Top 5 Slack eDiscovery Tools for Legal and IT Teams

Listen to lawyers talk for a few minutes, and you'll hear something like: "A few years ago, I rarely heard about Slack in discovery. Now? It's just about every case."

And they're right.

To quote Slack's own motto: it's "Where Work Happens". Well, maybe. But it certainly is where all kinds of discussion happen. The transition from email over to chat platforms like Slack has not just fundamentally changed how businesses communicate, it has created both opportunities and challenges for legal and IT professionals. With a few billion messages exchanged daily across organizations worldwide, the platform generates vast amounts of unstructured data that must be properly preserved, collected, and reviewed for litigation, compliance, and internal investigations.

As the global eDiscovery market expands toward $39 billion by 2032, specialized tools for handling Slack's unique data structure have become essential for maintaining legal defensibility and regulatory compliance.

Here are some considerations when evaluating Slack eDiscovery solutions:

• Which Slack plan do you have? If you are on Enterprise Grid: will you be exporting the entire contents of one or more workspaces, or just one or more specific custodians (users)? If you are not on Enterprise Grid, then you'll need to request a Compliance Export from Slack. In either case, you can get a JSON export (or .txt file, if it's just one user or channel).
  
  • But if you are on Enterprise Grid, you also have the option of using the Slack Discovery API (and tools that leverage it).
• What scope of data do you need? Can you capture all relevant Slack content, including direct messages, public and private channels, threads, files, edits, deletions, emojis, and third-party integrations such as Slack Connect?
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• Is your data preservation defensible? How will you ensure data integrity, maintain metadata, and support legal hold requirements to prevent evidence loss and avoid court sanctions?
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• What kind of search do you need to be able to do? Are you producing ESI from a snapshot of data (a JSON export)? Is this just a keyword and custodian search? Or do you also need to leverage natural language search, to "ask questions of your Slack archive" - say, for early risk assessment for potential trade secret or employment law violations?
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• What level of security do you need? If you need a GDPR or HIPAA compliant solution, that should be first on your checklist.
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• How budget conscious are you? If you're an eDiscovery service provider, you might have a longstanding tech stack that involves Windows 95 desktop applications that you run, to routinely cull the size of client Slack export files before uploading them to your eDiscovery platform, not just to confine searches to the correct scope but also to save money on what can sometimes seem like jaw-dropping data fees for uploading large files.
  
  • Are you using a giant platform to do a small job? Or vice versa, can you get away with a point solution when you really should be using an enterprise-scale, integrated eDiscovery platform?

Slack eDiscovery Tools Shortlist

Here's the list of some of the best tools I'll cover in this article:

• ViewExport
• Logikcull's Slack integration
• Onna's Slack integration
• Hanzo Illuminate for Slack
• Mimecast Data Governance & Compliance (formerly known as "Aware")

ViewExport

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Best for:
Legal, HR, and IT professionals at corporations and eDiscovery service providers who need to efficiently search, review, and export Slack message archives for audits, investigations, litigation, or GDPR Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs). If you already use Message Crawler, think of ViewExport as a modern replacement for that. If you don't, think of us as a self-service, easy to use point solution for Slack eDiscovery that doesn't require a long contract term and MSA with huge data fees tacked on.

Overview

ViewExport is a specialized eDiscovery tool designed to convert Slack JSON export archives into searchable, readable formats and export them back to either CSV, JSON, PDF, TXT, RSMF, and others. Common use cases include:

• Responding to audits
• Gathering data to respond to DSARs under the GDPR
• Handling ECA quickly for assessing legal exposure present in Slack data
• Preserving Slack data pursuant to legal holds
• Conducting internal HR investigations.

Founded in 2024, ViewExport aims to eliminate the complexity of handling Slack's raw export files, enabling teams to quickly locate and extract relevant communications without technical overhead. It's the simple, modern answer to straightforward Slack eDiscovery needs.

The platform supports keyword, user, channel, and date range searches, and operates without needing access to live Slack instances, enhancing privacy and security during sensitive reviews.

Pros

• Purpose-built for Slack eDiscovery: Converts unreadable Slack JSON exports into human-friendly formats, making legal and compliance reviews much faster and more accurate.
• Fast implementation: No complex setup—teams can start searching data as soon as the upload completes, with no steep learning curve.
• Enterprise-grade security: Features robust access controls, encrypted infrastructure, and detailed audit trails to meet legal and IT compliance standards.
• Supports GDPR DSAR compliance: Streamlines the process of responding to data subject access requests by quickly identifying and exporting relevant Slack communications.
• Responsive, personalized support: Customers interact directly with senior team members and receive proactive, high-touch service.

Cons

• Limited to Slack exports: The tool is focused solely on Slack data, so organizations using multiple messaging platforms may need additional solutions. If it's necessary to live-search across multiple workspaces, in both Slack and MS Teams as well as Google Workspace and Zoom, for example, ViewExport isn't a fit.
• No Slack API yet: As a boutique provider, ViewExport doesn't have a live Slack Discovery API integration yet.

Pricing, Integrations, and Customer Support

• Pricing: ViewExport offers an affordable starting plan in the $1.5k - 5k/yr range, unlike typical full-blown eDiscovery platforms that charge five to seven figures per year for a master service agreement.
• Integrations: The platform is designed for Slack export files and does not advertise integrations with other messaging or eDiscovery platforms yet. Data can be exported in standard formats (JSON, CSV, PDF, TXT, RSMF) for use in downstream workflows.
• Customer Support: ViewExport prides itself on direct, personalized support, with a commitment to treating all customers "royally" and overdelivering on service expectations. Users interact with senior team members, ensuring knowledgeable and responsive assistance.

ViewExport is best suited for organizations seeking a straightforward, secure, and legally defensible way to search and export Slack data for compliance and discovery needs, especially where speed and simplicity are critical. It's not a replacement for Reveal or Relativity.

Logikcull

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Best for: Legal and IT teams needing a user-friendly, pay-as-you-go solution for eDiscovery in small to mid-sized cases.

Overview

Logikcull is a cloud-based eDiscovery platform designed to simplify the process of collecting, reviewing, and producing electronic data. It stands out for its intuitive, drag-and-drop interface that makes powerful eDiscovery tools accessible to users without specialized technical training. For Slack, Logikcull offers a direct, API-based integration that automates the entire collection process. This allows legal and IT teams to easily place legal holds, collect data from specific channels or custodians, and process messages, threads, and attachments into a reviewable format, all without the need for complex manual exports. Logikcull describes the problem they're solving as follows: "Did you figure out the complex world of Slack exports only to download a JSON file you’re now unable to read? Put that nightmare behind you with a process as easy as hitting the “Import from Slack” button, ingesting, and reviewing."

Pros

• Ease of Use: Logikcull is consistently praised for its simple and intuitive user interface. Teams can get up and running in minutes, significantly reducing the learning curve often associated with eDiscovery software. This makes it ideal for in-house teams that don't have dedicated litigation support staff.
• Seamless Slack Integration: The platform connects directly to Slack's API, enabling automated, forensically sound collections. It can preserve and collect public channels, private channels, and direct messages, including edits, deletions, and attachments, ensuring a complete and defensible data set.
• Transparent Pay-As-You-Go Pricing: Unlike many competitors that require long-term contracts and user license fees, Logikcull operates on a flexible, pay-as-you-go model. This is highly advantageous for organizations with unpredictable litigation needs or for handling one-off cases, as you only pay for the data you process and host.
• Excellent Customer Support: User reviews frequently highlight Logikcull's responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful customer support team. This is a critical asset for teams who may need guidance when facing tight deadlines or complex data challenges.

Cons

• Cost at Scale: While the pricing model is a pro for smaller matters or short duration projects, it can become less cost-effective for very large data volumes or cases requiring long-term data hosting. For massive, multi-terabyte projects, a subscription-based platform might offer a more predictable and lower overall cost.
• Limited Advanced Analytics: Logikcull prioritizes simplicity and core functionality. As a result, it lacks some of the highly advanced analytical features, such as technology-assisted review (TAR), concept clustering, and complex data visualization tools found in enterprise-grade platforms like Relativity.
• Can Be Oversimplified for Power Users: The same simplicity that makes Logikcull accessible can be a drawback for seasoned eDiscovery professionals. Power users may find it lacks the granular control, customization, and complex search capabilities they are accustomed to in more robust systems.

Key Features for Slack eDiscovery

Pricing

Logikcull's pricing is one of its key differentiators. While you can subscribe annually for more functionality, you can also buy on a pay-as-you-go model with no long-term contracts, user seat licenses, or hidden fees. Costs are broken down into two main components:

1. Processing Fee: A one-time, per-gigabyte fee to upload and process your data.
2. Hosting Fee: A monthly, per-gigabyte fee to store the data on the platform for the duration of your project.

This transparent structure makes it easy to budget for individual matters and is particularly well-suited for organizations that want to avoid the high upfront costs and commitments of traditional eDiscovery software.

Integrations

While its Slack integration is a primary feature, Logikcull is designed to be a central hub for discovery data from various sources. Key integrations include:

• Cloud Storage: Box, Dropbox, Google Drive
• Collaboration Suites: Microsoft 365, Google Vault
• Direct Uploads: Supports direct uploads of various data types, including email containers (PST, MBOX), documents, and forensic images.

Onna

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Best for: Large organizations and legal service providers seeking to centralize and search unstructured data from a wide array of cloud applications.

Overview

Onna positions itself as a Knowledge Integration Platform, designed to create a single, unified source of truth from a multitude of collaboration, communication, and storage applications. For eDiscovery, this means it connects directly to sources like Slack, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace to collect, preserve, and process data in a forensically sound manner. Its powerful search capabilities allow legal and IT teams to quickly find relevant information across the entire connected data ecosystem, streamlining early case assessment, internal investigations, and compliance monitoring.

Pros

• Extensive Connectivity: Onna boasts an impressive library of pre-built connectors, allowing it to ingest data from dozens of popular enterprise applications beyond Slack, including Confluence, Jira, Box, and Zendesk. This creates a centralized repository for investigations, preventing data silos.
• Deep Slack Collection: The integration goes beyond simple message scraping. Onna captures a comprehensive record of Slack activity, including public and private channels, direct messages, edits, deletions, reactions, and all associated files and metadata.
• Powerful Search and Filtering: Users consistently praise Onna's robust search functionality. It allows for complex, granular queries across all connected data sources, making it highly effective for pinpointing specific information during early case assessment or internal investigations.
• Real-time Sync: Onna can be configured for real-time data collection, ensuring that new information is captured as it's created. This is crucial for placing legal holds and capturing a complete, contemporaneous record for litigation or compliance purposes.

Cons

• Steep Learning Curve: The platform's power and extensive feature set can be overwhelming for new users. Reviews suggest that it requires significant training and time to master its full capabilities, particularly for complex search queries and administrative tasks.
• Opaque Pricing: Onna does not publish its pricing online. As an enterprise platform with a full commercial sales team, it operates on a custom quote-based model, which can be a hurdle for teams trying to budget and compare solutions without engaging in a lengthy sales process. Typical Onna pricing appears to start in the low five figures, and reach up to the mid-100's per year in contract cost.
• Performance with Large Datasets: Some users have reported that the user interface can become slow or unresponsive when performing very large or complex searches across massive volumes of data. A large eDiscovery provider described this as: "You put in your query and come back in a day or two to see if it finished yet."
• UI Can Feel Dated: While functional, the decade-old user interface is sometimes described as less intuitive or modern compared to newer SaaS platforms, which can impact the overall user experience.

Key Slack eDiscovery Features

Onna provides a robust feature set specifically tailored for handling Slack data in a legally defensible way.

Integrations

A core strength of Onna is its ability to serve as a central hub for enterprise data. Beyond Slack, it integrates with a wide range of platforms, including:

• Communication: Microsoft 365 (Teams, Exchange), Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive)
• Collaboration: Confluence, Jira, Asana, Trello
• Cloud Storage: Box, Dropbox, OneDrive

Security & Compliance

Onna is built for the enterprise and meets stringent security and compliance standards, which is critical for legal and IT professionals handling sensitive data. Key certifications and attestations include:

• SOC 2 Type II
• ISO 27001
• GDPR & CCPA Compliant
• HIPAA Compliant

Hanzo

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Best for: Legal and compliance teams needing to capture Slack data in a forensically sound and context-rich format for litigation and investigations.

Overview

Hanzo is a specialized eDiscovery and compliance solution focused on capturing complex, dynamic data from sources like Slack and other collaboration platforms. Unlike basic export tools, Hanzo's technology is engineered to preserve conversations with their full context, including edits, deletions, reactions, threads, and rich media. Their platform, Hanzo Illuminate, allows legal teams to perform targeted collections, reducing the volume of data sent for review and thereby lowering downstream costs. The core value proposition is creating legally defensible, high-fidelity archives that accurately reflect the native Slack experience for review and analysis.

Pros

• High-Fidelity Data Capture: Hanzo excels at capturing the full context of Slack conversations. It preserves not just the text but also crucial metadata, including edits, deletions, reactions, and threaded replies. This ensures that the nuance and intent of a conversation are not lost, which is critical for legal review.
• Excellent Customer Support: User reviews consistently praise Hanzo's support team for being highly responsive, knowledgeable, and acting as true partners. Customers report that the team provides expert guidance throughout the collection and preservation process, which is invaluable for complex eDiscovery matters.
• Targeted & Defensible Collections: The platform allows for granular control over data collection. You can target specific users, channels, and date ranges, significantly reducing the amount of irrelevant data you need to process. This targeted approach saves time and money while ensuring the collection process is forensically sound and legally defensible.

Cons

• Premium Pricing: Hanzo is a specialized, high-end tool, and its pricing reflects that. The cost may be a significant consideration for smaller organizations or for cases with limited budgets, making it less accessible than simpler, less robust solutions.
• Learning Curve for Advanced Features: While the basic interface is user-friendly, mastering the platform’s full feature set—such as advanced filtering, workflow automation, or integrating with downstream review platforms—can require some training and experience. Organizations new to eDiscovery or without dedicated technical staff may face a steeper onboarding curve.
• Limited Use Beyond Enterprise Contexts: Hanzo’s strength lies in enterprise-grade defensibility and compliance, which may be overkill for smaller teams or those simply needing basic Slack data exports for internal investigations.

Aware (acquired by Mimecast)

Best for: Organizations requiring AI-powered contextual search and proactive risk detection within Slack for complex internal investigations and litigation.

Overview

Aware is a data governance and eDiscovery platform that provides a comprehensive solution for managing and analyzing collaboration data from tools like Slack. The platform specializes in capturing all Slack communications—including messages, files, reactions, and edits—in real-time and preserving them in an immutable, compliant archive. What sets Aware apart is its powerful AI and machine learning engine, which goes beyond simple keyword searching to analyze sentiment, toxicity, and context, helping legal and HR teams quickly identify relevant information and potential risks during investigations or eDiscovery requests.

Pros

• AI-Powered, Contextual Search: The platform’s NLP models enable search across semantic signals (context, sentiment, behavioral cues), not just raw keywords. This can reduce false positives and help surface risk more efficiently.
• Live Ingestion & Immutable Archive: Slack data—messages, edits, deletions—are ingested in real time and stored with auditability, preserving chain of custody for compliance or forensics.
• Multi-platform / Federated Capabilities: Aware’s architecture supports searching across multiple collaboration platforms (Slack, Teams, Zoom, etc.), providing a unified console rather than forcing separate siloed searches.

Cons

• Complexity for Simpler Use Cases: Because Aware is feature-rich (policy engines, AI models, multi-platform architecture, retention configuration, remedial actions), smaller organizations with basic eDiscovery needs may find it heavier than necessary.
• Enterprise-Tier Cost & Value Curve: Its design is clearly oriented toward regulated environments and enterprise use, so cost/ROI may not favor smaller firms with limited budgets.
• Opaque Technical Details & Model Accuracy Risks: While the use of NLP and ML is compelling, details such as model training, false positive rates, transparency, and auditability are not always fully documented publicly. Users will want confirmation of model performance and explainability in high-stakes contexts.
• Dependence on Platform APIs / Webhooks: Some risk remains in dependence on the target platforms’ APIs/webhooks. If Slack or other tools change their APIs or access rights, Aware (or any tool) may need adaptation.
• Transition / Integration Risk Post-Acquisition: As Aware is being integrated into Mimecast’s broader stack, some features or workflows may be evolving; there can be gaps or changes in the transition phase.

Choosing the Right Slack eDiscovery Tool

The right Slack eDiscovery solution depends on your organization’s risk profile, data volume, and internal capabilities more than on any single feature checklist. There’s no one-size-fits-all platform — each tool on this list serves a distinct purpose and audience.

If you’re a small or mid-size organization dealing with Slack exports only occasionally — for an HR investigation, compliance review, or GDPR request — a focused point solution like ViewExport will get you the fastest, simplest path to a defensible export. You’ll avoid high platform fees and unnecessary complexity while still producing legally compliant results.

If you’re an in-house legal or IT team handling recurring litigation or discovery requests, especially across multiple collaboration tools, Logikcull or Onna are worth consideration. Logikcull offers a strong middle ground: API-based automation and a predictable pay-as-you-go model without the operational overhead of an enterprise platform. Onna fits best where the objective is to centralize and search content across a sprawling SaaS ecosystem — Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, and more — in a single repository.

If your organization operates in a heavily regulated industry (finance, healthcare, government) or handles high-stakes litigation that requires forensically sound collections, Hanzo and Mimecast Aware occupy the top end of the market. Hanzo excels at defensible, high-fidelity capture and precise scoping. Mimecast Aware goes a step further, layering AI-driven risk detection and sentiment analysis on top of that data — a fit for compliance and security teams conducting proactive monitoring or sensitive internal investigations.

Ultimately, the guiding question should be:

“Is defensible Slack data extraction the main goal, or does the Slack data only make sense when paired with data sets from many other tools?”

If it’s the former, choose simplicity and speed. If it’s the latter, invest in AI-enhanced discovery and integrated governance.

Slack’s role in the modern workplace is only expanding, and so is the need for tools that can make sense of its enormous, fast-moving data streams. Whether you’re an eDiscovery provider, in-house counsel, or IT administrator, the best choice is the one that balances defensibility, efficiency, and proportionality with your actual use case — not just the biggest brand name.