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ViewExport vs Smarsh
Overall: Smarsh is the gold standard for SEC 17a-4 and FINRA-regulated communications archiving. ViewExport is a Slack-only eDiscovery tool for teams that need defensible review without an enterprise-wide surveillance platform.
ViewExport vs Smarsh Overview
A focused Smarsh alternative for Slack
Smarsh is built around continuous supervision of every message across every channel. If your regulator doesn't require that and you only need Slack, you're paying for capabilities you'll never use.
| Feature | ViewExport | Smarsh |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Focus | Slack eDiscovery: search, redact, and export for legal holds, DSARs, and HR | Enterprise-wide communications archiving and supervision for regulated firms |
| Best For | Mid-market teams that need Slack review without enterprise compliance overhead | Broker-dealers, RIAs, banks, and other firms with SEC 17a-4 / FINRA obligations |
| Pricing | ✅ Transparent; enterprise plans from $6k/yr | ⚠️ Custom quotes; market data places contracts at $30k+/yr and often well above |
| Setup Time | ✅ Minutes — upload a Slack export and start searching | ❌ Multi-month implementation with connectors, supervision setup, and policy tuning |
| Channels Covered | Slack only — focused and deep | Email, Slack, Teams, Bloomberg, mobile SMS, social, voice, and more |
| Capture Model | Export-based — ingest a Slack JSON export when you need to review | Real-time, always-on capture with WORM storage and supervision queues |
| Supervision Workflows | ❌ Not a supervision platform | Lexicon alerts, sampling queues, escalation, reviewer attestations |
| Compliance Coverage | GDPR, DSARs, audit logging, defensible Slack legal holds | SEC 17a-4, FINRA, IIROC, MiFID II, and similar regulated regimes |
Honest take
If you're a broker-dealer, you should probably stay on Smarsh
Comparison pages that don't tell you when to pick the competitor aren't worth your time. Here's where Smarsh is genuinely the right call.
You're under SEC 17a-4 or FINRA supervision
If your firm is a regulated broker-dealer or RIA, you need WORM storage, supervision queues, and a vendor with a long compliance track record. Smarsh is built for this and ViewExport is not. We will not pretend otherwise.
You need to supervise email, voice, and social too
Smarsh archives dozens of communication channels under one supervision umbrella. If your compliance team is reviewing email, Bloomberg chat, mobile SMS, and Slack together, replacing all of that with a single-channel tool is a downgrade.
Continuous capture is a regulatory must
Smarsh records messages as they happen, including ones that get deleted or edited. For supervised industries, that’s non-negotiable. ViewExport is export-based and isn’t designed to replace a live archive.
When to pick ViewExport
The 'we were quoted Smarsh and balked' use case
A lot of mid-market teams hit Smarsh's pricing during procurement and discover their use case doesn't actually need full supervision — they just need defensible Slack review when something happens.
You only need Slack, not the whole comms stack
If your real eDiscovery question is “what did this employee say in Slack,” ViewExport solves that directly. You don’t need to fund the rest of a multi-channel surveillance platform to get there.
You're paying for review, not supervision
ViewExport assumes you investigate when something happens — a legal hold, a DSAR, an HR matter. You don’t need a lexicon alerting system or a queue of flagged messages to review every morning.
A fraction of the cost
Smarsh contracts typically start in the tens of thousands per year and scale fast. ViewExport’s enterprise plans start at $6k/yr with transparent pricing. If your regulator isn’t forcing the spend, neither is your CFO.
Where we line up
What both tools take seriously
Defensible audit trail
Both Smarsh and ViewExport produce an immutable record of who accessed what and when. For legal and HR investigations, that chain of custody is the table-stakes feature.
Encryption and access control
Both tools encrypt data at rest and in transit, and both enforce role-based access so only authorized reviewers can see sensitive communications.
Compliance posture
Smarsh covers a broader set of regulated regimes. ViewExport aligns with GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA expectations. If your requirements stop short of FINRA, ViewExport covers the field.
Product Overview
The Slack export viewer built for review and audit.
Legal and IT teams hit walls fast: no easy way to filter by date range, no way to search across DMs or private channels without triggering "joined channel" alerts, and no way to make sense of raw JSON files without hours of manual effort.
Native Slack tools don't support scoped date searches well
Filtering Slack messages by date range isn’t easy natively — making legal holds, audit prep, and early case assessment slow and error-prone.
Accessing private channels notifies users
Joining private channels triggers alerts and raises red flags in sensitive HR, compliance, or internal investigations.
Slack exports are raw JSON, unreadable without help
Parsing Slack’s JSON exports eats up billable hours and IT time before legal review even begins.
Testimonials
Trusted by attorneys and IT leaders.
Most customer testimonials are anonymized at their request.
“With ViewExport, we were able to easily work with a very large Slack export and resolve our incident much faster compared to other Slack export solutions. The tool has great functionality with improvements happening on a regular cadence as well as fantastic support from the ViewExport team.”
Matt R, Head of IT
Large Game Studio in California
Name and company redacted for client privacy.
“Glad for ViewExport - in Slack you can't filter easily by date range, which is annoying and not usable for Legal/eDiscovery. And Onna is way too expensive. You guys are perfect.”
Chief Information Officer
NYSE-Listed Adtech Company
Name and company redacted for client privacy.
“Handling DSARs is a massive pain point for me with GDPR compliance. We've been working around this problem for 6+ years, across multiple companies.”
Head of IT & Security
Midmarket UK Tech Company
Name and company redacted for client privacy.
“This is marvelous. I'm the Slack admin of my company and I'm tired of searching through the json files for messages for HR investigations. Now I can share relevant exports with legal in a few clicks.”
Deborah, IT Manager
Large Not-For-Profit Organization
“With ViewExport, we were able to easily work with a very large Slack export and resolve our incident much faster compared to other Slack export solutions. The tool has great functionality with improvements happening on a regular cadence as well as fantastic support from the ViewExport team.”
Matt R, Head of IT
Large Game Studio in California
Name and company redacted for client privacy.
“Glad for ViewExport - in Slack you can't filter easily by date range, which is annoying and not usable for Legal/eDiscovery. And Onna is way too expensive. You guys are perfect.”
Chief Information Officer
NYSE-Listed Adtech Company
Name and company redacted for client privacy.
“Handling DSARs is a massive pain point for me with GDPR compliance. We've been working around this problem for 6+ years, across multiple companies.”
Head of IT & Security
Midmarket UK Tech Company
Name and company redacted for client privacy.
“This is marvelous. I'm the Slack admin of my company and I'm tired of searching through the json files for messages for HR investigations. Now I can share relevant exports with legal in a few clicks.”
Deborah, IT Manager
Large Not-For-Profit Organization
FAQ
Need help?
Whether you're a small startup, a growing mid-sized business, or a large enterprise, we're here to make things simple and support you at every step.
We're compatible with all Slack plans: Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise. Just export any Slack JSON archive!
Yes! Find pricing for the downloadable, local-hosted edition of ViewExport on our pricing page. Great for if you have security concerns about employee data leaving your private cloud, or if your contractual obligations prevent sensitive IP from touching third-party servers. With the local edition, we'll never see or have access to your Slack data files.
You can upload anything that is included with the .ZIP file that contains your .JSON exports from Slack. If those files contain private channel and direct message data, they'll be searchable in ViewExport as well. However, we can't help you get data from Slack that was not contained in your export.
There's no implementation required: ViewExport is as easy as setting up an account, and uploading a .ZIP file. That said, we're happy to walk you through configuration and best practices.
We take security seriously and serve organizations around the world who are entrusted with strict data governance procedures, including for their Slack data. Here's our full security overview.
Yes, with 2 year contracts we can offer 12% off the Annual Enterprise plan, and with 3 year contracts we're able to offer 14.5% off the Annual Enterprise plan. Above-contract usage is billed monthly pro rata. Reach out to our team for details and we can get you set up.
No, ViewExport is an independent service not affiliated with Slack Technologies Inc. We provide tools to view and search Slack export files but are not connected to, funded by, or endorsed by Slack.
ViewExport is a modern, cloud and desktop platform for searching and governing corporate Slack messages to maintain compliance. Think of us as a single-purpose tool — an alternative to Onna, Mimecast Aware, Hanzo, Smarsh, and Pagefreezer. Technical teams can also compare us to Slackdump or Backupery, or read why teams outgrow Slack's native export for legal review. Message Crawler customers will also enjoy switching to ViewExport so that they can filter and search their Slack archives before uploading them to Relativity, saving a reported $10-50k per year on RelOne data and hosting costs, according to some of our customers. You can read more here about the top Slack eDiscovery tools available.
The free trial is 7 days with a nominal data usage limit to prevent abuse. We want you to know that we're able to handle your needs, and we've noticed that most organizations can determine this in 24-48 hours. Need help with your trial? Shoot us a note and see if we can customize the experience for you, or provide a walkthrough.
