Battle of the chat apps: How Slack, Facebook Workplace and Microsoft Teams stack up to each other (FB, MSFT)

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Work email is finally dying. The future is all about chat apps.

Whether you work at a startup or a Fortune 500 company, you'll probably be using a work chat app soon, if you're not already.

These tools make real-time collaboration a snap, letting you fire off quick conversations with colleagues on your phone or laptop, share documents and use your favorite third-party apps.

At the head of the pack is Slack, which has grown like crazy since launching in 2013 and currently claims 4 million daily users and 1.25 million paid users.

But social networking giant Facebook recently launched its first business app called Workplace and it's already winning fans.  And Microsoft has doubled down on this young market with Teams, a new homegrown app that it announced earlier this month.

So which of these apps is right for your workplace?

Business Insider took a hands-on look at the three big workplace chat apps to see how they compare. Read on to see which one you like best:

Slack is organized into "channels." Every team in a company can have its own channel where team members communicate in one big chat room.

Slack has several advantages over other chat apps. First, it is really easy to use. Anyone can create a channel around any topic, like a project. Public channels use a pound sign (#) and are open to anyone in the company. Private channels use a lock sign and require an invite.

You can also send private messages to another person, or a group of others. In addition to typing messages, you can also upload photos, files, links to newspaper articles (that will preview the article), videos, tweets, etc. And you can find stuff via search.