Ryver debuted a few years ago as a business messaging app, and free was its middle name.
Free was its selling point.
At the time, the company said it would eventually roll out paid plans and add task-management capabilities.
It has done both of those things, and at the same time, taken away the free option.
What's left is an average team messaging app with a lightweight to-do app built in, sold for a flat monthly fee instead of a per-user rate.
The new Ryver works fine, even if it's a little clumsy in some places.
It just isn't impressive enough to compete with the best team messaging apps.
Microsoft Teams and Slack remain the top picks and our Daxdi Editors' Choices for their depth of features and integrations.
Slack is more expensive than just about any other team chat app, however.
A good budget pick is Zoho Cliq.
There are plenty of other alternatives to Slack if it's not your cup of tea; Ryver is one of them but it's fairly average.
Ryver Pricing and Plans
When Ryver first debuted, it was free for everyone.
The company's plan was to eventually roll out paid accounts, which it has now done.
And with that, the free plan is gone.
I had a free account, created when Ryver was in its infancy, that I thought had been grandfathered forward because it worked without any problems for days.
When I clicked Upgrade to see my options, however, it triggered something that locked my account and put it into read-only mode.
I reached out to Ryver to verify whether previously free accounts should remain active or get downgraded to read-only status, but have not received a response. Based on my experience, I assume previous accounts should be put into read-only mode until they convert to a paid version.
The fact that my account worked for several days was a glitch, I assume.
When you sign up for a new Ryver account, you get a 14-day free trial and then must choose one of these paid options: Starter ($49 per month), Unlimited ($99 per month), or Enterprise ($399 per month).
The $49-per-month price for a Starter account, or $490 if you pay annually, covers up to 12 team members and guests.
It's a competitive price if you have at least 8 people.
Starter accounts include unlimited chat, no storage limit, voice and video calls, plus all core features.
You don't get custom invite links or enterprise features, however.
At $99 per month, Ryver Unlimited supports as many team members and guests as you like.
It offers everything in Starter, plus custom invite links.
Really, the difference between Unlimited and Starter is that you're paying for more people in Unlimited.
The $99-per-month price is a good offer if you have at least 16 people on your team.
At $399 per month, Ryver Enterprise lets you have a "custom" number of team members and guests.
Contact the company to work out the details.
The Enterprise account includes everything in Unlimited, plus a few enterprise-specific features: single sign on, workflow automation, premium support, advanced team management, and a dedicated testing sandbox.
Most other business messaging apps charge per person per month, rather than a flat monthly rate, with prices hovering around $6.
Flock costs $6 per person per month, for example, or $54 per person per year for its paid account.
Twist by Doist also charges $6 per person per month for its Unlimited account.
Glip charges a little less at $5 per person per month.
The budget pick in this category is Zoho Cliq, which costs around $1 to $3 per person per month, depending on the total team size.
Slack costs the most of these at $8 to $15 per person per month, depending on the tier of service.
Microsoft Teams costs $5 per user per month as part of Office 365 Business Essentials, which doesn't include installable Office apps; to add those, you pay $12.50 per month per user for the Office 365 Business Premium plan.
It's also worth noting that most team messaging apps offer a free account of some kind.
Slack, Flock, Glip, Zoho Cliq, Twist, and Microsoft Teams all do.
Getting Started
In setting up a Ryver account, you must have a company name or team name.
This name becomes part of the unique URL everyone on your team uses for login.
You invite people to join by adding their email addresses into an invitation window.
Every person on the team gets a role: team admin, team member who may invite, or team member.
As you set up your account, you create Forums, which other apps call channels.
These are places to have conversations about different topics that you set.
Ryver also has Teams, which it handles separately from Forums.
Teams are also places to have conversations on defined topics, though the idea is they are reserved for conversations among particular team members.
Just like in any other team chat app, you can tag people in any post to a Forum or Team by using an @ symbol before their name.
If you type @here, anyone who is online at the moment and has joined that Forum or Team receives a notification of your post.
You can add emoji to your post and respond to other people's posts with reacji, just as you can in Slack and other apps.
Ryver has direct messages, too, so you can talk with people privately.
So far, that's all fairly run-of-the-mill for any team messaging app, but Ryver offers a few more ways to connect with your team that set it apart.
Additional Ways to Converse
Within Forums and Teams, you have three tabs: Chat, Topics, and Tasks.
The first tab, Chat, is for an ongoing conversation.
It's the default tab.
It's where you and your teammates discuss whatever it is you want to discuss.
The flow of conversation looks like a feed.
The Topics section is for conversations that need to be contained.
It's somewhat similar to threads in Slack, where a conversation essentially branches off into its own sub-feed.
All the follow-up discussion on a thread becomes self-contained so that it doesn't get lost in the rest of the channel chatter.
In Ryver, you can create a new Topic conversation at any time from scratch, or you can convert a post from the Chat area into a Topic.
When you click on a conversation in Topics, it opens in another panel to the right, a visual way of showing that it's separate from other conversations.
What I don't like about Topics is how visually separate they are from the main Chat area.
Let's say you're actively involved in multiple conversations each day.
It's hard enough to remember which Forum or Team each one is in, and with Ryver, you also have to remember if the conversation was a Chat or a Topic.
It's more complicated than it needs to be.
Lastly, we have Tasks.
Tasks is an area for task management.
If your team doesn't use a collaborative to-do list app already, Ryver gives you one—or really, one in every Forum.
When you first enter the Tasks area, Ryver asks if you'd like to use a template to get started.
There are kanban board templates if you need to manage workflows, for example.
Tasks in Ryver are fine for jotting down a few to-dos here and there, but they are no replacement for a really good team to-do app or project management software.
The way Ryver spreads tasks across Teams and Forums makes it difficult to keep a good handle on them.
You do get two unique views of all tasks in a Task Stream and all tasks you've written down for yourself in Personal Tasks, but it all still feels very broken-up and disordered.
Ryver's Bot, Integrations, and Mobile Apps
Ryver comes with a bot, just like Slack and other apps, that you can ask for help.
In Ryver, it's called Eddy Bot, and it stays quiet most of the time, only offering information when asked or when you're first setting up your account.
If you need to integrate Ryver with other business apps, you can do so via Zapier.
Zapier is an automation tool, similar to IFTTT and Microsoft Flow.
It lets you connect otherwise disparate online services without having to know any coding.
Ryver does have one native integration called News Streaming.
With this feature, you can get alerts when keywords appear in RSS feeds, particular online publications (Wall Street Journal, Ars Technica, etc.), and social media sites.
For example, you could set up a Google Alert for your company's name, use the company name as the keyword, and pull the RSS feed of the Google Alert.
That way, Ryver will alert you and your team whenever your company name pops up in the Google Alert.
I should note that you can easily create a similar news alert system in Slack using integrations, webhooks, or third-party automation tools like Zapier.
So although News Streaming is neat, it's not unique.
Ryver has adequate mobile apps for Android and iOS.
By no means are they designed for a mobile-first workforce, but they get the job done if you need to stay connected to your team while on the go.
What's Missing
As busy as Slack sometimes looks, it offers a high degree of customization.
You can connect to multiple accounts at once and choose a custom color theme for each of them.
Slack also has a rich set of tools for customizing other aspects, such as notifications, keyword alerts within Slack channels, whether images and gifs appear by default or get shortened to just their filename, and more.
Slack's notifications are a big deal.
In Ryver, you can turn notifications on or off for each Team or Forum to which you belong, and you can choose whether you want to receive notifications for direct messages and @ messages.
You don't get notification options for keywords, however.
They help clue people into conversations that might matter to them.
Without keyword notifications, a lot of important information might pass you by.
Fairly Ordinary for Team Messaging
Ryver is a good team chat app, although nothing about it is especially compelling.
Forums or channels already do their job to house different conversations, and further subdividing conversations into Teams and Topics makes it harder to keep a bird's eye view on everything happening at once.
The tools for managing tasks feel tacked on rather than fully developed, and they're no replacement for a proper task-management app.
Though it's been a few years since Ryver debuted, it still doesn't compare with Microsoft Teams or Slack in terms of customizations, variety of features, notifications, and app integrations.
Microsoft Teams and Slack remain Daxdi Editors' Choices for workplace messaging.
The Bottom Line
The formerly free Ryver team messaging app and service has added task-management tools, but it's just average for the field and would benefit from a more-thoughtful design.
