Franz 5 aims to unify to your messaging

Everyone seems to use a different way to communicate. Although most business users have switched to Slack, there are others who rely on Skype, WhatsApp and Messenger to send an important message. Everyone has their favourite chat client.

It's hard to keep on top the messages and there's still some business contacts who insist on using LinkedIn to ask you an important question and, unless you login using your browser, it’s very easy to overlook an urgent message.

Step up Franz 5. This is a cross-platform client will unify your messaging mailbox. What it does is enable you to bring together your other clients such as Slack and WhatsApp into one central UI. Don't worry, you're not getting basic versions of each client, either. The developer hasn't programmed his own WhatsApp client. All Franz does is wrap their UIs, so you still get the usual settings, style and notifications.

Down the left side of the Franz UI, you find icons from each client and the usual badge notification of unread messages, so you can quickly switch between the various clients. Design-wise, this is ingenious. If you want to avoid having to move around various messaging clients, Franz makes it far easier to keep on top of notifications.

After using Franz for a while, we came to one important conclusion: it can prove to be annoying to receive unified messaging from a single application. What Franz does is pool the notifications from the other clients to a single Franz notification which you can't/daren't ignore. You can't tell who is messaging and from which client -- so if you prioritise Slack at work, over, say, Facebook Messenger, and a message comes in via Messenger, you won’t be able to tell the difference within Franz, so you'll feel compelled to open it to see who has messaged you. This can, somewhat ironically, make you more unproductive.

Franz is freeware on a basic level, but there's a Premium version available for €4/month (or €35/year) which enables you to add proxy support, spell-checking, reduce app delays and also remove ads. A team version at €10/member/month is also available on demand.

Download Franz 5 and see if it will make your day more productive by unifying your messaging.