Slack Connect takes Slack beyond team-only chat. It lets you work with other companies inside the same Slack interface you already use.
You can message, share files, and use apps just like you would in a normal channel. The difference is that people from multiple organizations can join the same conversation. Want one place to coordinate with a client, vendor, or partner team? That’s the point.
Slack Connect works through shared channels. One organization creates the channel and acts as the Channel Owner. Then they invite other organizations to join, so everyone can collaborate in that single shared space.
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Are “Slack Connect” and “Shared Channels” the Same Thing?
Yes, shared channels evolved into Slack Connect. They function like normal channels connecting organizations and are now part of Slack Connect.
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How Many Organizations Can Participate in a Slack Connect Channel?
A single Slack Connect channel can include up to 250 organizations (including your own). That makes it a strong option for large, multi-partner work, such as joint ventures, consortium projects, or large rollouts, where many external teams need the same updates and decisions in one place.Â
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How Many Slack Connect Channels Can Two Organizations Have?
Two organizations can set up multiple Slack Connect channels between themselves. There’s no “one channel per partner” limit.
A lot of people assume there can only be a single Slack Connect channel between two companies. That’s not true. You can create as many shared channels as you need, and it often makes work cleaner.
Having separate channels helps when:
You’re running more than one project at once
Different teams need their own space (sales, support, engineering)
You want clearer boundaries around topics, files, and decisions
You need different channel members for different workstreams
In practice, it’s the same idea as internal Slack: one channel gets noisy fast. Multiple focused channels keep collaboration organized.
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Is Slack Connect Free?
Slack Connect isn’t free. It requires a paid Slack subscription, and every organization in a Slack Connect channel must be on a paid plan too. There is one workaround. The channel creator can invite people as Guests. And Single-Channel Guests can join and participate for free.
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What Is the Price of Slack Connect?
Slack Connect doesn’t have its own price tag. It comes with every paid Slack plan. So you’re paying for the Slack users in your workspace who need to use Slack Connect. Pricing starts at about $7.25 per user (and can vary by region). Also, the external people you invite to a Slack Connect channel must be on a paid Slack plan.
You can cut costs in two main ways:
Keep most of your team on a free Slack workspace. Then create a separate paid workspace for the employees who need Slack Connect to work with customers or partners.
If a customer or partner isn’t on a paid plan, add them as a Single-Channel Guest instead.
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How Can One Use Slack for External Communication?
Slack’s preferred option for external communication is Slack Connect. With paid Slack plans, one organization can invite another paid organization into a Slack Connect channel, making it easy to work across companies in a shared space.
If one side isn’t on a paid plan, a common alternative is to use Single-Channel or Multi-Channel Guests. Both approaches still give you access to Slack’s collaboration tools, like Canvas, Lists, and Huddles, not just basic messaging.
Slack does offer some email integration, but it isn’t built for ongoing, email-style customer communication. For that, teams usually rely on add-ons like Front, Hiver, or ClearFeed. And if you want to use Slack to talk with people who live in Microsoft Teams, Discord, WhatsApp, or Telegram, you’ll typically need extra software to bridge those platforms.
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What Are Some Alternatives to Slack Connect?
A common alternative to Slack Connect is using Single-Channel Guests in Slack. If your partner doesn’t have a paid Slack workspace, you can invite them into your workspace as a guest. If you give them access to only one channel, they count as a single-channel guest and can use Slack for free. Like Slack Connect, you can also use direct messages between your team and guest users.
One key catch: you can only invite guests from a paid Slack workspace. So you still need a paid Slack subscription to use this option, even though the guest doesn’t. Another alternative to Slack Connect is Microsoft Teams, which we’ll cover later in this blog.
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What Are the Differences Between Slack Connect and Single-Channel Guest Users?
The biggest difference between Slack Connect and guest users is cost. In Slack Connect, the external organizations in a shared channel must be on a paid plan. With single-channel guests, external users can come from free workspaces. But cost isn’t the only difference. Slack Connect also has clear advantages in billing, security, and day-to-day management:
Aspect
Slack Connect
Single-Channel Guest Users
Cost / plan requirement
External organizations in the shared channel must be on a paid Slack plan.
External users can come from free workspaces.
Billing and cost
Each organization pays for its own users.
The host organization may pay for external users, especially if they need access to multiple channels.
Data control and security
Gives tighter control over what profile and message data external users can see. They also cannot automatically access apps installed in another organization’s workspace, reducing risk of data leakage.
Less separation between organizations. Guests can use the host organization’s apps, which can create more security and data exposure concerns.
Apps and workflows
Each organization can use its own apps in the shared channel, so both sides continue working in their own setup.
Guests can use the host organization’s apps, but cannot bring their own apps and workflows.
Management overhead
Each organization manages its own members, so admin work is usually lower after setup.
Access can become hard to manage at scale because admins must track access, channel membership, and expiration.
Best suited for
Ongoing collaboration between two organizations that both want control, flexibility, and lower admin burden.
Simpler cases where one external user only needs limited access to a single channel.
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How Many Single-Channel Guests Can I Add To Slack?
Single-Channel Guests are free in a paid Slack workspace. Slack includes an allowance of five free single-channel guests for every paid member. So, if you pay for 5 members, you can add up to 25 free single-channel guests. That lets you bring in a lot of external people at no extra cost, but the number isn’t unlimited.
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How Is Pricing Handled for Multi-Channel Guests Versus Full Members in Slack Connect Scenarios?
Multi-channel guests are billed like paid members under Slack’s Fair Billing Policy, while single-channel guests are free. Billing is handled by the host workspace, based on its paid member types. So if you use the guest approach to collaborate with external users, it’s free only when those users are limited to one channel.
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How Many Slack Connect Channels Can I Have?
There’s no hard limit on how many Slack Connect channels a workspace can create. You just need a paid Slack plan. At ClearFeed, we run several hundred Slack Connect channels ourselves. And some of our customers have more than 1,000.
That kind of scale gets hard to manage. Channel sprawl, handoffs, and follow-ups can quickly turn messy. In practice, software like ClearFeed becomes almost essential once you have lots of Slack Connect channels.
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Can I Rename a Slack Connect Channel?
Yes. The organization that creates a Slack Connect channel sets the original name. But the other organization can rename the channel when they accept the invite (or anytime later).
That rename is local. It only changes the channel name in the external organization’s workspace. The owner’s workspace keeps the original name. So two teams can be in the same shared channel but appear under different names.
Option to rename the channel when accepting a Slack Connect invite.
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Understanding the Invitation Process
How To Create a Slack Connect Channel?
How To Add an External Connection To Slack?
A Slack Connect channel, or an External Connection in Slack, is just a regular Slack channel with users from multiple organizations. To create a Slack Connect channel (i.e., an external connection in Slack) and share it with external organizations or users, follow these steps:
Open Slack and Choose a Channel: Start by opening your Slack workspace. Go to the channel you want to share or create a new one.
Click 'Add People': In the top-right corner of the screen to see thumbnails of the current channel participants. Click the thumbnails, then click 'Add People.'
Add External Users to the Channel: Just add an external email id to the channel.
When an external user joins the channel, it becomes a Slack Connect channel. Alternatively, if you accept a Slack Connect invite and join an external organization's Slack Connect channel, that also shows up as a Slack Connect channel in your workspace.
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How To Send an Invite to Customers on Slack?
Once you've prepared your Slack Connect channel, you can invite external users:
Enter the Partner's Email: Provide the partner's email address you want to invite. This should be the email they use for their Slack workspace.
Send the Invitation: Click 'Send' once you've entered the email. An invitation will be sent to the partner's Slack workspace.
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Who Can Send a Slack Connect Invite?
All workspace members (other than guests) can send invites by default. However, depending on your workspace settings, this may be limited to the admins and specific members. In this case, the administrators must approve the external invitation. Note that invites should only be sent to people you are working with - and not as Spam. Slack's Acceptable User Policy prohibits sending invites without consent.
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What Happens to a Slack Connect Invite After It Is Sent?
What If a Slack Connect Invitation Is Not Accepted?
A common issue we see is “expired invites.” Invitations often go unanswered because they need internal approval, or the invite email gets lost in someone’s inbox.
The good news is that Slack does flag this. When an invitation expires, Slack shows a notification (like in the screenshot below), so you know the channel wasn’t accepted and can resend the invite or follow up.
We recommend keeping an eye out for expired invite notifications and resending the invitation when needed. In our experience, it often takes a few attempts before the other organization accepts the connection.
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What Causes Slack Connect Invite Failures Besides Expiry, and How Can I Diagnose Them?
Here are a few common reasons Slack Connect invites fail:
The external organization requires approvals, but no one has approved the invite.
The external organization has Slack Connect turned off.
The external organization is on a free plan, so they don’t have access to Slack Connect.
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What Is a Channel Owner in Slack Connect?
The workspace that sends the invite becomes the owner of the Slack Connect channel. That matters because the channel owner gets extra privileges.
On the desktop, in Channel details, right-click the channel name and select Open channel details (as shown below).
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Can Slack Channel Ownership Be Transferred Between Organizations After Creation?
Slack Connect channels can have different settings in each organization. But Slack doesn’t clearly document an admin option to transfer channel ownership. If you have a specific case where ownership needs to change, the safest path is to contact Slack Support.
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Who Should Initiate the Invite in a Shared Channel?
Most Slack Connect channels are set up between two organizations. Think vendor and customer, or agency and client. Either side can create the channel and invite the other. But we usually recommend that the vendor create the channel and invite the customer.
Here’s why:
Ownership and app control. The workspace that sends the invite becomes the channel owner. That matters because the owner can control app access. If the customer creates the channel, they may be able to block the vendor from installing key apps (like ClearFeed) that help manage Slack Connect at scale.
Faster customer engagement. Slack Connect is a great channel for customer communication. Vendors benefit from starting the connection early, ideally as soon as they begin working with a prospect, so collaboration and support can happen in one place from day one.
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I Was Suddenly Removed from a Slack Connect Channel. What Should I Do?
Here are a few common reasons this happens:
The other organization archived or deleted the Slack Connect channel. That can remove all external participants at once. If you suddenly disappear from a channel, reach out to the channel owner by email (or another route) to confirm whether it was intentional or accidental.
Your workspace was downgraded to a free plan. If your Slack workspace drops to the free tier, you’ll be removed from all Slack Connect channels you participate in. And for any Slack Connect channels your workspace owns, external users may also be removed. Once you restore a paid plan, you’ll usually need to be invited back into external channels (and re-invite partners into channels you own).
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How Can I Remove an External Connection in Slack?
When two companies no longer need a Slack Connect channel, one side may want to exit. You can do that in a few ways:
Have everyone in your organization leave the channel. Anyone can leave by typing /leave in the channel. Once the last person from your org leaves, your organization is effectively out.
Ask the channel owner to archive or delete the channel. Archiving or deleting the Slack Connect channel removes all external participants, including your organization.
If you’re the channel owner, remove the other organization. Open the channel settings, find the external organization, click the menu next to it, and choose Remove from channel.
As a workspace admin, remove the external connection in Slack's admin settings. Admins can also remove the external connection through the admin interface (more on that in the next question).
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How Can I See All the Slack Connect Channels in My Workspace?
If you’re a Slack workspace admin, you can view all Slack Connect channels from the browser admin area under the Administrator section → Slack Connect connections. This page also shows any pending Slack Connect invites.
From this panel, admins can disconnect Slack Connect channels at any time (as shown in the screenshot below).
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What Does “Your Admins Have Disabled Slack Connect Channels” Mean?
This usually means the other workspace has policies in place that either require approval or block Slack Connect entirely.
Owners and admins can enable Slack Connect and set approval or auto-accept rules in their Slack Connect settings. So the next practical step is to ask the admin (or the appropriate owner on that team) to approve the invite or update the workspace policy to allow the connection.
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Security for Slack Connect Channels
For inter-organizational collaboration, security is critical. Slack knows this and provides admins with a set of controls for Slack Connect channels. Here are the details of those controls:
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What Profile Information Is Visible to External Users in Slack Connect?
Only the email address, name, and profile pictures are visible by default to external organizations in shared channels.
Admins can decide whether to share additional profile information, such as title, status, and pronouns, with external partners.Â
They can also turn off email information from being visible to partners.Â
This article contains instructions for controlling these options. The default sharing options for profile information are shown below:
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Can External Participants See Presence or Status, and Can Admins Restrict Visibility?
Presence, status, and profile details that external users can see are controlled by admin settings for profile visibility and Slack Connect visibility. By default, external users can only see your email, name, and profile photo. They can’t see your presence or status unless an admin turns on Status and Presence visibility, as described in the previous section.
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Can External Users Access Custom Emojis of Your Workspace?
No. Custom emojis are tied to a workspace. You can use your workspace’s custom emojis, but external users in Slack Connect can’t. Those emojis won’t show up in their emoji picker.
That said, if you use a custom emoji in a shared channel, external users can still see it.
Guests are different. Guest users can access your workspace’s custom emojis. That’s another way Slack Connect can be better from a security standpoint.
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Who Can Add Members To Slack Connect Channels?
The Slack Connect channel owner (the organization that sent the invite) can add any members they choose. By default, partner organizations can also add members freely, but the channel owner can change that setting
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How Can We Prevent External Users From Adding Members and Apps To Slack Connect Channels?
You can do this by changing the privileges for an external organization in the Slack Connect channel. Here’s how:
On the desktop, right-click the channel and open Channel details.
Scroll down to the section that lists the partner organizations.
Click the “…” menu next to the partner organization and update their privileges (as shown in the screenshot below).
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I Am Unable To Add Apps or Invite Users to the Slack Connect Channel – What Can I Do?
This often happens when the Slack Connect channel was created by the other organization, and the channel owner didn’t give you Post and Invite permissions. Here’s what you can do:
To invite someone from your organization: ask the channel owner to invite them directly.
To add an app: ask the channel owner to temporarily grant you invite privileges, install the app, and then they can revoke the privilege.
You generally shouldn’t ask them to install the app for you. The app may not be available in their workspace. And even if it is, apps are installed per organization. Your Jira app, for example, is tied to your Jira account, while their Jira app is tied to their Jira account.
If this keeps coming up, ask the channel owner to grant you Post/Invite permissions on a more permanent basis.
Also note: if you don’t have invite privileges, it can affect your access to channel data if the owning organization deletes content later.
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Can External Users on Slack Connect See My User Groups?
External users can’t see or join user groups in another workspace. In a Slack Connect channel, people outside your org won’t be able to view your user groups.
That also means you can’t tag those user groups in the shared channel. To notify everyone, you’ll need to use mentions like @channel or @here instead.
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How Long Are Messages Retained in a Slack Connect Channel?
By default, messages in a Slack Connect channel are kept forever. But each organization can control how long it retains the messages it sends.
You can change retention in two ways:
Method 1: Workspace-wide retention
You can update message retention for the whole workspace by changing the Message History settings in Workspace settings (as described in the link).
Method 2: Per-channel retention (usually the better option)
Workspace-wide retention isn’t always practical, since admins often want different rules for Slack Connect channels than for internal channels. To do that, you can set retention at the channel level. It’s a two-step process.
First, enable the option that allows members to override channel-level message retention settings. You’ll find this in the same Message History section mentioned above (shown in the screenshot below).
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With this enabled, individual channel owners can update retention for a specific Slack Connect channel. On desktop, open the channel’s Settings by right-clicking the channel → View channel details → Settings, then change the Message History setting (as shown below).
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Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a single global setting that applies to all Slack Connect channels. This is one area where tools like ClearFeed can help, by making it easier to apply consistent policies and actions across many Slack Connect channels.
Slack makes collaboration easy, including sharing messages and files, including confidential ones. That’s why many businesses worry about data leaving the company firewall. Slack Connect adds another channel for sensitive information to leak.
To address this, Slack provides a strong set of security controls that help teams balance collaboration with risk. Admins should understand these controls and configure them to match their organization’s security policies and requirements.
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How Do Retention Settings Interact When Each Organization Sets Different Policies in the Same Slack Connect Channel?
Each organization’s retention policy applies only to the messages and files created by its own members. Content from external organizations is subject to their retention rules. And any channel-level retention overrides only apply within that organization’s scope.
The steps for changing retention at the organization level are described above.
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What Happens When a Slack Connect Channel Is Deleted?
If the host who started the Slack channel deletes it, what happens to other organizations in that channel depends on their permissions:
Participants with Post and Invite permissions: will continue to see an archived version of that channel. Retention settings would apply wrt actual data that is visible.
Participants with Post privileges only: will not have access to the channel or its data; it will be completely removed from their workspace.
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What Happens When a Slack Connect Channel Is Archived?
Any organization in a Slack Connect channel can archive it. When they do, they disconnect from Slack Connect, and the channel is archived in their workspace. Any apps from their workspace are also removed from that channel.
The channel still stays active for the other organizations. In their workspaces, they’ll see a message in the channel saying that an external organization has left.
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Is It Possible To Disable Direct Messages in Slack Connect?
By default, external members in a Slack Connect channel can send direct messages to other members in that channel. That can be hard to manage because DMs can go unanswered. It also creates another risk: people can share information across companies without the rest of the channel seeing it.
Admins can disable Slack Connect DMs. But private messages can be genuinely useful, since not everything belongs in a shared channel. So it’s worth aligning with your team before turning DMs off to make sure the trade-off makes sense for how you work.
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Can Single-Channel Guests Send DMs – Does That Differ From Slack Connect DMs?
Guests can use DMs in accordance with Slack's normal DM rules. Cross-organization DMs, on the other hand, are controlled by Slack Connect DM settings that admins can enable, disable, and manage (as described above).
So Slack Connect gives admins far more control over DM behavior with external users than the guest model does.
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Can External Users in a Slack Connect Channel Join User Groups?
No. External users can’t see another organization’s Slack user groups, and they can’t be added to user groups outside their own workspace.
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Managing Applications in a Slack Connect Channel
Apps can greatly improve how a Slack workspace operates, especially in Slack Connect channels. But who can install apps, and how those apps work in a shared channel, isn’t the same as in regular channels.
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Who Can Install Applications in a Slack Connect Channel?
By default, workspace admins (or members with the right permissions) in each organization can install apps in a Slack Connect channel. But if the channel owner has restricted an organization’s ability to invite users, that organization won’t be able to add apps either.
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Can Different Organizations Install the Same App in a Slack Connect Channel?
Yes. Each organization can install the same app in the same Slack Connect channel, but each installation is separate and only applies to that organization.
For example:
Acme Corp and Beta Corp share a Slack Connect channel called ABC.
Acme installs the Giphy app in ABC.
Beta Corp also installs Giphy in ABC.
Now both Acme and Beta members can use Giphy (for example, through shortcuts). But when they do, they’re using their own organization’s Giphy installation, not a shared one.
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How Do We See All the Apps Installed in a Slack Connect Channel?
You can see all apps installed in a Slack Connect channel from the channel’s Integrations tab (desktop: right-click the channel → View channel details → Integrations).
As Slack notes, apps added by another organization show that organization’s Slack icon next to the app name, and only members from the organization that added an app can remove it from the channel.
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Can Apps Installed by One Organization Be Used by Another in a Slack Connect Channel?
In general, no, with one exception.
App shortcuts are only visible to members of the organization that installed the app in the Slack Connect channel. For example, the /giphy shortcut is only available to the org that installed Giphy.
The same applies to message actions that show up in the “three dots” menu next to messages. Those actions are only available to the organization that installed the app.
But app messages are visible to everyone in the shared channel. So you need to be careful with what apps post, even if external participants can’t use the app directly.
Workflows are also available to everyone in the channel.
External Slack Connect members can open apps installed by the host organization by finding them under Channel Integrations (as described above). For example, the ClearFeed app installed by a company (Sprinto, in this case) is visible to external members. But the functionality is limited: external users can usually only send messages to the app.‍
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How Can You Create Tickets in a Slack Connect Channel?
Slack doesn’t have a native “ticket” feature. If you want to track important customer messages, you can use Save Later or a shared Slack List with the customer.
Most ticketing tools (like Zendesk) also offer a Slack app that lets you link Slack channels to the ticketing system. But if you want a more complete ticketing workflow inside Slack, you’ll likely need a dedicated tool.
ClearFeed is built for that. It adds things like forms, automatic ticket creation, and a two-way sync between Slack threads and tickets, so the workflow stays inside Slack.
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What Are the Best Practices for Customer Channels?
Here are some best practices for customer channels:
Use one channel per customer, with a clear and consistent naming pattern that signals it’s a customer channel. Example: ext-<customername>.
If you also use an internal triage channel for some customers, name those consistently, too. Example: int-<customername>.
Pin a welcome message in each customer channel.
Set up automations to send a welcome message to new channel participants.
Use a support platform that’s built to manage conversations in Slack, Microsoft Teams, and similar tools (for example, ClearFeed).
You can find a more detailed list in the article “Guide to Customer Support on Slack.”
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What Are Some Tools To Manage Slack Connect Channels?
Slack Connect is a great tool for working with other organizations, and it’s far better than email for day-to-day collaboration. But as we’ve seen at ClearFeed, some of its core concepts can be confusing, and managing a growing number of channels gets hard fast. That’s where tools like ClearFeed help.
ClearFeed is an AI-powered customer and employee support platform for Slack. It can
Monitor messages across scores of Slack channels and convert them into ashared task queue.
Slack is hugely popular, but Microsoft Teams is even more widespread. The two don’t work together seamlessly the way email does. So companies that run on Slack often run into friction when they need to collaborate with Teams users.
Is Microsoft Teams an Alternative To Slack Connect?
Yes. You can also work with external organizations in Microsoft Teams. Like Slack, Teams lets you add external users as guests or connect workspaces using Teams Shared Channels.
Can We Set Up an External Connection From Slack to Teams?
Microsoft Teams and Slack don’t connect natively. But you can link them using third-party tools like ClearFeed.
For example, a team that works in Slack can chat with customers in Microsoft Teams channels from Slack triage channels through ClearFeed. Your employees stay in Slack, while customers keep using Teams.
Beyond mastering Slack Connect, we have also written other tutorials on various aspects of using Slack for Customer Support and Engagement. These include:
Guide to Integrating Email and Slack: If you work with customers across both Email and Slack, this guide shows how to bring them together.
Free Tools to automate Actions across Slack Connect channels: A collection of free browser apps to perform actions across lots of Slack Channels at once.
Slack Connect takes Slack beyond team-only chat. It lets you work with other companies inside the same Slack interface you already use.
You can message, share files, and use apps just like you would in a normal channel. The difference is that people from multiple organizations can join the same conversation. Want one place to coordinate with a client, vendor, or partner team? That’s the point.
Slack Connect works through shared channels. One organization creates the channel and acts as the Channel Owner. Then they invite other organizations to join, so everyone can collaborate in that single shared space.
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Are “Slack Connect” and “Shared Channels” the Same Thing?
Yes, shared channels evolved into Slack Connect. They function like normal channels connecting organizations and are now part of Slack Connect.
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How Many Organizations Can Participate in a Slack Connect Channel?
A single Slack Connect channel can include up to 250 organizations (including your own). That makes it a strong option for large, multi-partner work, such as joint ventures, consortium projects, or large rollouts, where many external teams need the same updates and decisions in one place.Â
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How Many Slack Connect Channels Can Two Organizations Have?
Two organizations can set up multiple Slack Connect channels between themselves. There’s no “one channel per partner” limit.
A lot of people assume there can only be a single Slack Connect channel between two companies. That’s not true. You can create as many shared channels as you need, and it often makes work cleaner.
Having separate channels helps when:
You’re running more than one project at once
Different teams need their own space (sales, support, engineering)
You want clearer boundaries around topics, files, and decisions
You need different channel members for different workstreams
In practice, it’s the same idea as internal Slack: one channel gets noisy fast. Multiple focused channels keep collaboration organized.
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Is Slack Connect Free?
Slack Connect isn’t free. It requires a paid Slack subscription, and every organization in a Slack Connect channel must be on a paid plan too. There is one workaround. The channel creator can invite people as Guests. And Single-Channel Guests can join and participate for free.
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What Is the Price of Slack Connect?
Slack Connect doesn’t have its own price tag. It comes with every paid Slack plan. So you’re paying for the Slack users in your workspace who need to use Slack Connect. Pricing starts at about $7.25 per user (and can vary by region). Also, the external people you invite to a Slack Connect channel must be on a paid Slack plan.
You can cut costs in two main ways:
Keep most of your team on a free Slack workspace. Then create a separate paid workspace for the employees who need Slack Connect to work with customers or partners.
If a customer or partner isn’t on a paid plan, add them as a Single-Channel Guest instead.
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How Can One Use Slack for External Communication?
Slack’s preferred option for external communication is Slack Connect. With paid Slack plans, one organization can invite another paid organization into a Slack Connect channel, making it easy to work across companies in a shared space.
If one side isn’t on a paid plan, a common alternative is to use Single-Channel or Multi-Channel Guests. Both approaches still give you access to Slack’s collaboration tools, like Canvas, Lists, and Huddles, not just basic messaging.
Slack does offer some email integration, but it isn’t built for ongoing, email-style customer communication. For that, teams usually rely on add-ons like Front, Hiver, or ClearFeed. And if you want to use Slack to talk with people who live in Microsoft Teams, Discord, WhatsApp, or Telegram, you’ll typically need extra software to bridge those platforms.
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What Are Some Alternatives to Slack Connect?
A common alternative to Slack Connect is using Single-Channel Guests in Slack. If your partner doesn’t have a paid Slack workspace, you can invite them into your workspace as a guest. If you give them access to only one channel, they count as a single-channel guest and can use Slack for free. Like Slack Connect, you can also use direct messages between your team and guest users.
One key catch: you can only invite guests from a paid Slack workspace. So you still need a paid Slack subscription to use this option, even though the guest doesn’t. Another alternative to Slack Connect is Microsoft Teams, which we’ll cover later in this blog.
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What Are the Differences Between Slack Connect and Single-Channel Guest Users?
The biggest difference between Slack Connect and guest users is cost. In Slack Connect, the external organizations in a shared channel must be on a paid plan. With single-channel guests, external users can come from free workspaces. But cost isn’t the only difference. Slack Connect also has clear advantages in billing, security, and day-to-day management:
Aspect
Slack Connect
Single-Channel Guest Users
Cost / plan requirement
External organizations in the shared channel must be on a paid Slack plan.
External users can come from free workspaces.
Billing and cost
Each organization pays for its own users.
The host organization may pay for external users, especially if they need access to multiple channels.
Data control and security
Gives tighter control over what profile and message data external users can see. They also cannot automatically access apps installed in another organization’s workspace, reducing risk of data leakage.
Less separation between organizations. Guests can use the host organization’s apps, which can create more security and data exposure concerns.
Apps and workflows
Each organization can use its own apps in the shared channel, so both sides continue working in their own setup.
Guests can use the host organization’s apps, but cannot bring their own apps and workflows.
Management overhead
Each organization manages its own members, so admin work is usually lower after setup.
Access can become hard to manage at scale because admins must track access, channel membership, and expiration.
Best suited for
Ongoing collaboration between two organizations that both want control, flexibility, and lower admin burden.
Simpler cases where one external user only needs limited access to a single channel.
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How Many Single-Channel Guests Can I Add To Slack?
Single-Channel Guests are free in a paid Slack workspace. Slack includes an allowance of five free single-channel guests for every paid member. So, if you pay for 5 members, you can add up to 25 free single-channel guests. That lets you bring in a lot of external people at no extra cost, but the number isn’t unlimited.
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How Is Pricing Handled for Multi-Channel Guests Versus Full Members in Slack Connect Scenarios?
Multi-channel guests are billed like paid members under Slack’s Fair Billing Policy, while single-channel guests are free. Billing is handled by the host workspace, based on its paid member types. So if you use the guest approach to collaborate with external users, it’s free only when those users are limited to one channel.
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How Many Slack Connect Channels Can I Have?
There’s no hard limit on how many Slack Connect channels a workspace can create. You just need a paid Slack plan. At ClearFeed, we run several hundred Slack Connect channels ourselves. And some of our customers have more than 1,000.
That kind of scale gets hard to manage. Channel sprawl, handoffs, and follow-ups can quickly turn messy. In practice, software like ClearFeed becomes almost essential once you have lots of Slack Connect channels.
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Can I Rename a Slack Connect Channel?
Yes. The organization that creates a Slack Connect channel sets the original name. But the other organization can rename the channel when they accept the invite (or anytime later).
That rename is local. It only changes the channel name in the external organization’s workspace. The owner’s workspace keeps the original name. So two teams can be in the same shared channel but appear under different names.
Option to rename the channel when accepting a Slack Connect invite.
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Understanding the Invitation Process
How To Create a Slack Connect Channel?
How To Add an External Connection To Slack?
A Slack Connect channel, or an External Connection in Slack, is just a regular Slack channel with users from multiple organizations. To create a Slack Connect channel (i.e., an external connection in Slack) and share it with external organizations or users, follow these steps:
Open Slack and Choose a Channel: Start by opening your Slack workspace. Go to the channel you want to share or create a new one.
Click 'Add People': In the top-right corner of the screen to see thumbnails of the current channel participants. Click the thumbnails, then click 'Add People.'
Add External Users to the Channel: Just add an external email id to the channel.
When an external user joins the channel, it becomes a Slack Connect channel. Alternatively, if you accept a Slack Connect invite and join an external organization's Slack Connect channel, that also shows up as a Slack Connect channel in your workspace.
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How To Send an Invite to Customers on Slack?
Once you've prepared your Slack Connect channel, you can invite external users:
Enter the Partner's Email: Provide the partner's email address you want to invite. This should be the email they use for their Slack workspace.
Send the Invitation: Click 'Send' once you've entered the email. An invitation will be sent to the partner's Slack workspace.
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Who Can Send a Slack Connect Invite?
All workspace members (other than guests) can send invites by default. However, depending on your workspace settings, this may be limited to the admins and specific members. In this case, the administrators must approve the external invitation. Note that invites should only be sent to people you are working with - and not as Spam. Slack's Acceptable User Policy prohibits sending invites without consent.
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What Happens to a Slack Connect Invite After It Is Sent?
What If a Slack Connect Invitation Is Not Accepted?
A common issue we see is “expired invites.” Invitations often go unanswered because they need internal approval, or the invite email gets lost in someone’s inbox.
The good news is that Slack does flag this. When an invitation expires, Slack shows a notification (like in the screenshot below), so you know the channel wasn’t accepted and can resend the invite or follow up.
We recommend keeping an eye out for expired invite notifications and resending the invitation when needed. In our experience, it often takes a few attempts before the other organization accepts the connection.
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What Causes Slack Connect Invite Failures Besides Expiry, and How Can I Diagnose Them?
Here are a few common reasons Slack Connect invites fail:
The external organization requires approvals, but no one has approved the invite.
The external organization has Slack Connect turned off.
The external organization is on a free plan, so they don’t have access to Slack Connect.
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What Is a Channel Owner in Slack Connect?
The workspace that sends the invite becomes the owner of the Slack Connect channel. That matters because the channel owner gets extra privileges.
On the desktop, in Channel details, right-click the channel name and select Open channel details (as shown below).
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Can Slack Channel Ownership Be Transferred Between Organizations After Creation?
Slack Connect channels can have different settings in each organization. But Slack doesn’t clearly document an admin option to transfer channel ownership. If you have a specific case where ownership needs to change, the safest path is to contact Slack Support.
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Who Should Initiate the Invite in a Shared Channel?
Most Slack Connect channels are set up between two organizations. Think vendor and customer, or agency and client. Either side can create the channel and invite the other. But we usually recommend that the vendor create the channel and invite the customer.
Here’s why:
Ownership and app control. The workspace that sends the invite becomes the channel owner. That matters because the owner can control app access. If the customer creates the channel, they may be able to block the vendor from installing key apps (like ClearFeed) that help manage Slack Connect at scale.
Faster customer engagement. Slack Connect is a great channel for customer communication. Vendors benefit from starting the connection early, ideally as soon as they begin working with a prospect, so collaboration and support can happen in one place from day one.
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I Was Suddenly Removed from a Slack Connect Channel. What Should I Do?
Here are a few common reasons this happens:
The other organization archived or deleted the Slack Connect channel. That can remove all external participants at once. If you suddenly disappear from a channel, reach out to the channel owner by email (or another route) to confirm whether it was intentional or accidental.
Your workspace was downgraded to a free plan. If your Slack workspace drops to the free tier, you’ll be removed from all Slack Connect channels you participate in. And for any Slack Connect channels your workspace owns, external users may also be removed. Once you restore a paid plan, you’ll usually need to be invited back into external channels (and re-invite partners into channels you own).
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How Can I Remove an External Connection in Slack?
When two companies no longer need a Slack Connect channel, one side may want to exit. You can do that in a few ways:
Have everyone in your organization leave the channel. Anyone can leave by typing /leave in the channel. Once the last person from your org leaves, your organization is effectively out.
Ask the channel owner to archive or delete the channel. Archiving or deleting the Slack Connect channel removes all external participants, including your organization.
If you’re the channel owner, remove the other organization. Open the channel settings, find the external organization, click the menu next to it, and choose Remove from channel.
As a workspace admin, remove the external connection in Slack's admin settings. Admins can also remove the external connection through the admin interface (more on that in the next question).
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How Can I See All the Slack Connect Channels in My Workspace?
If you’re a Slack workspace admin, you can view all Slack Connect channels from the browser admin area under the Administrator section → Slack Connect connections. This page also shows any pending Slack Connect invites.
From this panel, admins can disconnect Slack Connect channels at any time (as shown in the screenshot below).
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What Does “Your Admins Have Disabled Slack Connect Channels” Mean?
This usually means the other workspace has policies in place that either require approval or block Slack Connect entirely.
Owners and admins can enable Slack Connect and set approval or auto-accept rules in their Slack Connect settings. So the next practical step is to ask the admin (or the appropriate owner on that team) to approve the invite or update the workspace policy to allow the connection.
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Security for Slack Connect Channels
For inter-organizational collaboration, security is critical. Slack knows this and provides admins with a set of controls for Slack Connect channels. Here are the details of those controls:
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What Profile Information Is Visible to External Users in Slack Connect?
Only the email address, name, and profile pictures are visible by default to external organizations in shared channels.
Admins can decide whether to share additional profile information, such as title, status, and pronouns, with external partners.Â
They can also turn off email information from being visible to partners.Â
This article contains instructions for controlling these options. The default sharing options for profile information are shown below:
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Can External Participants See Presence or Status, and Can Admins Restrict Visibility?
Presence, status, and profile details that external users can see are controlled by admin settings for profile visibility and Slack Connect visibility. By default, external users can only see your email, name, and profile photo. They can’t see your presence or status unless an admin turns on Status and Presence visibility, as described in the previous section.
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Can External Users Access Custom Emojis of Your Workspace?
No. Custom emojis are tied to a workspace. You can use your workspace’s custom emojis, but external users in Slack Connect can’t. Those emojis won’t show up in their emoji picker.
That said, if you use a custom emoji in a shared channel, external users can still see it.
Guests are different. Guest users can access your workspace’s custom emojis. That’s another way Slack Connect can be better from a security standpoint.
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Who Can Add Members To Slack Connect Channels?
The Slack Connect channel owner (the organization that sent the invite) can add any members they choose. By default, partner organizations can also add members freely, but the channel owner can change that setting
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How Can We Prevent External Users From Adding Members and Apps To Slack Connect Channels?
You can do this by changing the privileges for an external organization in the Slack Connect channel. Here’s how:
On the desktop, right-click the channel and open Channel details.
Scroll down to the section that lists the partner organizations.
Click the “…” menu next to the partner organization and update their privileges (as shown in the screenshot below).
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I Am Unable To Add Apps or Invite Users to the Slack Connect Channel – What Can I Do?
This often happens when the Slack Connect channel was created by the other organization, and the channel owner didn’t give you Post and Invite permissions. Here’s what you can do:
To invite someone from your organization: ask the channel owner to invite them directly.
To add an app: ask the channel owner to temporarily grant you invite privileges, install the app, and then they can revoke the privilege.
You generally shouldn’t ask them to install the app for you. The app may not be available in their workspace. And even if it is, apps are installed per organization. Your Jira app, for example, is tied to your Jira account, while their Jira app is tied to their Jira account.
If this keeps coming up, ask the channel owner to grant you Post/Invite permissions on a more permanent basis.
Also note: if you don’t have invite privileges, it can affect your access to channel data if the owning organization deletes content later.
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Can External Users on Slack Connect See My User Groups?
External users can’t see or join user groups in another workspace. In a Slack Connect channel, people outside your org won’t be able to view your user groups.
That also means you can’t tag those user groups in the shared channel. To notify everyone, you’ll need to use mentions like @channel or @here instead.
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How Long Are Messages Retained in a Slack Connect Channel?
By default, messages in a Slack Connect channel are kept forever. But each organization can control how long it retains the messages it sends.
You can change retention in two ways:
Method 1: Workspace-wide retention
You can update message retention for the whole workspace by changing the Message History settings in Workspace settings (as described in the link).
Method 2: Per-channel retention (usually the better option)
Workspace-wide retention isn’t always practical, since admins often want different rules for Slack Connect channels than for internal channels. To do that, you can set retention at the channel level. It’s a two-step process.
First, enable the option that allows members to override channel-level message retention settings. You’ll find this in the same Message History section mentioned above (shown in the screenshot below).
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With this enabled, individual channel owners can update retention for a specific Slack Connect channel. On desktop, open the channel’s Settings by right-clicking the channel → View channel details → Settings, then change the Message History setting (as shown below).
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Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a single global setting that applies to all Slack Connect channels. This is one area where tools like ClearFeed can help, by making it easier to apply consistent policies and actions across many Slack Connect channels.
Slack makes collaboration easy, including sharing messages and files, including confidential ones. That’s why many businesses worry about data leaving the company firewall. Slack Connect adds another channel for sensitive information to leak.
To address this, Slack provides a strong set of security controls that help teams balance collaboration with risk. Admins should understand these controls and configure them to match their organization’s security policies and requirements.
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How Do Retention Settings Interact When Each Organization Sets Different Policies in the Same Slack Connect Channel?
Each organization’s retention policy applies only to the messages and files created by its own members. Content from external organizations is subject to their retention rules. And any channel-level retention overrides only apply within that organization’s scope.
The steps for changing retention at the organization level are described above.
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What Happens When a Slack Connect Channel Is Deleted?
If the host who started the Slack channel deletes it, what happens to other organizations in that channel depends on their permissions:
Participants with Post and Invite permissions: will continue to see an archived version of that channel. Retention settings would apply wrt actual data that is visible.
Participants with Post privileges only: will not have access to the channel or its data; it will be completely removed from their workspace.
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What Happens When a Slack Connect Channel Is Archived?
Any organization in a Slack Connect channel can archive it. When they do, they disconnect from Slack Connect, and the channel is archived in their workspace. Any apps from their workspace are also removed from that channel.
The channel still stays active for the other organizations. In their workspaces, they’ll see a message in the channel saying that an external organization has left.
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Is It Possible To Disable Direct Messages in Slack Connect?
By default, external members in a Slack Connect channel can send direct messages to other members in that channel. That can be hard to manage because DMs can go unanswered. It also creates another risk: people can share information across companies without the rest of the channel seeing it.
Admins can disable Slack Connect DMs. But private messages can be genuinely useful, since not everything belongs in a shared channel. So it’s worth aligning with your team before turning DMs off to make sure the trade-off makes sense for how you work.
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Can Single-Channel Guests Send DMs – Does That Differ From Slack Connect DMs?
Guests can use DMs in accordance with Slack's normal DM rules. Cross-organization DMs, on the other hand, are controlled by Slack Connect DM settings that admins can enable, disable, and manage (as described above).
So Slack Connect gives admins far more control over DM behavior with external users than the guest model does.
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Can External Users in a Slack Connect Channel Join User Groups?
No. External users can’t see another organization’s Slack user groups, and they can’t be added to user groups outside their own workspace.
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Managing Applications in a Slack Connect Channel
Apps can greatly improve how a Slack workspace operates, especially in Slack Connect channels. But who can install apps, and how those apps work in a shared channel, isn’t the same as in regular channels.
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Who Can Install Applications in a Slack Connect Channel?
By default, workspace admins (or members with the right permissions) in each organization can install apps in a Slack Connect channel. But if the channel owner has restricted an organization’s ability to invite users, that organization won’t be able to add apps either.
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Can Different Organizations Install the Same App in a Slack Connect Channel?
Yes. Each organization can install the same app in the same Slack Connect channel, but each installation is separate and only applies to that organization.
For example:
Acme Corp and Beta Corp share a Slack Connect channel called ABC.
Acme installs the Giphy app in ABC.
Beta Corp also installs Giphy in ABC.
Now both Acme and Beta members can use Giphy (for example, through shortcuts). But when they do, they’re using their own organization’s Giphy installation, not a shared one.
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How Do We See All the Apps Installed in a Slack Connect Channel?
You can see all apps installed in a Slack Connect channel from the channel’s Integrations tab (desktop: right-click the channel → View channel details → Integrations).
As Slack notes, apps added by another organization show that organization’s Slack icon next to the app name, and only members from the organization that added an app can remove it from the channel.
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Can Apps Installed by One Organization Be Used by Another in a Slack Connect Channel?
In general, no, with one exception.
App shortcuts are only visible to members of the organization that installed the app in the Slack Connect channel. For example, the /giphy shortcut is only available to the org that installed Giphy.
The same applies to message actions that show up in the “three dots” menu next to messages. Those actions are only available to the organization that installed the app.
But app messages are visible to everyone in the shared channel. So you need to be careful with what apps post, even if external participants can’t use the app directly.
Workflows are also available to everyone in the channel.
External Slack Connect members can open apps installed by the host organization by finding them under Channel Integrations (as described above). For example, the ClearFeed app installed by a company (Sprinto, in this case) is visible to external members. But the functionality is limited: external users can usually only send messages to the app.‍
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How Can You Create Tickets in a Slack Connect Channel?
Slack doesn’t have a native “ticket” feature. If you want to track important customer messages, you can use Save Later or a shared Slack List with the customer.
Most ticketing tools (like Zendesk) also offer a Slack app that lets you link Slack channels to the ticketing system. But if you want a more complete ticketing workflow inside Slack, you’ll likely need a dedicated tool.
ClearFeed is built for that. It adds things like forms, automatic ticket creation, and a two-way sync between Slack threads and tickets, so the workflow stays inside Slack.
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What Are the Best Practices for Customer Channels?
Here are some best practices for customer channels:
Use one channel per customer, with a clear and consistent naming pattern that signals it’s a customer channel. Example: ext-<customername>.
If you also use an internal triage channel for some customers, name those consistently, too. Example: int-<customername>.
Pin a welcome message in each customer channel.
Set up automations to send a welcome message to new channel participants.
Use a support platform that’s built to manage conversations in Slack, Microsoft Teams, and similar tools (for example, ClearFeed).
You can find a more detailed list in the article “Guide to Customer Support on Slack.”
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What Are Some Tools To Manage Slack Connect Channels?
Slack Connect is a great tool for working with other organizations, and it’s far better than email for day-to-day collaboration. But as we’ve seen at ClearFeed, some of its core concepts can be confusing, and managing a growing number of channels gets hard fast. That’s where tools like ClearFeed help.
ClearFeed is an AI-powered customer and employee support platform for Slack. It can
Monitor messages across scores of Slack channels and convert them into ashared task queue.
Slack is hugely popular, but Microsoft Teams is even more widespread. The two don’t work together seamlessly the way email does. So companies that run on Slack often run into friction when they need to collaborate with Teams users.
Is Microsoft Teams an Alternative To Slack Connect?
Yes. You can also work with external organizations in Microsoft Teams. Like Slack, Teams lets you add external users as guests or connect workspaces using Teams Shared Channels.
Can We Set Up an External Connection From Slack to Teams?
Microsoft Teams and Slack don’t connect natively. But you can link them using third-party tools like ClearFeed.
For example, a team that works in Slack can chat with customers in Microsoft Teams channels from Slack triage channels through ClearFeed. Your employees stay in Slack, while customers keep using Teams.
Beyond mastering Slack Connect, we have also written other tutorials on various aspects of using Slack for Customer Support and Engagement. These include:
Guide to Integrating Email and Slack: If you work with customers across both Email and Slack, this guide shows how to bring them together.
Free Tools to automate Actions across Slack Connect channels: A collection of free browser apps to perform actions across lots of Slack Channels at once.
Learn how fast growing companies like Teleport, Chronosphere and Acryl Data have scaled Support processes with ClearFeed
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