Business Chat Cost Guide: Slack vs Teams vs Chatwork

The difference between Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chatwork, and LINE WORKS mostly comes down to three things: how far the free plan gets you, how well it fits the groupware you already use, and how much your staff work from smartphones. On cost, some small businesses run entirely on a free plan, while others pay roughly 500 to 1,500 yen per user per month, plus a few tens of thousands to a couple hundred thousand yen upfront for setup and training. Here is a rough picture as of August 2026.

Mixing email, phone calls, and individual staff members' personal LINE accounts for internal communication tends to create the same set of problems. First, it becomes unclear who knows what, so the same questions get asked repeatedly. Second, when a staff member leaves or transfers, whatever conversation history lived on their personal LINE account disappears along with them. Third, email is too formal for urgent on-site messages, while phone calls leave no record and invite "he said, she said" disputes. Once a company has more than around ten employees and several sites or projects running at once, a dedicated chat tool is usually worth evaluating. If everyone still works in the same room, there is no need to force it.

Pricing changes fairly often for all four vendors, so treat the numbers below as rough guidance only. Always check each provider's official site for current plans and prices before signing up.

The first factor is whether to align with the groupware you already pay for. If you're on Microsoft 365, Teams is the obvious default; if you're on Google Workspace, pairing it with Chatwork or Slack avoids paying for overlapping services. The second factor is how often you communicate with outside parties — Chatwork's guest-invite feature is designed for exactly that, making it a good fit for businesses in constant contact with clients or vendors. The third factor is whether your staff work mainly from smartphones or desktops; for construction sites, retail floors, or delivery teams, LINE WORKS' familiar, intuitive interface tends to win out. The fourth factor is how much ongoing admin overhead you can absorb — a company running IT as a one-person department is usually better off with a simpler tool than one that demands complex permission settings and integrations, an idea covered in more depth in our guide for solo IT admins.

Once you've picked a tool, settle a few basic rules before turning it on company-wide. Decide who issues and revokes accounts when someone joins or transfers, and keep that responsibility with one fixed person. Plan your channel structure up front — by department, by project, or both — because reorganizing it later is far more work than doing it right the first time; a simple hierarchy like "company-wide," "department," and "per-project" channels works well for most small businesses. Disabling accounts when someone leaves or transfers deserves special attention, since skipping it leaves a former employee with ongoing access to internal conversations; fold chat-tool deactivation into the same process described in our IT offboarding checklist. Finally, put in writing — in your workplace rules or an internal guideline — that business communication happens on the company's chat tool and that using personal LINE for work messages is not allowed, and make sure staff actually see it.

A few failure patterns show up again and again. One is letting anyone create channels freely, which quickly produces a pile of similarly named channels and no clear sense of where any given topic lives. Another is treating the tool as an always-on channel, which breeds pressure around read receipts — "they saw it but didn't reply" — and expectations of replies outside working hours; setting a rough response-time expectation and a policy against after-hours messages up front helps a lot. A third is running on a free plan without realizing its message-history retention limit, then losing access to past conversations that turn out to matter; keep a separate record of anything genuinely important rather than relying on chat history alone. Finally, letting different departments adopt different tools independently leads to two or more chat tools running in parallel, which raises both cost and admin burden — standardizing on a single company-wide tool avoids this.

It helps to split the cost into two buckets: the tool's monthly subscription, and the one-time setup and training cost. The subscription scales with headcount times the per-user price; a company of around ten people often gets by on a free plan, and even on a paid plan the total usually lands somewhere between a few thousand and around ten thousand yen a month. The setup and training cost is easy to overlook — if you outsource channel design, writing internal rules, or running a staff training session, that can add anywhere from a few tens of thousands to roughly 200,000 yen. Handle it in-house and this piece can cost close to nothing. If your company already runs several SaaS subscriptions, it's worth applying the same thinking as our guide to auditing SaaS subscription costs to check for overlap with tools you already pay for.

- Have you mapped out headcount and how often you communicate with outside parties?
- Have you checked which groupware you already pay for (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, etc.)?
- Do you know whether field staff work mainly from smartphones or desktops?
- Have you decided a channel/room structure before rollout?
- Have you assigned who issues and revokes accounts, and how?
- Are you ready to communicate a ban on using personal LINE for work messages?
- Have you set a rough response-time expectation and an after-hours policy?
- Have you checked the free plan's message history retention limit?