For the past couple of years, Facebook has been working on an enterprise version of Facebook which in a way was designed to be a competitor to Slack. The service was in beta for over a year where it finally launched last year called Workplace, a service which companies had to pay for depending on the number of users they wanted to use it for.
The good news is that if you’re a relatively small company that likes the features of Workplace but don’t like the idea of paying for it, you’ll be pleased to learn that according to a report from CNBC, Facebook has confirmed that they will be launching a free version of Workplace that they are currently still testing.
One of the main differences of this version is that it will not offer companies or admins the same administrative or analytical tools that are available to the paid version, but other than that it is expected to look and feel exactly the same. This version will be dubbed as Workplace Standard, while the paid version will be known as Workplace Premium.
Speaking to CNBC, Facebook product manager Simon Cross said, “Not every company wants to go through a full-scale enterprise deployment and not every company is in a position to pay for Workplace. We hope it helps grow the number of companies that we’re able to connect.” In the meantime Microsoft has also launched their own Slack rival in the form of Microsoft Teams, but with Workplace now going free, the competition just got more intense.