5 Yammer Alternatives That Are Actually Better Than Yammer Itself

 
After Microsoft has aquired Yammer, there has been a number of high profile defections and complaints, regarding service reliability. Yammer status page itself shows there's at least one serious outage/tech issue each month with Yammer/Microsoft which is unacceptable to most businesses. The good news there are a number of Yammer alternatives that you can use - and some even offer more features, while costing much less (or being entirely free), so let's take a look at them.

1. Bitrix24.com

Bitrix24 is often considered the best among Yammer alternatives on the grounds that it's 100% free for small companies/departments and that it comes with a number of features unavailable in Yammer itself - namely really powerfull CRM, Dropbox-like Bitrix24.Drive, Project Management, File Sharing and 30+ enterprise tools. Another important advantage over other Yammer alternatives is the fact that with Bitrix24 you can choose between a cloud based SaaS option or host Bitrix24 on your own server (which is critical for having full control over your data). Finally, mobile apps for Bitrix 24 in Appstore and Google Play have higher ratings than Yammer mobile app. Definitely your first try on a post-Yammer journey.

2. WhatsApp

Lots of folks use Yammer only for their mobile app that act as an instant messenger and just like with Bitrix24, WhatApp does a better job while costing only a dollar (or free, in some instances). WhatsApp major advantage is that it works on ALL mobile platforms - iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and even supports Nokia S40 and S60. Chances are most of your friends and collagues already have WhatsApp installed on their phones.

3. Zoho

Zoho is a suite of  small business tools that sometimes falls short on actual collaboration features, but is nevertheless is generally a better fit for small businesses than Yammer ever was. Zoho is very stingy on free offers (3 free users max) and suffers from whats known as 'Indian code syndrome' among programmers (when things don't work how they are supposed to or have really weird internal logic) and does not let you use mobile apps until you switch to a paid plan. Still, Zoho has been improving slowly over time and you should at least consider taking a peek at the website.

4. ZenDesk

If you used Yammer inside customer service department, I suggest you make a switch to ZenDesk or FreshDesk (which are nearly identical in every single respect). Not only these two make working on customer complaints much easier and faster, for the moment their integration with Microsoft products, like Dynamics (CRM) is done at a much better level.

5. SalesForce Chatter

Finally, if you are working for a big company that's unhappy with a solution from a big company, but want to switch only to another big company, SalesForce Chatter is your most logical choice. While quite expensive and compicated by the standards of most businesses, it comes with almost 200 apps from AppExchange that work with SalesForce Chatter, some of which you are probably already using. Importantly, while Yammer CEO seems to have given up on tyring to improve his product, Marc Benioff has consistently put the money where his mouth is, investing over a billion dollars in acquisitions that give more work options to both SalesForce CRM and Chatter users.