Sports.ru
How the leading sports media outlet on the Russian internet moved to Pachca
About the company
I'm Pavel, CTO at Sports.ru. I joined the company in 2020, and since then I've been through every change of our work chat app. Each one happened right in front of me.
Sports.ru isn't just a sports news site. It's the leading Russian-language sports media outlet, with an audience of millions, where you can write longreads and news, read bloggers' posts, follow matches and be part of the community. The site is 27 years old, and we're one of the most cited media outlets on the Russian internet, and not just among sports media.
An interesting fact about us: we care a lot about company culture, internal processes and values. That's directly tied to the chat app question, because for us it's fundamentally important. It's not "one more place where you can message each other," it's a tool every employee uses every day. It was crucial for us that everyone liked it, that it was modern and that it got even the smallest details right, down to how much many of us love emoji and reactions. We value our employees' opinions and try to build internal processes that are clear, open and convenient for the team. The chat app is one of the main places that helps us do that.
Life before Pachca
I joined the company in 2020, the COVID year, when you'd think online communication would have become a must. But back then, communication ran on personal contacts: some of it in email, some in Telegram, some just "walk over to each other in the office." There wasn't enough structure, especially in a year when so many people went online and processes weren't set up for it.
Telegram didn't work as a team chat app for a simple reason: it's not built for work, it's personal. There's a lot of everyday chatter in it, and you can't properly manage chats: add a person to the right places when they start or remove them from every chat when they leave. There's no single chat directory and no proper employee profiles that can be filled in automatically. So we switched to Slack pretty quickly. At first a lot of people had to get used to it, but once everything was standardized, Slack became our baseline, a given that everyone loved.
Then came 2022, when many companies started getting cut off from Slack. We were no exception: literally overnight (morning in the US) we lost access to the service. Then we scrambled to find something to switch to. That's when we first came across Pachca. Back then it didn't have enough features for us, but from the design and the updates we could see the product clearly had a future, so we decided to keep an eye on it.
Basically, the global team chat market rests on three pillars: Slack, Mattermost and Rocket Chat. Slack was out. Almost everyone considered Mattermost, but I was personally against it. Moving to the cloud version of a service that isn't available in Russia felt strange, and hosting and developing it ourselves, like some companies did, wasn't the best use of our time. We don't build chat apps and didn't want to accidentally become its developers. We wanted a ready-made product from a company that specializes in it. In the end we chose cloud Rocket Chat: it had support in Russia and let us import our data, which was important.
Rocket wasn't as great as Slack, but we gradually got used to it. Everything was fine until Rocket's Russian representative left and the service became unstable. Every now and then it could go down for a day, and because of the time difference with support, we sometimes spent part of the day with no idea what was going on.
The turning point came in the summer of 2025. For many employees, it stopped working without a VPN altogether. It was important to us not to maintain the chat app and its apps ourselves. We wanted an out-of-the-box SaaS solution. It became obvious that we had to leave after all.
Once again we remembered Pachca and started looking at our options. By then, the Russian team chat market had matured, and we had plenty to choose from. I even have the spreadsheet we made for the final decision: I color-coded features green, yellow and red. In the end, out of roughly 10 apps, it came down to Pachca and one other Russian service (a Mattermost derivative, as it happens).
The moment we decided on Pachca
Probably the first moment was when we analyzed the features. While the competitors' columns in my spreadsheet were mostly yellow and red, Pachca's cells were almost entirely green. To be clear, everyone has the basics: private and public chats, threads, a mobile app. What mattered most to us was easy administration, a robust API, searchable employee profiles instead of an intranet, group tags for on-call teams and proper global search, which Rocket badly lacked.
But what really sets Pachca apart is how the team treats the product. For almost every competitor, the chat app is a secondary product that comes bundled with an ecosystem. Pachca stands out sharply against that: you can see the team's own vision for the app, a transparent backlog, great support, regular update announcements and lots of small details that show the product is built with real user scenarios in mind. We're a product company ourselves, and we value a thoughtful, customer-focused approach. When we see the same attitude, it really wins us over.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
The most telling thing: in several months of using it, we've heard nothing but positive feedback about Pachca from colleagues. That's amazing to me. Even back when we switched to Slack, there was a whole team that, let's say, "didn't warm up to the new app." Not to mention Rocket Chat, where people often "asked" me whether we could pick something more convenient. But this product clicks with everyone internally. People are happy with the interface and the speed.
Some things changed in our work too. Calls are a good example. Hardly anyone used them in Slack, and Rocket had some kind of solution that nobody used either. But in Pachca, from day one I've been hearing from lots of people that their teams moved their standups and one-on-ones there.
We also started actively using reminders and scheduled messages, which we didn't do before. For example, I like to work in the evening and late at night, and I had a habit of sending messages right away so I wouldn't forget. But many people have push notifications on, so you can accidentally wake someone up. Pachca has scheduled sending: you can schedule a message and not wake anyone.
Tips for switching
My main advice: if you can't properly export and import your history, just give yourself a couple of months when both apps run side by side, to make sure you don't need the old history. In just a couple of months, you'll pile up so many messages in the new app that you won't be digging into the past. I don't want to claim this as a rule, but if you have doubts, here's our experience: three months in, nobody at our company opened Rocket at all.
If you have 1–3 months of runway, that's a great window for the switch. And if you quickly realize you keep going back to your history, you'll still have time to build an export and import yourself or, possibly, with Pachca's help.
I'd also recommend taking a couple of weeks to move your most critical integrations (alerting, monitoring, review notifications, key stats or anything else) to Pachca before you bring everyone in. That way you minimize the need to work in two apps at once, and teams can dive in and settle into the new place. The smaller stuff can move later.
