Collaboration platforms have become a necessity in today's work environment, especially since remote work and distributed teams are becoming increasingly common. Among all the options that businesses are considering to help teams collaborate more efficiently, Slack is one of the most popular choices. In this blog post, we'll compare Lark vs Slack by looking at its feature set, pricing plans, and how they might fit into your business.
Lark vs Slack: Pricing
While Lark and Slack both offer chat features, the actual bill you need to pay to get Slack up and running for your team is much larger than what's showcased on their pricing page. This is because a team needs more than chat, and Slack doesn’t offer much beyond that without integrations, which can be a substantial cost.
To begin with, Lark offers a free plan with a lot of functions that are only available on Slack's paid plan or via integration. On Lark’s free plan, for example, you can access essential collaboration apps such as Calendar, Email, and Approval as well as content creation tools such as Docs, Sheets, and Wiki. You can also access a powerful no-code data management app called Base. If you are a solopreneur or an entrepreneur with a small team, these tools can help you get started quickly without any complex setup. With 100 GB and support for up to 20 users, the plan is robust enough to support your needs for a long time, even as your business grows.
As your team grows and starts to think about upgrading to a paid plan, the price and value difference is even more significant:
On Lark, you’ll get more advanced features like video conferencing, meeting minutes, more automations, and higher storage. This means your business won’t have to keep buying more tools as your business needs evolve. Slack’s lowest tier paid plan in 2025, at $8.75 per user/month, may seem cheaper on the surface, compared to Lark’s $12 per month. However, if the total cost of ownership for a typical toolset for a team is taken into consideration, Lark comes out ahead. For example, a 100-employee company with a basic tech stack composed of Slack, Google Workspace, and Airtable can save $25,200 by switching to Lark's Pro plan.
Lark vs Slack: Purpose
Lark and Slack position as different products: the core of Slack is chat, while Lark aims to provide all the essential tools teams need from within one app, including chat.
Let's break it out:
Slack's idea of collaboration is about connecting people and aiding team communication, hence Slack is made into a chat-centric platform, including private messages, group chats (channels), and sometimes Slack Bot.
Businesses can organize different conversations and communicate using text in an efficient manner when they leverage Slack the right way; however, everything beyond team chat will require integration with third-party tools, adding complexity and friction for users and IT costs for the company. To complete a routine task like scheduling and running a meeting on Slack requires the company to install a calendar app and subscribe to video conference solutions like Zoom.
Let’s compare that with Lark:
Lark's idea of collaboration is about making the everyday work tools handy from within one app. In this way, teams won’t have to constantly toggle between multiple apps, saving precious time and energy. (Learn how to choose the best collaboration method based on the urgency and importance of the task here).
By combining meetings, calendars, docs, tasks, a no-code database, and email on one unified platform, Lark’s chat function is more powerful than any standalone messenger. Since all the apps work seamlessly together, tagging colleagues or documents is really simple, and important notifications are never missed. You can also do things like turn a message into a task on your task list, or schedule meetings directly from within group chats, or approve an out-of-office request by clicking a button on the notification card sent to you.
Lark vs Slack: Mobile features
For businesses that run both front and back offices, being able to provide a collaboration platform that's easy to use on both large and small screens will greatly help engage with those who are on the frontline and communicate efficiently. Onsite teams usually need to rely on smartphones to submit reports, raise issues, or check numbers.
One of the advantages that Lark brings is the emphasis on mobile functionality, making it easy for frontline teams to stay connected on the go and suitable for businesses with an on-site workforce such as retail stores, construction sites, or warehouses. Unlike Slack, which is primarily designed for desktop use, Lark offers a mobile app where things like report submission, approval, and doc collaboration can all be done at your fingertips. The interface also adjusts automatically to a smaller screen.
On Slack, sharing reports and updates still relies on segmenting channels for different purposes and sending the information in the format of text messages, which makes digesting, organizing, and analyzing the information for insights challenging. To be able to build a form for information collection, businesses might need to pay extra to get Slack's workflow builder. The rooted separation between Slack and the tools it can integrate with through a connector makes the mobile experience of Slack more complicated: You might need to log in to a different platform such as Google Workspace, and constantly toggle between apps just to read through a word document someone shared.
Lark vs Slack: User interface
A user interface can play a significant role in how easy it is to onboard your teams to a collaboration platform. If the platform is not intuitive enough for teams to navigate by themselves, companies might, later on, find that no one is really using the platform and benefiting from it, despite spending a fortune (we've been there ourselves).
Despite all the features built into one app, Lark maintains a tidy interface with everything a team needs immediately accessible and displayed on the side (and can be folded, too). It usually takes the new users less than a day to know where things are in Lark and start using them with ease.
The flattened learning curve is especially friendly to non-tech teams who want to leverage tools to get more productive without having to learn to use multiple tools.
While Slack has a cleaner interface at first look, functions fold under "More" and the meeting feature is labeled as Huddle in the corner. For people new to Slack, it might take more clicks to find the features they want and a longer waiting time to get the rest, as things like cloud docs, calendars, workflows, and other essential tools all require the tech team to go to the backend and integrate. Of course, Slack is still one of the tech teams' favorite tools with its "/" command, along with other capabilities to leverage tech knowledge directly on Slack usage.
Lark vs Slack: Productivity
While emojis and memes are all great fun, one potential drawback that Slack brings to some teams is distraction. Creating channels in Slack usually takes a few more steps than creating groups in Lark: you need to create a channel, add teammates one by one to the channel or set rules for joining, and start discussions as a group. There’s also an option to convert group chats into channels but no option to convert them from one-on-one direct messages.
On Lark, group chats serve the purpose of making discussion more focused and productive. For example, a group chat can be easily created from a 1:1 chat by adding more people, with the option to select chat history to sync to the group. Threads can also be created in group chats to hold more in-depth discussions with relevant members only, without distracting others in the group.
Lark also enables you to create content directly on the platform, with document collaboration tools. For text-heavy tasks, there’s Docs; for number crunching, there’s Sheets; for presentations, there’s Slides, and for knowledge management, there’s Wiki. For data or project management, there is Base, a zero-code platform that allows you to plan, execute, track, and deliver a wide variety of tasks. It’s packed with powerful automation features and advanced permission control to make your workflows efficient and secure. If you don’t want to build your own business management system from scratch, there are plenty of ready-made templates available.
Also, productivity hacks can help teams collaborate more efficiently by streamlining workflows or automating repetitive tasks. Both Lark and Slack have built-in productivity hacks that can help teams save time while working together; Lark's all-in-one design further saves teams time and money compared with using multiple platforms, and adds more convenience for global teams to collaborate across time zones efficiently.
Some of Larks' built-in productivity hacks:
Auto-translation: in chats, docs, and meetings (real-time transcripts, and translation on minutes) to allow collaboration across teams who might not use the same language for work
Meeting Minutes: transcript and translation in real-time during a meeting, and the ability to package meeting transcripts, the recording, and docs shared during a meeting into minutes automatically for sharing
Smart Calendar: schedule meetings quickly by not only checking everyone's availability but also seeing their time zones, directly from a group chat
Task Management: Assign tasks directly within chats using a text message, and organize tasks into different categories
Slack's built-in productivity hacks, which are also available on Lark at no additional cost:
Reminders: Set reminders so nothing falls through the cracks
Scheduled Messages: schedule a message to be sent on a specific day and time
Customizable Chat Grouping & Notifications: Organize conversations into groups and choose what notifications you receive
Workflow Builder (paid feature on Slack): Automate repetitive tasks using pre-built templates
Lark vs Slack: Security compliance
All businesses want to operate safely and securely without data leakage, and such requests apply to the products they use for collaboration too. Both Lark and Slack adhere to GDPR and CCPA for customers, and acquire compliance certifications to safeguard cloud service and privacy information.
Lark complies with SOC 2 & SOC 3 standards, and has secured multiple certifications across information security, privacy information management, cloud security, and cross-border security, and Lark's data is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). More information on Lark's data security and compliance can be found in Lark Trust Center.
Slack has gained a similar series of certifications, too:
Image source: slack.com
Lark vs Slack: Final verdict
When it comes to Lark vs Slack in features, Lark offers much more than just team communication and file sharing. It is packed with collaboration features that can be used from the get-go, without the need for any cumbersome integrations. Slack may be suitable for teams that don’t require much beyond messaging or have dedicated IT teams to integrate and maintain multiple software applications. Lark, on the other hand, can be used by companies from a wider range of industries with tools for everyday work in one app for a much lower price, shorter onboarding time, and friendlier interface across big and small screens.
Beyond Slack’s capabilities, Lark provides unique features like auto-translation, timezone-specific calendars, and built-in no-code databases that can be customized to fit your specific workflows, making it a more comprehensive solution. These advanced tools make Lark especially well-suited for distributed teams, enhancing global collaboration in ways Slack cannot match.
