A small agency deciding how to keep clients informed usually ends up looking at these two, and the framing is wrong from the start. They are not alternatives — they fail in different places.
Slack is 8,25 € per user a month billed monthly. Loom is $18 per user a month billed monthly. Loom is more than twice the price and is bought by fewer people on the team, which is the detail that makes the comparison decidable.
Slack replaces the thread; Loom replaces the call. If your problem is that client questions arrive by email and take a day to resolve, Slack is the answer and Loom will not touch it. If your problem is that you spend four hours a week walking clients through work on video calls, Loom is the answer and Slack will not touch it. Agencies with both problems buy both, but only Loom needs to be bought for the people who actually record.
What each one actually removes
Slack removes latency. A question that would have been an email with a next-day reply becomes a message answered in minutes, and shared channels put the client in the same room as the work. Loom removes synchronisation. A walkthrough that needed both parties free at the same time becomes a recording watched whenever. Neither removes the other's problem, and buying the wrong one leaves the original complaint exactly where it was.
The seat arithmetic is not symmetrical
Slack is priced per active member, and everyone who participates needs a seat — including, on shared channels, the arrangement with the client's own workspace. Loom is priced per person who records. Viewers do not need an account, which means a three-person agency sending client walkthroughs pays for three seats and not for twenty-five viewers. At $18 against 8,25 € the headline looks lopsided; across a real team it frequently is not.
Where Slack gets expensive quietly
The free plan keeps ninety days of message history. For internal chatter that is irrelevant; for client work it means the decision someone agreed to in March is gone by summer, which is the sort of thing you discover at the worst moment. If Slack is holding client agreements, the paid plan is not optional and the cost is the whole team, permanently. Budget it as a per-head fixed cost rather than a tool subscription.
Where Loom gets expensive quietly
Loom's monthly rate is $18 but its annual arrangement is $180 per user per year for a single user — worth reading twice, because it is not the usual monthly-equivalent discount. The second cost is behavioural: a five-minute recording takes about eight minutes to make well, and teams that adopt Loom enthusiastically often replace a thirty-minute weekly call with ninety minutes of scattered recording. It works when it replaces meetings, not when it supplements them.
Pricing side by side
Frequently asked questions
Can a client join Slack without paying?
They can be a guest, and shared channels let two workspaces connect, but the arrangement depends on which side holds the paid plan and how many external people are involved. Check it against your actual client count before assuming it is free — this is the part of Slack's pricing most often discovered late.
Does Loom need a paid plan for client work?
The free plan caps video length and library size, which is exactly the constraint that bites on client walkthroughs. If recording is a weekly habit rather than an occasional one, the paid plan is the realistic baseline.
Is there a cheaper way to solve the same problem?
Sometimes. If the goal is a written record clients can find, a shared document costs nothing extra. If the goal is fewer calls, a structured weekly written update often outperforms both tools and costs only the discipline. Buy software when the habit already exists and the tool removes friction from it.
Which should a solo freelancer buy first?
Loom, in most cases. A solo freelancer rarely has an internal-latency problem, which is what Slack fixes, but very often has a walkthrough problem. One seat of Loom against a whole-team Slack bill is also a much smaller commitment to get wrong.