Facebook’s Slack Competitor Reaches 3 Million Users, Gets New Features

Facebook is launching some new features for its Workplace service. Workplace is essentially Facebook’s take on Slack, and it’s used by some big companies for communication between teams.

Facebook first launched Workplace in 2016, and it’s now announcing a major new milestone: Workplace now has 3 million paying customers. The service had 2 million paying users back in February of this year, so it gained a million in just around 7 months which is pretty impressive. To put things into perspective, Microsoft’s Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, had more than 13 million daily active users back in July 2019, while Slack had more than 10 million back in January.

Workplace is also picking up some new features this week. Facebook is introducing new video features — allowing users to make Workplace calls on its Portal devices, and it’s also introducing automatic video captioning to improve accessibility. It’s also launching a new Enterprise Live broadcasting video solution that allows companies to deliver high-quality live and on-demand video within their network without having to find a third-party solution.

There are a number of other new features, like badges for Workplace profiles, and the ability to thank your colleagues for their work whenever you want. It’s also getting some improved analytics feature to help highlight the positive impact Facebook claims Workplace has on a company’s performance.