Slack absolutely dominates when it comes to communication because everyone is already there and it actually makes connecting with people outside your company simple with Slack Connect. You can just spin up a shared channel with customers or vendors and get things done in real time, without juggling endless calls or emails. Sure, it can get messy and overwhelming, but the chaos is a side effect of its reach and immediacy.

Dialpad Meetings, on the other hand, just makes everything harder. Even though it looks clean, getting people to actually use it is a headache because it feels unfamiliar and lacks the integrations everyone expects. You end up forcing people into workarounds, especially for things like CRM integration, and the missing API means you're stuck using third party bots to bridge the gap. Most people just don't want to deal with the extra friction.

If what matters is actually getting people to communicate and collaborate without resistance, Slack is the only real option here. Dialpad Meetings just creates more confusion and makes adoption a pain, while Slack is already where everyone is talking. Don't waste your time fighting inertia. Use Slack.

Slack Editor's Verdict

What is Slack?

Slack is the default communication layer for startups and modern small businesses.

At its core, Slack is a real-time messaging platform built around channels. Teams organize conversations by topic, project, or department instead of burying everything in email threads. It is where decisions happen, launches are coordinated, bugs are reported, and customer feedback gets surfaced in real time.

While we wish the user experience with Slack was better, it's pretty much irreplaceable at this stage. The reason is Slack Connect. It lets you create shared channels with contractors, vendors, and most importantly customers. This is the piece most Slack competitors are missing. Instead of managing scattered email chains or scheduling endless Zoom calls, you can just open a shared channel and talk. We have so many Slack Connect channels, we've lost count.

Is Slack chaotic? Absolutely. Channels pile up, notifications get overwhelming, threads get missed. Many users (including us) wish there was something more user friendly. But the truth is Slack owns this market. Most people you need to connect with are already there. So the decision is made for you in terms of needing to use it.

As you scale, Slack alone is not enough. You will eventually layer in project management tools, internal knowledge base documentation systems, and help desk workflows. But in the early stage, Slack is the fastest way to create alignment and stay close to your customers.

Dialpad Meetings Editor's Verdict

What is Dialpad Meetings?

I was actually one of a few people back in the day that tried to make the pivot from Google Meet and Zoom to Dialpad Meetings (formerly UberConference) happen.

The thing is, at the time, there was just too much friction trying to get people to use and accept Dialpad Meetings, because it's just different from what they are used to using (thank you inertia /sarcasm).

Pros & Cons

Pros

You can have it automatically join your calls in Dialpad Meetings, but Google Meet and Zoom as well, it's super flexible in that way.
They are likely to be a bit more advanced than even that of Dialpad Meetings, since they are solely focused on just the meeting AI side of things, whereas Dialpad Meetings needs to also support the entire infrastructure of a meeting platform.
If you ever do choose to leave Dialpad Meetings and move back to Zoom/Google Meet, your historical lock-in is on a 3rd party tool (Fireflies), instead of the meeting platform itself. So with Fireflies, you can jump between Dialpad Meetings to Google Meet to Zoom, no problems!

Cons

You're now going to be paying for a second meeting recorder to join the call, and the integration will be linking your CRM and notes from what Fireflies comes up with, not Dialpad Meetings.
It'd definitely a bit less clean. Also, Fireflies will join the call as a fake person, that's how they record the call.

So all-in-all, we know this isn't the most ideal thing to hear. Without Dialpad Meetings having a proper API though (or a native CRM integration), that's all we can really do here.

If the above is you, all I can say is we hear you... It's overwhelming, confusing, and we were going down this exact same rabbit hole 6+ years ago.

Key Features

User Interface (UI)

Dialpad Meetings is quite clean, we've always appreciated the simplicity it brings with it. I appreciate them coming at it with a more modern approach, but with that, comes more difficult user-adoption (unless you just copy Google Meet and Zoom identically).

User Interface (UX)

This is where we've ran into the most struggles with Dialpad Meetings. It's just not familiar with most people when joining. They don't know where the screensharing icon is, along with everything else. It's just different from what people are used to. While this is normally fine and we don't want to be too negative on Dialpad Meetings for this point, the truth of the matter is they are just battling inertia (familiarity), and people just hate change when it comes to something they also dislike (Meetings) 😅

API & Integration

Dialpad Meetings doesn't have an API that we can connect into, so there's no current way to create custom integrations outside of what they list on their site (native integrations).

So say you want to create a meeting activity within your CRM (assuming you picked one of the Best CRM options on our list), you can't do that without a meeting recorder tool that can join your meeting, like Fireflies. So the only way to really do this is to hand off the integration side of things to a meeting recorder tool that has deep integrations with CRMs.

What I did back in the day to get this working actually, was relying on Fireflies to join the call and be the native integration with the CRM. They do have a dedicated landing page for their integration with Dialpad Meetings, although it is still has the URL "uberconference". 😅

There are positives and negatives that come with this approach though.

Final Verdict

At the end of the day, we ultimately just decided to use Google Meet alongside Granola, as the native integration they have between eachother, alongside no longer having to fight the inertia (of people not wanting to try a "new" meeting tool), is where we ultimately found ourselves.

It's also more likely that tools will integrate natively with Google Meet and Zoom, especially because for some reason Dialpad Meetings is choosing to highly restrict their API for internal use only. 🤷