Slack communities on any website.

Slack started in 2009 as a side project inside Tiny Speck (a failed game studio) and shipped publicly in August 2013. Stewart Butterfield's team rode the rise of distributed work through the 2010s, IPO'd in June 2019, and were acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for $27.7 billion, the largest software acquisition in Salesforce history. Under Salesforce ownership the platform has consolidated around its enterprise franchise (Enterprise Grid, AI summarization, Slack AI add-on, Salesforce CRM integration) and stepped back from the long-tail community use case. The pivotal change for communities was September 2022, when Slack ended the legacy 10,000-message archive on the Free tier and replaced it with a 90-day rolling window. Messages older than 90 days remain in the workspace but are inaccessible (not searchable, not viewable, not exportable) on Free. To restore full archive access a workspace must upgrade to Pro ($8.75 per user per month annually as of 2026), Business+ ($15.00 per user per month) or Enterprise Grid (custom pricing, typically $50+ per user per month at scale). For a 5,000-member community workspace on Pro, that is roughly $44,000 per year just for the chat tool, which is why so many free-tier communities migrated off Slack between 2022 and 2024. The Poper widget reads message history through the Slack Web API, which means it inherits the same limitation: on a free workspace it can only read the most recent 90 days. On a paid Pro, Business+ or Enterprise Grid workspace it can read the full archive. We are honest about this in the dashboard: when you connect a workspace, we display the workspace tier and the effective message-history window. If you are running a paid workspace this is invisible. If you are running on Free and want to embed older threads, the right answer is either upgrade Slack or migrate to a platform built around longer retention (Discourse, Circle.so).

Slack's API surface for third-party tools is the cleanest in the chat space. The Web API is a request-response REST API for historical reads (conversations.history, conversations.replies, users.info, conversations.list), and the Events API is a push-based webhook stream for real-time updates (message.channels, message.replied, reaction.added). Both are gated by OAuth 2.0, with granular per-scope permissions that the workspace owner approves at install time. The Poper Slack app requests three scopes and three only: channels:history (read message history from public channels the app is added to), channels:read (list public channels in the workspace, so you can pick one in the dashboard), and users:read (resolve member IDs to display names and avatars on the embed). It does not request groups:history (private channels), im:history (DMs), mpim:history (group DMs), files:read (file content), or any write scope. The OAuth screen Slack shows the workspace owner at install time lists exactly these three scopes, and the workspace owner can revoke them from the Slack admin panel at any time. The public-channels-only boundary is a feature, not a limitation. Marketing-page embeds should never have access to private channels or DMs, and the API surface is designed so that even a fully compromised Poper app (which is not a likely scenario but is the right threat model to think about) could not exfiltrate private content from your workspace. The trade-off is that the widget cannot embed a member-only channel, which is the correct trade-off for a public sales-page embed. If you need member-gated content on a marketing site, the right tools are Circle.so (paid-membership-native) or Discourse (with private categories), not Slack.

The four platforms creators and SaaS teams typically consider for a community in 2026 are Slack, Discord, Discourse and Circle.so. Each has a defining trade-off worth understanding before you commit. Slack is the right choice when your audience is B2B professionals who already live in Slack all day for work. Onboarding is near-zero (everyone has a Slack account), threading is mature, the integration ecosystem is the strongest of any chat tool, and the Salesforce-era enterprise polish is appropriate for SaaS customer hubs. The cost is real: paid Slack is the most expensive of the four at any meaningful scale, and the Sept 2022 free-tier change made the Free plan unusable for retention-sensitive communities. Discord is the right choice when your audience is consumer, gaming, dev, crypto, music or any community where real-time voice and screen-share matter. Discord is free and infinitely scalable, the live-voice product is unmatched, and the bot ecosystem is the deepest of any chat tool. The trade-off is the product surface, which is real-time chat (noisy, not async) and which makes Discord hostile to long-form posts and structured Q-and-A. There is no native paid-membership tier; you bolt on Whop or Memberful. Discourse is the right choice when your community is post-shaped rather than chat-shaped: open-source projects, product feedback forums, education cohorts, brand-owned customer forums. Discourse is open-source and MIT-licensed (you can self-host), the public JSON API is the best in any forum platform, the trust-level moderation system is rare, and content is searchable forever. The trade-off is that Discourse is a forum, not a chat tool, so it does not fit synchronous use cases. Circle.so is the right choice when your community is paid-first: cohort courses, mastermind groups, high-ticket coaching, paid newsletters. Circle is purpose-built for paid memberships, the Headless API supports rich sales-page embeds, and the live-room product is designed for cohort calls. The trade-off is cost ($89 per month minimum) and that Circle is closed SaaS, not open. The Poper Slack Community Feed Widget is the right answer specifically when your community already lives on a paid Slack workspace and you want to surface that activity on a marketing site. For Discord embeds use the Discord widget. For Discourse use the Discourse Feed widget. For Circle use the Circle.so Community Feed widget. Picking the right tool starts with picking the right platform, and Slack is right for the SaaS-customer and OSS-maintainer corner of the community map.

Slack's enterprise tiers add two pieces that matter for community embeds: Slack Connect (cross-workspace channels, where members of two different workspaces can collaborate in a shared channel) and Enterprise Grid (a single org spanning multiple workspaces, typical at companies above 1,000 employees). The Poper widget intentionally does not read Slack Connect channels even when the workspace owner has access. Slack Connect channels span multiple organizations, the membership is by definition not solely under one workspace owner's control, and embedding cross-org content on a public marketing page would create real consent problems for the partner organization's members. The widget treats Slack Connect channels as out of scope, the same way it treats private channels, regardless of whether the OAuth token would technically permit reading them. Enterprise Grid is a different story. A Grid org with many workspaces (parent company plus customer community plus partner community plus open-source community, for example) can install the Poper app per-workspace and aggregate channels from each into one merged feed on the marketing site. Each workspace generates its own OAuth token, scoped independently, and Pro and Business plans of Poper support up to 8 workspace tokens with merged-feed sorting, deduplication and per-workspace weighting. The most common use is a SaaS company aggregating an internal #customer-success workspace and an external customer-community workspace into a single docs-site embed showing both internal-team responses and peer-customer responses to a question. Enterprise Grid customers using the Poper widget typically also want the Slack admin panel's app-management workflow, where IT can pre-approve apps before non-admin users install them. The Poper Slack app supports admin-managed install across the Grid org, which removes the per-workspace install friction for large deployments.

Embedding member-generated content on a public marketing site raises real privacy questions, especially for chat platforms where members posted with a reasonable expectation that the audience was the workspace, not the open web. The Poper Slack Community Feed Widget is built to make the safe choice the default. Only public channels are reachable, period. Private channels, DMs and Slack Connect channels are unreachable by OAuth scope and additionally rejected by the widget if a token somehow had access. Member display names and avatars come from the users.info Slack endpoint (the same data the workspace itself displays in the channel UI), and the workspace owner can configure the embed to anonymize members entirely (rendering every author as Community member) for highly regulated industries (legal, medical, financial) where even public-channel members may not consent to off-platform display. Reactions are aggregated counts, not per-member lists, so reaction data never reveals which individual member reacted. For GDPR specifically, the widget sets no cookies, loads no Slack tracking pixels, and sends no personal data to Slack on page view (visitor traffic only contacts our edge cache, not Slack). For California CCPA compliance, the same defaults apply. Any member who leaves the workspace is automatically excluded from new embed renders within one sync cycle (every 6 hours on Free, sub-30 seconds on Pro via the Events API), which makes the right-to-be-forgotten workflow workable. The workspace owner can revoke the Poper Slack app from the Slack admin panel at any time, which fails the embed closed within one sync cycle. For workspaces operating in EU or EEA jurisdictions, the Salesforce data-residency story applies (Salesforce offers EU data residency on Enterprise Grid plans), and the Poper edge cache itself is regionalized so EU traffic is served from EU edges. All of this is the same set of defaults a serious community manager would build by hand if they had the time, packaged as a checkbox.