Slack vs. Lark: Choosing the Right Collaboration Platform

"Which one is better" is the wrong question — Slack and Lark are built around different assumptions about how a team works, and the right choice depends on your org's shape more than either platform's feature list.

Slack's strength: depth of integration

Slack's real advantage is its ecosystem — thousands of app integrations and, for Salesforce shops specifically, a genuinely native connection (Slack-first Salesforce workflows, approvals, and alerts inside the channel where work already happens). If your team's tools are scattered across best-of-breed apps, Slack is the connective layer that ties them together without forcing anyone to switch what they use.

Lark's strength: one platform, fewer seams

Lark takes the opposite bet: docs, base (spreadsheet/database hybrid), video meetings, calendar, and approvals live inside a single suite, all natively linked. For fast-scaling, especially APAC-based teams standing up their stack from scratch, that reduces the integration tax entirely — there's less to connect because less is separate. The tradeoff is a smaller third-party app ecosystem than Slack's.

How to actually choose

Three questions settle it in most cases: How much of your stack is already committed elsewhere — does it need to integrate, or can it be replaced? Where is your team based, and which platform has stronger regional support and adoption? And do you want "best tool for each job, connected together" (Slack) or "one tool, fewer handoffs" (Lark)?

Neither one wins universally

I've implemented both, and the honest answer is that the platform rarely fails on its own merits — it fails when it's picked to match a trend instead of the team's actual working shape. Match the platform to how the org already collaborates, not the other way around.