Slack is a collaboration layer pretending to be a communication tool. It sits between your CRM, your calendar, your invoicing, your task manager, and your email—and fragments them all. Teams mirrors the problem. The conversation to move everything into native team chat inside your business platform is genuinely worth having. But not all conversations move the same way, and not all integrations cost the same thing to replace. The 80% that migrates cleanly: chat, threads, search If your team is using Slack as a lightweight messaging layer—quick asks in #general, project updates in #client-work, one-off decisions in threads—migration is straightforward. The data moves, search works immediately after, and people adjust in two weeks. Core workflows that move without friction: Direct messages and group chats. One-to-one conversations, team huddles, quick back-and-forths. All portable, all searchable on arrival. No dependencies. Text-based threads. Channel conversations, project discussion, decision logs. Export, import, done. People adapt to new UI in 5–7 days. File sharing within teams. Uploaded documents, screenshots, PDFs. Most platforms (Lark, Twist, Orin) store them natively. No re-upload needed if your new platform has a migration pathway. Basic mentions and notifications. @channel, @here, @person alerts. Every modern chat system does this. Behavior ports cleanly. This is the low-risk core. Migration friction here is adoption inertia, not data loss or broken workflows. The 20% that doesn't: bots, CRM sync, file permissions Slack's real stickiness is not Slack—it's the ecosystem of apps bolted onto it. And that ecosystem rarely survives intact. Bot integrations and API workflows If your team relies on Slack bots for status updates, incident response, or scheduled notifications—Hubot, PagerDuty alerts, GitHub commit notifications, Zapier workflows that post into channels—you have a migration cost. Most third-party services offer native integrations to major platforms (Lark, Twist), but not all, and not always at the same API speed or feature parity. Real example: A 12-person DevOps team runs 6 Slack bots: GitHub deployments → #deploys, PagerDuty incidents → #on-call, Sentry errors → #bugs, Datadog alerts → #infra, custom billing anomalies, and an internal scheduling bot. GitHub, PagerDuty, Sentry, and Datadog all offer direct integrations to Lark. The billing anomaly detector and scheduling bot are internal Node.js microservices. Porting those requires API rewrite: 3–5 days of engineering work. The alternative: keep one Slack workspace for bot traffic only, route critical alerts elsewhere. That's not migration—it's fragmentation. Cost to patch: $2–4K in engineering time, plus 2–3 weeks of parallel running to validate signal fidelity. CRM and customer data sync If your sales team uses Slack-CRM integrations to stay in channel context —deal updates from Pipedrive or HubSpot, contact cards on demand, lead notifications—migrating team chat breaks the habit unless your new platform offers the same integration. Lark, Twist, and Orin all support CRM integrations, but the feature set varies wildly. Slack + HubSpot integrations: Deal notifications when a rep moves a stage. Contact card lookup via slash command. Activity logging: messages posted to deals are logged in HubSpot as notes. Not every alternative platform replicates all three. Some offer notifications but skip activity logging. Others require a third-party middleware (Zapier, Make, n8n) to bridge the gap. Real cost: If your platform of choice doesn't offer native HubSpot sync, you add a Zapier/Make subscription ($30–100/month) plus 4–6 hours of workflow design. That's ~$500–1,200 in year-one friction, plus the maintenance burden if HubSpot changes their API. File permissions and compliance Slack's file storage and permission model is granular: files in private channels stay private, shared channels expose files to specific teams, public channels make everything visible. When you migrate, not all platforms handle this the same way. Some default to more-open permissions; others require manual remapping. If you operate in a regulated industry (healthcare, finance, legal), or if your team has strict IP controls, this matters. A wholesale Slack export imported into a less-sophisticated permission model can accidentally expose confidential files to people who shouldn't see them. Mitigation: Audit your file permissions before migration. Most platforms allow per-channel or per-group access controls; use them. Plan for 1–2 days of manual permission cleanup post-import. The hidden integration debt: what you're paying Slack for without knowing Every integration Slack surfaces—every bot, every CRM slash command, every notification—has a cost hidden in your Slack bill or bundled into a third-party app subscription. When you consolidate into a new platform, that debt becomes visible. Slack integration audit checklist: Open Slack admin settings → Installed Apps & Custom In