The most common way of managing tasks in Slack is via integrations. As Slack introduced Actions, users don’t have to leave the app to create and finish tasks. Let’s have a brief look at how it works on the example of Asana. After adding the app to Slack, it appears as a separate channel. Then, you type in any of the suggested commands depending on what you want to do. E.g. for creating a task you would type “/asana create@.

Typing in a command to set a task in Slack

After this, Asana’s modal box will pop up so you can set up a task.

Creating a task in Asana via Slack

After that, the task appears in your Asana workspace.

There are some additional ways you can manage To-dos in Slack without integrations. I covered them in the Asana vs. Slack article.

However, it might be more convenient for you to use Chanty, as our team chat already has built-in Tasks. We’ve recently released the task manager that is a breeze to use. It’s totally built-in with no extra effort or integrations required from your side! Try it out!

Basecamp vs. Slack: communication

Communication in Slack

Slack centers around communication. The tool’s basic feature is Channels – public and private. They are a single place for messaging, tools and files. Channels can be divided up by team, project, client, or whatever else is relevant to your organization. Team members can join and leave channels as needed — unlike lengthy email chains.

Messaging in Slack

Threads is another famous feature in Slack – loved by ones, hated by others. They let you respond directly to a message in a channel, keeping the replies organized neatly in a single conversation.

Threads in Slack

In Slack, not only can we text a message, but also make audio and video calls.

Audio and video calls are not supported in Basecamp. However, being a PM tool, it has quite a few means of communication.

Communication in Basecamp

Basecamp allows you to communicate quite efficiently. It has many more ways to have conversations than, for example, Asana. Basecamp even claims it’s able to replace Slack due to its Campfire chat. Can it?

Basecamp claims to replace Slack due to its Campfire feature

Basically, Basecamp suggests you use discussion threads instead of conversation channels and chat emails. Overall, I have counted 4 ways of communicating within the tool.

1. Campfire (a Real-time Group Chat)
2. Message Boards
3. Direct Messages (Pings)
4. To-Dos – comment directly on tasks and lists

Let’s briefly review all of them.

1. Campfire (Real-time Group Chat)

Basically, Campfire is a chatroom. Suppose, I have a question to the team and not quite sure who to ask. So I go to Campfire.

Campfire feature in Basecamp

Every HQ, team or project include their own Campfire. The feature is stacked with tools for conversations: you can attach files, quotes, code samples, insert sounds, video, and emoji, use @mentions. Simply put, Campfire is the analog of a separate group channel in Slack. You can follow and unfollow particular Campfires, delete a Campfire Post or just delete the Campfire tool.

2. Message Boards

Message Board is a place where you post updates and gather feedback on what we are doing.

When your colleagues post messages, you can answer them by “applauding” (which is the analog of Reactions in Slack). You can also insert images or files into your message.

3. Comments in To-Do section

You can also comment directly on tasks and lists, discussing projects in the To-do section.

Commenting in To-Do Section in Basecamp

4. Direct Messages (Pings)

This is a feature which is quite rare in project management tools. In Basecamp, you can private message people in separate channels. Basically, this is the analog of direct messaging in Slack.

Pings feature in Basecamp

Within Pings, not only can you have private 1-1 conversations, but also group chats.

Your conversation history is searchable (there’s no info about message history limits though). You can also attach files, insert sounds, video, and emojis.

Using Pings in Basecamp

In a nutshell, the conversations in Basecamp are organized via multiple features. I just hope the users of the tool don’t get confused having so many different ways of communication.

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Basecamp vs Slack: integrations

When it comes to integrations, Slack is ahead of the curve, having over 2,600 of them. Users can easily set up a channel for any software they use, allowing for seamless communication and collaboration. We explored Slack integrations in our team chat wars series so feel free to check out the other in-depth tool reviews by the Chanty team. For now, let’s mention that in Slack’s Freemium version, you can use only 10 integrations.

Choosing integrations in Slack
Image source

Being a paid tool, Basecamp doesn’t limit users with the number of integrations. It has way fewer of them – 700(as of 2024). But there are some tools including Zapier that allow connecting to hundreds of business apps, enhancing its functionality.

Integrations on a Basecamp page
Image source

I briefly tested Basecamp’s integrations, connecting the tool with Slack via Zapier.

Let’s suppose I want to be notified in Slack about new To-dos in Basecamp. There is a trigger for that in Zapier.

Then I choose the way of how to be notified about a To-do. For example, I want to receive a message in a particular Slack channel – this is my “Action”.

After a couple of steps coordinating “Trigger” and “Action”, everything went smoothly and I started to receive notifications about To-dos in my Slack channel. In a nutshell, integrations are definitely worth using in both tools.

Basecamp vs. Slack: documents and file storage

Sharing files is fairly easy within both tools. In Basecamp, you can add your documents to any HQ, Team, or Project by using the “Attach a file” button in the message or to-do list input area. Once you’ve uploaded your files, they’ll be organised in the Docs & Files section, so you can easily access them when you need them. You can also add a note to give some background about the file, mention team members to let them know, and get everyone working together on the document through comments and discussions.

Dragging and dropping a file in Basecamp

In Slack, you share files when chatting – in a public, private channel or via a direct message.

The modal box in Slack that enables file sharing

As you could notice, Slack supports sharing Google docs file (and integrates with different file storage services). This might be handy, especially if you use the Freemium version of the tool. In case you don’t pay for using Slack, you’ll have only 5GB for a team. (In paid plans the file storage limit up to 20 GB per user). At the same time, the size limit for uploading a file in Slack is 1GB. If you try to upload a larger file, you’ll get a timely notification.

Slack’s notification on uploading file limit

In Basecamp, the file limit upload is bigger. You can transfer files up to 5GB. The file storage limit in Basecamp is 500GB for a team. You can also link to files from different file storage services.

Basecamp’s options of linking to files

Overall, I would say that file sharing in Basecamp seems more elaborated. Experts say Basecamp can act as a repository for creative files when using freelancers, outside vendors and remote-based teams.

There’s also a cool option in Basecamp – you can reorder and color code files to keep things tidy. You can also sort them by date modified and time created. Don’t know about you, but to me, it seems like quite a nice feature.

Color coding files in Basecamp

Basecamp vs Slack: search

Both tools present a detailed search that allows you to specify the query to find what you need. So there’s no need to scroll tons of messages or files.

In Slack, you can specify results with a particular person, channel or time period.

Search options in Slack

In Basecamp, you can narrow your search by choosing Projects or Teams for more relevant results. Unlike Slack, there’s no option to a search within a time period. You can search messages, to-dos, files, and Campfire chats, but not uploaded documents. The results are based on exact keyword matches, making it easy to find relevant content.

Search options in Basecamp

Overall, Slack’s search is more detailed, as you can look for a particular snippet within documents. Say you need to get a doc and don’t remember its title, but you can recall some of the words in the text. Then you can type them in and Slack will find that document.

Just to be safe, recently, we tested Slack’s search by files. I sent to my colleague our ‘50 ways to improve team communication’ e-book in .pdf format. I typed the name of the last chapter ‘Thinking outside the box’ to find out whether I can find it via search. And – voila – Slack found it!

A snippet of the book                         Slack found it!

I didn’t manage to do the same thing in Basecamp. After I uploaded the book to Doc & Files section, I found it by the name of the file. But when I searched it by the name of a chapter in the text – it was no use.

I didn’t find the text file in Basecamp by entering the words form its snippet.

Basecamp vs. Slack: help and support

Basecamp’s and Slack’s Help pages look quite similar. Both have a search box for queries with a drop-down list of popular questions, which I successfully tested by entering the word “integrations”. Basecamp came up with 2 suggestions to me.

Slack had 4 suggestions upon my request.

Basecamp also supports users with How-to Guides and The Manual which I explored and found quite comprehensive.

A snippet from Basecamp’s Help page

Slack also offers some pieces of advice to users, including featured articles and tips.

A snippet from Slack’s Help page

As for the Support feature, I tried to get in touch with Basecamp Help service. When I just started to write this article, I couldn’t find the info file storage limit in Basecamp. (Though it was right on the landing page!) Happens. But back then, I had to write to guys from Basecamp and they replied literally within minutes.

I didn’t really have any questions to Slack support team so I haven’t requested their help. If you have an experience of turning to Support in Slack, feel free to drop in the comments.

Conclusions

Though both tools – Slack and Basecamp – position as collaboration hubs for your workplace, they have different set of features. Slack is primarily a communication tool, while Basecamp is a project management app. At the same time, the tools have similar features and can substitute each other in some ways. Here’s a brief review of the comparison.

Pricing.  If you have a limited budget, Basecamp might not be the best option, as its most affordable plan is $15 per user/month. Slack, on the other hand, offers a free version along with two paid plans, starting from $8.75 per user per month. This makes Slack a good choice for teams that want to keep costs down.

Signing up and onboarding. Signing up is simple in both tools. No credit card is required if you are to use Slack’s Freemium version or try Basecamp for free. Slack will greet you with a Slackbot and a short product tour. Basecamp will suggest you watch a short introduction video.

Layout and design. Slack features a vertical layout, while Basecamp has a more horizontal design. In both tools, you can customize the color scheme of your workspace (Slack) or Home Screen (Basecamp) to match your preferences. Basecamp also introduced a more intuitive navigation menu in 2024, making it easier to access different projects and teams.

Task management. Being primarily a project management tool, Basecamp offers multiple features for setting and tracking tasks, including To-do lists and scheduling. Slack, on the other hand, handles tasks mainly through integrations with third-party services like Asana or Trello, making it flexible but less focused on task management.

Communication features. Slack specializes in communication with Channels as a key feature. Basecamp offers quite a few ways for staying in touch with each other including features like Campfire (Real-time Group Chat), Message Board, Comments, and Direct Messages (Pings).

Integrations. Basecamp has way fewer integrations than Slack (700 vs 2600+ as of 2024). However, Basecamp can actually connect to hundreds of tools e.g. via Zapier.

Documents and files. You can share your files freely, but be aware of the file storage limit, which is 500GB for a team in Basecamp and up to 20GB per user in Slack.

Search. Both tools offer search functionalities for messages and file names, but unlike Slack, Basecamp does not search within uploaded documents. Slack’s search capabilities have improved, allowing users to filter results more effectively by channel or date.

Support and Help. Both tools feature well-designed Help sections with searchable topics, dropdown lists, and articles covering essential usage tips. Slack’s help section includes a community forum, which can be a valuable resource for troubleshooting and best practices.

Have I missed anything? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.