Comparing the best business messaging apps in 2025

This blog has been updated since it was first pubished in July 2022

Summary: This article explores the top business messaging apps in 2025, comparing their performance, features, security, compliance, and pricing. Whether you’re a startup or an enterprise, you’ll find insights into mainstream platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, as well as customizable white-label solutions like Q-municate.

Contents Table

• Introduction
• What is a business messaging app?
• Benefits of a business messaging app
• What to look for in a business messaging app
• Best messaging apps for business
  
  • Slack
  • Microsoft Teams
  • WhatsApp for Business
  • Zoom Team Chat
  • Q-municate
  • Twist
  • Chanty
  • Webex Teams
• Conclusion: alternatives to mainstream business messaging apps
• FAQs: Business Messaging Apps

Introduction

If you’re exploring the best messaging apps for your business, you’re not alone. In today’s digital workplace, choosing the right communication tool can have a major impact on productivity, collaboration, and client engagement. With so many platforms available—each offering a unique blend of features, security options, and integration capabilities—knowing where to start can be overwhelming.
That’s why we’ve done the research for you. In this post, we take a closer look at the top business messaging apps in 2025, comparing their strengths, limitations, and suitability for different types of organizations.

What is a business messaging app?

More and more businesses today are discovering that internal real-time messaging apps are critical to successful daily operations. The move to remote-work is making this trend even more apparent. The need to collaborate across departments, share and receive information promptly, send files, links, and other attachments, and keep employees engaged, connected, and accountable necessitates an easy-to-use internal messaging system.

There are a number of products on the market specifically designed with business needs in mind. They allow for different styles of communication (one-on-one, group, chat, video, etc), third-party integrations, as well as the ability to customize etc. Finding the right solution for your company can make all the difference.

Learn more about: The 10 most secure messaging apps, chat app features and detailed comparison

Benefits of a business messaging app

If you are still in doubt about whether your business needs a business messaging app, here is a brief summary of some of the key benefits you are likely to gain with this tool:

• Seamless communication. No more worries about important messages stuck in someone’s email inbox. Communications via an internal messaging app are instant and visible.
• Effortless collaboration. Connect team members across departments and geographies. Most business messaging apps allow for group chats that make it easy to work collaboratively no matter where workers are located.
• Tracking and accountability. An internal messenger makes it easy to keep your remote workforce accountable and their activities visible. There’s no excuse not to report daily and directly to your colleagues or line manager. Track conversations and chat history.
• Simple third-party integration. Most business apps are designed to easily integrate with other 3rd party business tools allowing you to streamline your work process and create greater efficiency.
• Employee engagement. An easy-to-use and efficient communication tool helps to keep your employees connected and engaged. Whether used for task tracking, sharing ideas, project planning, or daily catch-ups, a business messaging app provides a platform for your employees to be their best.

Learn more about: Top 10 use cases for in-app chat messaging for businesses

What to look for in a business messaging app

Before we start comparing various communication products, let’s align our criteria. In selecting the products for our “short list” and comparing them, we looked for the following characteristics:

• Performance, as the speed and quality of messaging is of utmost importance for business communication.
• Feature set, which defines the messaging options you have with each of the products.
• Security. No comment.
• Regulatory compliance, as the current trend is toward the increase of regulations in data management.
• Price, which may not be the decisive criterion but may tip the scales when the products are otherwise comparable.

Learn more about: Why GDPR makes secure messaging apps a business necessity

Best messaging apps for business

Here is our list of the best messaging tools that you can consider for your business in 2025.

Slack

Slack has been among the most popular messaging apps for business use. Slack’s acquisition by Salesforce has increased trust towards the tool and strengthened its reputation among users. It serves teams of all sizes, from startups to enterprises, and is especially popular in tech, media, and creative industries.

Performance: Slack offers a fast, responsive experience across desktop, web, and mobile. It’s reliable for both real-time messaging and asynchronous collaboration, even in large teams with extensive message history and files.

Features: Slack is more than just a messaging tool, rather, it is a complete team collaboration platform with multiple useful features:

• Direct messaging
• Group channels
• Audio and video calling
• Screen sharing
• File sharing
• Reminders and notifications
• Integrations (Google Workspace, Zoom, Salesforce, GitHub, JIRA, and more)

Security: Slack implements security measures sufficient to ensure protection of its users’ data:

• Identity management
• Data encryption in transit and at rest
• Information governance and risk management

Regulatory compliance: Slack is compliant with GDPR, however, for other regulations, such as HIPAA and FINRA, Slack can support compliant collaboration after a certain configuration. In healthcare applications, Slack may not be used for communication with patients or their families or employers.

Pricing: Slack supports several pricing plans from a free tier to a negotiable enterprise plan. Its Business+ plan costs $12.50 per month, however, HIPAA-compliant configurations are supported only in the Enterprise Grid.

Microsoft Teams

A messaging tool from the Microsoft family, Microsoft Teams is very popular with businesses across the globe. With over 320 million daily active users, Microsoft Teams is among the most used communication solutions.

Performance: Microsoft is constantly working on improving the performance of its tools. A recent Microsoft Teams update led to multiple optimizations of various features and a dramatic reduction of power consumption.

Features: Microsoft Teams can become your collaboration tool as it has all the features you may require:

• Direct chat
• Teams and channels for group chatting
• Audio and video calling
• Screen sharing
• File sharing
• SharePoint and OneNote integration
• Online conferencing

Security: The set of measures applied by Microsoft Teams can protect users’ data strongly:

• Access management including two-factor authentication and SSO
• Data encryption in transit and at rest
• Microsoft Defender tool detecting malicious content, such as links and attachments
• Risk management

Regulatory compliance: Microsoft Teams uses multiple compliance standards including HIPAA, GDPR, and EU Model Clauses.

Pricing: You can use Microsoft Teams for free with a somewhat restricted feature support.

Alternatively, you choose the Teams Essentials plan at $4 per user per month to expand the list of available features or choose Teams as part of your Microsoft 365 Business package ($6 per user/month at the Basic tier and $12.50 per user/month at the Standard tier). Microsoft offers a flexible pricing system to fit businesses of any size.

WhatsApp for Business

WhatsApp Business is designed to help businesses connect with customers using the familiar WhatsApp platform. Widely adopted across global markets, it’s ideal for customer-facing communication, particularly in industries like retail, logistics, and telemedicine support—not internal team collaboration.

Performance: WhatsApp Business is lightweight, mobile-first, and performs exceptionally well across devices and network conditions. It’s particularly strong in regions with high WhatsApp usage and is ideal for real-time customer engagement.

Features:

• Business profile with contact info, location, and business hours
• Automated greeting, away messages, and quick replies
• Catalog sharing for products or services
• One-to-one and broadcast messaging
• Message templates for notifications and reminders
• API access for chatbot integration and CRM syncing

Security: WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption by default for all personal and business messages, ensuring conversations are private and secure. However, metadata (such as who contacted whom and when) may still be accessible to Meta. For businesses using the WhatsApp Business API, encryption must be properly configured, especially if cloud-based solutions or third-party services are involved.

Regulatory Compliance: While WhatsApp offers strong security, it is not inherently HIPAA-compliant, and Facebook/Meta’s data policies may concern healthcare providers or those in regulated industries. Use with PHI is not recommended without strict safeguards.

Additionally, compliance with standards like GDPR depends on configuration and usage practices.

Pricing:

• WhatsApp Business app: Free
• WhatsApp Business API: Pay-per-message model. Pricing varies by country and whether messages are user- or business-initiated. CRM/chatbot integrations may incur third-party costs.

Zoom Team Chat

Zoom Team Chat extends the popular Zoom platform beyond video calls, offering a full-featured messaging solution for team collaboration in real time.

Performance: Zoom Team Chat has evolved significantly in 2025, offering a smoother and more reliable messaging experience alongside its flagship video conferencing capabilities. It handles real-time communication across large teams well, with minimal latency and high availability across devices.

Features: Zoom Team Chat supports a variety of features including:

• threaded conversations
• file sharing
• whiteboarding
• integration with Zoom Meetings and Zoom Phone
• Create channels for departments, projects, or topics
• built-in calendar integrations to streamline scheduling.

Security: Zoom has invested heavily in its security architecture following early pandemic-era criticism. Chat messages are encrypted in transit and at rest, and enterprise plans allow for granular admin controls, user permissions, and audit logs.

Regulatory Compliance: Zoom supports HIPAA-compliant configurations (with a signed BAA) and meets standards such as GDPR and SOC 2. This makes it suitable for use in healthcare and other regulated industries, although customers must configure settings properly to ensure compliance.

Pricing: Zoom Team Chat is included with all Zoom One plans, starting from $14.99/user/month. Higher-tier plans unlock advanced admin tools, more storage, and compliance features.

Q-municate

Q-municate is a fully customizable, white-label messaging app developed by QuickBlox. Unlike off-the-shelf tools like Slack or WhatsApp, Q-municate gives businesses complete control over the branding, user experience, and functionality of their messaging platform. It’s ideal for organizations that want to offer secure, real-time communication under their own name—whether for internal collaboration or customer-facing interactions.

Performance: Q-municate is built on QuickBlox’s real-time communication infrastructure, ensuring reliable messaging, calling, and file sharing across platforms. It performs smoothly on web and mobile and can be deployed quickly as a standalone app or integrated into an existing platform using QuickBlox’s SDKs and APIs.

Features:

• One-on-one and group messaging
• File sharing and multimedia support
• Typing indicators, message read receipts, and push notifications
• Custom branding (logos, colors, UI elements)
• Integration-ready SDKs for iOS, Android, and web
• Optional AI extensions such as AI Chatbot integration

Security & Compliance: Q-municate is built with data protection in mind. It includes:

• Full encryption for messages
• Secure user authentication and role-based access control
• Encrypted data storage and secure hosting options (including on-premise)

Compliance:

• HIPAA-ready for use in healthcare environments (with BAA available)
• GDPR-compliant for organizations handling EU user data
• Supports additional enterprise-level security configurations depending on deployment

Pricing: Q-municate is available through QuickBlox’s Enterprise plans, which are tailored based on feature requirements, user volume, and hosting preferences (cloud or on-premise).

• Custom pricing depending on configuration
• Developer support and dedicated onboarding included

Twist

Twist is very different from most of the popular messengers for its asynchronous nature. Unlike other tools, Twist does not support presence indicators or notifications and does not offer video calling or conferencing. Focused on remote teams, Twist declares that it can let you reclaim control of your time and work on your own schedule without pressure.

Performance: Twist is very lightweight and fast. When developing the tool, the team focused on speed and performance and included only the features necessary for async communication.

Features: Designed for asynchronous messaging, Twist has a set of features that is distinctly different from other tools:

• Direct chat
• Team and group chats
• Threads
• Message inbox
• Chat history
• Integrations with Google Drive, GitHub, Todoist, and other tools

Security: Twist implements the following security measures:

• Email-password authentication
• OAuth 2.0 authentication
• Data encryption in transit and at rest
• Data backup and redundancy

Regulatory compliance: Twist confirms its compliance with GDPR. However, the team makes no specific statements as to its tools’ compliance with other data management standards. We recommend reaching out directly to Twist developers to verify compliance if you plan to use this messenger in sensitive products.

Pricing: Twist pricing system offers only two plans – free and unlimited ($5 per user per month). Both plans include largely the same set of available features, except for the full message history which you can get only in the Unlimited plan. The Free plan supports message history for one month only and limits the number members and integrations.

Chanty

Chanty is another team collaboration tool which includes messaging and communication features.

Performance: Users describe Chanty as “simple and fast”. The tool’s straightforward functionality allows achieving high communication speed and quality.

Features: Chanty supports many useful communication and collaboration features:

• Direct chat
• Group chat
• Message threads
• Presence indicators and status updates
• File sharing with the support of multiple formats
• Audio and video calling
• Integrations with Trello, Google Drive, GitHub, Mailchimp, Asana, and others

Security: Chanty has a number of security mechanisms in place to protect your data:

• One-time code authentication
• Data encryption in transit and at rest
• Physical data center security
• Data backup and recovery at the architecture level

Regulatory compliance:Chanty’s privacy policy is designed to ensure GDPR compliance. However, the tool does not explicitly claim compliance with any other standards.

Pricing: You can use Chanty for free or at $3 per user per month. The paid version allows adding members to your Chanty team and supports features not available in the free pricing plan. For example, audio and video calls are available only in the paid version.

Webex Teams

Webex by Cisco is a robust enterprise communication and collaboration platform. Like other tools in this review, it also supports a number of collaboration functions.

Performance: Webex Teams generally demonstrates good performance and speed, however, the tool sets certain bandwidth requirements to audio and video calls.

Features: With Webex Teams, you are getting a set of features you can use to set up your team’s collaboration:

• Direct chat
• Channels
• Message threads
• Audio and video calling
• File sharing
• Screen sharing
• Integration with Microsoft Office, Slack, Twitter, Google, and others

Security: In Webex Teams, your data is protected by a number of security measures:

• Data end-to-end encryption protecting it in transit and at rest
• Authentication through SSO using the company’s active directory
• Password security standards

Regulatory compliance: Webex Teams is compliant with GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO/IEC 27001.

Pricing: If you consider Webex Teams as a messaging app for your business, you can choose from a number of pricing plans. There is a free tier with just a basic set of features and a limited meeting duration and capacity. The paid options range from $13.50 to $25 per user per month offering different features and capacities. For enterprise customers, Webex Teams offers a negotiable pricing option depending on your specific requirements.

Learn more about: 15 Reasons to consider Quickblox for your Enterprise messaging infrastructure

Conclusion: alternatives to mainstream business messaging apps

In 2025, the landscape of business messaging apps is more diverse and competitive than ever. Whether you’re looking for robust integrations, enterprise-level security, or ease of use across remote teams, there’s a platform out there to meet your needs.

However, as business communication becomes more specialized—and data privacy more critical—many organizations are discovering the limits of off-the-shelf solutions. If branding, compliance, or customization is important to your business, a white-label messaging platform like Q-municate may offer the control and flexibility you’re looking for.

Ultimately, the best messaging solution is one that aligns with your specific workflow, industry standards, and user expectations. Take the time to evaluate your requirements carefully—and don’t be afraid to explore beyond the mainstream.

Want to learn more about private messaging apps or thinking about developing your own? Contact Quickblox who would be happy to discuss your business communication needs.

FAQs: Business Messaging Apps

What is the most secure business messaging app in 2025?

Most off-the-shelf business messaging apps offer a high level of security, but for that extra level of protection, consider a white-label solution, because they offer greater control over data storage, encryption protocols, and user access. With Q-municate, you can choose on-premise hosting, enforce custom security policies, and ensure full compliance with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR.

What’s the difference between a business messaging app and a regular chat app?

Business messaging apps offer features like team channels, integrations with productivity tools, administrative controls, and compliance capabilities—making them more suitable for professional use than consumer apps like WhatsApp or Messenger.

Which business messaging app is best for healthcare providers?

Platforms like Q-Consultation and Q-municate are built with healthcare in mind, offering HIPAA-compliant infrastructure, secure video calling, and options for patient intake and AI assistant integration.

Can I customize a business messaging app for my brand?

Yes, white-label solutions like Q-municate allow you to rebrand the app, customize features, and host it on your own infrastructure—giving you more control and a seamless user experience under your own brand.

Are there any free business messaging apps worth using?

Both Slack and Microsoft Teams offer free tiers with limited features, but for businesses with strict security or branding requirements, paid or white-label options may be more appropriate.

What should I look for in a secure business messaging platform?

Key considerations include data encryption, role-based access controls, compliance certifications (HIPAA, GDPR), scalability, and integration with your existing tools. You may also want to consider AI functionality.