Reign vs Slack.

Questions people ask before moving.

Can members still message each other privately on Reign?

Yes. MediaVerse adds direct messages between members, so one-to-one and small group conversations stay possible alongside the public spaces. The difference from Slack is what happens to the rest: questions asked in spaces or in the Jetonomy forum stay on the site as threads that people can search and link to. That keeps private chat private while the useful answers build into something the next member can find.

Can I export my Slack history?

Yes, public channels export as JSON on every plan, and private channels and DMs on higher plans subject to your workspace settings. Nothing on the WordPress side imports that format directly, so plan on using it as an archive and rebuilding the channels that matter as spaces by hand.

What happens to messages past the free tier limit?

They become inaccessible rather than deleted, and return if you upgrade. For a community that is the crux of it: the questions answered last year are the asset, and a platform that can put them behind a paywall at its own discretion is not somewhere to keep them.

Does Reign charge per member?

No. The theme is licensed per site, and the plugin family installs free regardless of how many members you have. Your hosting bill eventually reflects traffic, but there is no per-seat line item at any size. Current licence options are on the pricing page.

Can members join without creating another account?

They register on your site, which is a real step. You can soften it with social login, and BuddyNext supports the usual providers, but there is no way to move a community between platforms without asking people to sign in somewhere new once.

Is a forum really a replacement for channels?

For a community, usually yes, and often better. Channels optimise for immediacy, which is why anything valuable scrolls away. Jetonomy spaces keep a question, its answers and the accepted one together on a page that is searchable, linkable and indexed. What you lose is the feeling of a room, which matters more for teams than for audiences.

What about file sharing and storage?

Files live on your own hosting, so the limit is your disk rather than a per-plan quota. MediaVerse handles member image and video uploads with albums, free. For documents, the usual WordPress media library covers it, and there is no tier that suddenly caps you.

Can I still have private spaces?

Yes. Jetonomy spaces and BuddyNext spaces both support private membership, and WordPress roles control who sees what. A private space behaves as you would expect: invisible to non-members and excluded from search and sitemaps.

Does search work as well as Slack's?

Different and generally better for a community, because the content is structured. Instead of searching a stream of messages you are searching titled posts with accepted answers, and Google can search them too, which Slack never allows. What you lose is Slack's speed at finding a half-remembered message from a colleague.

What does hosting actually cost?

Hosting is the running cost people forget to budget. A small community runs comfortably on shared or entry-level managed WordPress hosting on an entry-level plan. Past a few thousand active members you want managed hosting with object caching. The bill follows your traffic, not your member count, and unlike a subscription it buys you infrastructure you control rather than access you rent.

What if the move does not work out?

You still hold everything, which is the real safety net. The database, the content and the member list are yours to export and take elsewhere, so a failed migration costs you time rather than your community. That is not true in reverse: leaving a platform that holds your data means leaving with whatever they let you take.