Slack Analytics on the Free Plan: What Owners Can See and Export

On the Slack Free plan, owners and admins get one analytics page, the Overview, plus an Export button that downloads 28 days of daily counts as a CSV. The Channels tab shows only an upgrade message, the files chart is locked, and there are no per-member stats at all. Open it from Admin > Analytics in the left rail. On October 26, 2026 we opened every analytics tab in our Free test workspace as its Primary Owner and read the exported file line by line.

What the Free overview shows

• • All-Time Usage: messages sent against a 10,000-message bar, file storage against 5.0 GB, and apps against the 10-app limit. The message and storage bars come from Slack's older Free limits; today's Free plan limits history to 90 days instead, as Slack free plan limits explains.
• • Active people in your workspace: a monthly, weekly or daily chart of people who posted a message or read at least one channel or DM.
• • Where conversations happen: the share of reading and of posting in public channels, private channels and DMs. Ours showed 48% public, 3% private and 48% DMs for reading.

The page is not live. On October 26 it said "Data as of 10/24/2026, last updated 1 day ago", so expect numbers about two days behind.

What needs a paid plan

The Channels tab showed only this on Free:



The Who is uploading files chart at the bottom of the overview is greyed out with "Upgrade to unlock more insights about your workspace. Workspaces on a paid plan can view message and file data.":



There is no Members tab on Free. When we opened the members analytics address (app.slack.com/manage/<team ID>/analytics/members) directly, Slack sent us to Manage members instead. Per-person numbers such as messages posted or the last active date are paid-only; how to find inactive users in Slack shows the paid Members table and what a Free owner can use instead.

The Export button works on Free

Export at the top right of the overview downloaded a file named _Analytics Prior 28 Days - Oct 26 2026.csv (2,854 bytes) with one row per day and 28 columns:

Date,Total Enabled Membership,Enabled Full Members,Enabled Guests,Daily active people,Daily people posting messages,Weekly active people,Weekly people posting messages,Messages in public channels,Messages in private channels,Messages in shared channels,Messages in DMs,Percent of messages, public channels,Percent of messages, private channels,Percent of messages, DMs,Percent of views, public channels,Percent of views, private channels,Percent of views, DMs,Total Full Members,Total Guests,Total Members,Total Claimed Full Members,Total Claimed Guests,Total Claimed Members,Public channels, single-workspace,Messages posted,Monthly active people,Monthly people posting messages

So a Free owner does get daily message counts by place (public channels, private channels, DMs), daily and weekly active people, and member totals. These rows from our file show what the numbers did:

Two things to know before you chart this file:

Who can see Slack analytics

Our test account was the Primary Owner, and the analytics pages sit under Admin next to Manage members and the security settings. Does Slack show last seen covers what a regular member can see about other people.

FAQ

Can I see how many messages each person sent on the Free plan? No. The Free overview and export count messages per day and per type of conversation, not per person.

Does Slack analytics show who read a message? No. The overview reports the share of reading in public channels, private channels and DMs as percentages, with no names.