A 25-slide walkthrough of what Polybase does, how it stacks up against the tools customers already pay for, and the use cases that close.
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↗Four pillars. Every conversation, demo and renewal call comes back to one of these.
When a prospect asks "what is Polybase?" — lead with these four sentences. Everything else (modules, comparisons, pricing) is unpacking them.
"Polybase is the workspace that replaces your Slack, Asana, Zoom, Notion and Google Drive — built in Europe, hosted in Frankfurt, and the data belongs to you, not to us."
Cloud version hosted in Germany and Finland, owned by an EU company. Or run the whole thing on your own servers for total control.
Chat, tasks, calls, docs, calendar and AI agent — built as one product, not five integrations. No app-hopping, no duplicate data, no juggling five different logins.
Open APIs. Import/Export or integrate everything, anytime. No lock-ins, no artificial limits.
Same workspace on every device. Real desktop apps with a system tray, real mobile apps with push notifications.
↗Eight modules, one product. Every module shares the same data layer, presence, search, and permissions.
The next eight slides walk through each module in order. Then we flip the script and compare feature-by-feature to the incumbents.
Don't demo modules in isolation — demo the handoff. A chat message becoming a task. A task spawning a call. A call recording ending up in a PolyDoc. The integration is the product.
↗Slack-quality messaging, with the rest of the workspace one click away.
Real-time channels and DMs that update instantly. Every channel also holds its tasks, docs, calls and events — so messages don't get orphaned from the work they describe.
Public and private channels, channels nested inside channels, one-to-one DMs, threads inline or in a side panel.
Mentions notify across modules; GIF picker, sticker picker, file attachments, message editing.
Emoji reactions, live typing dots, coalesced read receipts, presence dots in every list.
Pin critical messages per channel, forward across channels, full edit history retained.
Right-click → "Create task" — the task lives in the same workspace with a backlink.
Built-in polls for quick decisions — no Polly bot, no separate tool.
Pick a real message in the demo channel, right-click, "Create task" — show the task appearing in the board with the message quoted. The Slack-to-Asana copy-paste dance is gone.
↗A full project tool — not a Slack-bot afterthought. Customers stop paying for Asana.
Boards are channel-scoped: every conversation about a task sits in the same room. Custom fields, status workflows, subtasks, timelines — without paid add-ons.
Drag-and-drop columns, custom status flows per channel, bulk select, board templates.
Add your own fields (dropdown / text / checkbox / number) per channel. Coloured labels. Not locked behind a paid tier.
Break work into subtasks, link tasks across boards. See overall progress at a glance and which tasks block others.
Threaded comments, reactions, presence cursors on the task panel itself.
Filter by assignee / label / due-date; switch to timeline or calendar view per board.
Spreadsheet and direct imports keep labels and assignees intact — migration guides included.
"How many of your task comments turn into Slack threads that the rest of the team never sees?" — If the answer is "all of them", the boards-inside-channels model lands instantly.
↗A real video stack — not a hallway shortcut bolted onto chat.
Powered by Jitsi — self-host it, use Jitsi's hosted service, or pick a local Jitsi provider. Slack Huddles are bare-bones; Polybase calls are conference-grade — and they live next to the channel they came from.
Built on Jitsi (an open-source video platform) — run it on your own servers, use the hosted Jitsi service, or pick a regional provider.
Share your full screen, an app window, or a browser tab. The call pops out into a small floating window so you can keep working.
Subtitles generated on your own device — accessibility built in, no paid transcription add-on.
Persistent video rooms per channel — drop in and out, no scheduling friction for stand-ups.
Real ring on desktop and mobile, missed-call notifications, calendar-aware meeting invites.
Pick your camera, mic and speaker per call · focus on one speaker · video quality adapts on weak networks.
"We already use Zoom." → The pitch isn't to rip out Zoom on day one — it's that for daily standups and quick syncs the built-in calls eliminate scheduling friction. Zoom can stay for external clients.
↗Docs that don't need a separate tab — and don't lock the customer in.
A modern document editor with slash-commands, templates, comments, mentions and live cursors. The killer feature: round-trips Word, PDF, Markdown and HTML — bring your library in, take it out anytime.
Text, heading, list, callout, todo, code, quote, table, image, video, layout, toggle, status — all via slash-commands.
Notion-style /commands, mention picker, emoji picker, template panel. Power-users feel at home in minutes.
Single-writer per document with on-the-fly handoff. Live cursors and selections from teammates.
Drop in your existing documents and they open as proper editable docs — your whole library on day one.
Save out to any common format. No "download as PDF (paid plan only)" gate.
Syntax-highlighted code blocks, person mentions that notify across modules.
Notion's lock-in is real: exports come out as messy data files. PolyDocs round-trips cleanly through Word format — show this in the demo. Lock-in fear is the #1 reason customers don't leave Notion.
↗The presentation tool that imports from PowerPoint and exports back to it.
This very training deck could live in PolyDeck. Real templates, clean PowerPoint round-tripping, and team editing — built because customers shouldn't need a separate Google account just for slides.
Blank, title, section header, title+body, two columns, title only, one column, main point, section title+desc, caption, big number.
Place anything anywhere, rotate it, layer it — the same controls you expect from PowerPoint.
Drop in a deck from PowerPoint or Google Slides — text and layout come through intact.
Download as .pptx for clients who live in Office. PDF for sharing.
Slide transitions, speaker view, keyboard navigation — same shortcuts as this deck.
Brand-level theme, font picker per slide, image library — consistent decks across the org.
"Open your existing PowerPoint deck in Polybase, edit it with your team commenting in the side panel, hit export — your client gets back a .pptx they can open in PowerPoint." No format loss, no Google Slides hostage situation.
↗A full spreadsheet — not a database with rows. Excel users won't fight us.
Multi-sheet workbooks with a formula engine, charts, conditional formatting and typed cells. Customers move their .xlsx files in without losing functionality.
100+ formulas with autocomplete suggestions. Excel users feel at home; nobody hits a "feature not supported" wall.
Chart drawer in the toolbar — drag a range, pick a chart, embed in any PolyDoc.
Color cells by rule. Heat-maps, traffic lights, alerts on threshold crossings.
Typed cells with native pickers — close to Airtable feel, in a spreadsheet you can still .xlsx-export.
Tabs, named ranges, drag-select. Real spreadsheet model, not a toy.
exceljs round-trips workbooks cleanly. Customers can move their Excel library in and back out.
We're not pitching "replace Excel for the finance team." We're pitching: stop opening Google Sheets in a second tab to track what's happening in the channel — the data lives here too.
↗Channel-scoped scheduling that pulls in the customer's existing calendars.
Per-channel calendars with iCal feed subscriptions, recurrence, meeting rooms and timezone support. Customers see their Google / Outlook events side-by-side with team events.
Channel-scoped calendar with event CRUD, drag-resize, and a familiar grid layout.
Daily / weekly / monthly recurrence with timezone-aware rules.
iCalendar feed subscriptions — Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook show up alongside Polybase events.
Add attendees from the workspace directory; RSVPs roll up into the event card.
Pick a meeting room when creating an event — joining the call is one tap from the event.
Web Push (VAPID) and Expo mobile push, plus templated email reminders the user can dial down.
Calendar is the easiest second module to onboard. After chat + tasks land, push the customer to subscribe their Google Calendar — once they see external events alongside team events, they stop tabbing away.
↗Provider-agnostic AI scoped to what the user can already see — no external data exposure.
An assistant that can take action — and only sees what you can see. Customers pick the AI provider, or run an open model on their own servers and never send a byte to the US.
OpenAI, Gemini and others — or run an open model on your own servers. Customer brings their own key; no lock-in.
Words appear as the AI types them — straight into the chat or doc. No loading spinner stares.
The assistant can search your workspace, summarise a thread, draft a task, query a spreadsheet — only inside what you already have permission to see.
Daily summary delivered as a chat: what changed, what's due, who needs a nudge.
One-click summarise of long channel threads and PolyDocs.
Agent context is scoped to channels the user can already see — no data leakage across permission boundaries.
"Does my data train OpenAI's model?" → Customer brings their own API key with their own retention policy. For the strictest customers we run an open model (Mistral, Llama) on their own servers — data never leaves their network.
↗What every module gets for free — and what makes the all-in-one story actually hold up.
Each Polybase module exists because of these eight platform capabilities. The competitors charge per add-on; we ship them all on day one.
Live online/away status, typing dots, live cursor positions on docs — updates within a second.
One shortcut, search every doc, channel, and task. Jump directly from any screen.
Nested folders, batch upload, trash that auto-empties overnight, share-link inbox for outside uploads.
Browser push, mobile push, and templated email — set the volume per channel.
One workspace on every device. System tray, real ringing, push notifications everywhere.
Remap any shortcut to your taste. It stays put across sessions — build your own muscle memory.
Built-in connectors. Your existing tools push straight in — no Zapier middleman.
Frankfurt by default. Or run it on your own servers. Soft-delete trails. Token-based invites with onboarding flow.
When the customer asks "but does it have X?" — X is almost always on this slide. Memorise these eight items. They're the answer to half of every procurement checklist.
↗Parent/child channels are the foundation — every other module is scoped by them.
Slack channels are flat. Polybase channels form a tree — and every module attaches to a channel. Create a child channel and you've spun up a full mini-workspace in one click.
Sales / CS: parent = account, children = opportunities, renewals, support cases. The whole customer relationship in one tree.
Product / engineering: parent = initiative, children = workstreams, squads, releases. Roll-up status without spreadsheets.
Org structure: parent = department, children = teams, grandchildren = standup / retro / planning channels. Mirror the real org.
In the demo, create a child channel under an existing parent — show that tasks, files and the calendar appear empty and ready-to-go in seconds. This is the moment prospects realise Polybase replaces “spin up a new project in 5 tools”.
↗Every customer is a workspace. The account name is the channel.
Sales teams structure Polybase around the customer. Account name as parent; opportunities, renewals, expansion and the post-sale handoff as children. Account history stays in one tree forever.
When CS takes over an expansion conversation, the entire account history is one click away — no Slack archaeology, no scrolling through a CRM activity feed.
↗From kickoff to renewal — the customer journey lives in one tree.
CS teams structure Polybase around the customer lifecycle. The customer name is parent; kickoff, integration, training, QBRs and escalations are children. A new CSM ramps by scrolling the tree.
Renewal forecasting becomes: open the customer tree, scan what's open in the escalations and QBR channels. Health signals live next to the work, not in a separate dashboard.
↗Many sub-projects in parallel. Contained context, shared coordination.
Product teams run many sub-projects in parallel without losing cross-team context. Initiative as parent; each workstream as child. Coordination in the parent, deep work in the children.
Cross-team coordination becomes: post in the parent, the relevant squads are already subscribed. No more "did anyone tell iOS?" moments three days before launch.
↗Squad-shaped trees. Service-shaped subtrees. RFCs stay close to their code.
Engineering teams shape the workspace around ownership. A parent per squad; children per service or initiative they own. On-call rotations, postmortems and RFCs stay near the code they're about.
An RFC discussion, the decision that came out of it, and the runbook three weeks later — same channel, still findable, still owned by the people who shipped it.
↗Each campaign is its own workspace. Templates make next quarter one click.
Marketing teams structure Polybase around campaigns. Campaign as parent; content, assets, paid distribution, press and retro as children. Spin up the next quarter by copying the tree template.
By the second campaign, the team has a tree template they trust. Onboarding a new marketer to a campaign means duplicating the tree — every workflow is already in the right place.
↗Channels in Polybase are disposable. Create one for any focused work, dismiss it when the work is done.
The single biggest cultural shift when teams move from Slack to Polybase. Reps must teach this — customers default to the wrong model.
Dismissing a channel removes it from your sidebar — your teammates can still see it. You stay subscribed. When someone posts, mentions you, or moves a related task, the channel pops back to the top of your sidebar with a NEW badge.
↗Create → work → dismiss → auto-resurface. The lifecycle is the feature.
1-click. Name it after the work, not the team.
Pull in the 3–7 people who need to be there.
Do the work. Make the decision. Ship the deliverable.
Removes from your sidebar. Channel stays alive, fully searchable.
New message, mention, or task update? It pops back, top of sidebar.
Open the “Dismissed” section in the sidebar. Show a channel sitting there from a closed project. Have a teammate mention you in it — watch it pop back into the active sidebar in real time, with a NEW badge.
This is the moment prospects say “wait, that’s actually how I want to work.”
↗Workflows that were too heavyweight in Slack become natural here.
Each of these would be a 6-message DM thread on Slack. Here they leave a trail, surface again on demand, and onboard the next person.
4 stakeholders. 2 weeks. Decide, dismiss. Resurfaces when you renegotiate next year.
One channel per role. Interview notes, scheduling, debrief. Dismiss when hired. Resurfaces if onboarding hits a snag.
Intense activity for 6 hours. Dismiss when resolved. Postmortem lives in the same channel forever.
3 weeks, 5 people, ship a recommendation. Dismiss. Re-emerges when pricing comes up again.
Captures arguments, decision, owner. Dismiss. Resurfaces if someone questions the decision 6 months later.
Time-bounded, high-intensity. Dismiss when resolved. Resurfaces immediately if recurrence.
The org actually gains an audit trail of how decisions were made. Slack’s channel-scarcity tax pushes these workflows into DMs that nobody can find later. Polybase keeps them — and dismisses them so they don’t add noise until they matter again.
↗Thirteen tools. Eight modules. One workspace. Memorise this — RFPs come back as line items from this list.
The next 5 slides drill into each group. Don't memorise feature tables — memorise the why-they-switch hook for each competitor. That's what wins the conversation.
↗When the customer says "we already use Slack / Teams / WhatsApp."
Best-in-class chat — but only chat. Tasks need Asana, video needs Zoom, docs need Google. Every integration is one more SSO seat and one more place data lives.
"Slack-quality channels and threads, plus the four tools you bolt onto Slack — in one workspace."
Locked into the Microsoft 365 universe. Per-seat licensing surprises; sluggish desktop client; tasks live in Planner, docs in SharePoint, chat in Teams — all separate panes.
"All-in-one collaboration without the Microsoft tax or the bloated bundle."
Personal app that small teams cling to because it's free. No channels, no admin controls, no audit trail, no data compliance — group chats become chaos by month two.
"You've outgrown WhatsApp the moment a customer asks where their data is stored."
Slack: Workspace export → channel-mirror in Polybase → invite team. Most teams skip importing history. · Teams: Channel-by-channel cutover, start with one project. Microsoft 365 stays for Office files until customers move to PolyDocs. · WhatsApp: Hard cutover — there's nothing to migrate, just an embarrassing free-tier upgrade.
↗When the customer says "we already use Zoom."
Zoom is the gold standard for standalone conferencing. The argument for Polybase isn't quality — it's integration. After a Zoom call ends, action items scatter across Slack, email, and Notion. Polybase calls leave structured residue: a thread, a task, a doc.
For external client calls and webinars with hundreds of attendees, Zoom still wins. Polybase calls are for the internal standups, syncs, and pair-work that happen 90% of the time.
Pro tipDon't pitch "drop Zoom." Pitch "stop scheduling 1:1s." Polybase calls make internal sync friction-free; Zoom stays for the external use cases where it shines.
↗When the customer says "we already use Asana / Linear / Jira / Monday."
Polished, but isolated. Tasks live in Asana, conversation lives in Slack, files live in Drive. Context fragments across three apps for every project.
"Asana-quality boards with the conversation in the same room."
Beautifully fast — and tiny in scope. Linear-only teams still need Slack, Notion, Zoom. Linear's single-purpose design can't unify the stack.
"Linear-fast task entry, but with chat + docs + calls woven in."
Industry standard — and notorious. Hours configuring workflows. Disconnected from comms; "copy ticket ID into Slack" is the daily ritual.
"All the ticket-tracking, none of the admin overhead, and chat is already wired in."
A colorful spreadsheet. Communication happens elsewhere (Slack). Docs live elsewhere (Drive). Each add-on adds cost and context fragmentation.
"Monday's flexibility — without the four-tool stack around it."
Engineering teams on Jira/Linear are sticky. Pitch tasks for non-engineering first (marketing, ops, sales) — let Jira keep the dev backlog while the rest of the org consolidates.
Asana → Polybase is the easiest migration. CSV import, project → channel mapping is intuitive, and the price delta funds the whole switch.
↗When the customer says "we already use Notion / Drive / SharePoint / Dropbox."
Loved for the editor, feared for the lock-in. Exports come out as messy data files. AI features bolted on top, not woven into a workspace.
"Notion-style editing with clean Word round-trip — and chat plus tasks already wired in."
Files in folders, conversations in Slack, tasks in Asana — three apps for one project. Docs orphan, links rot, permissions drift.
"Documents that live inside the conversation, not in a separate cloud."
Legacy Microsoft tool. Tangled with corporate logins, awkward "site" structures, slow UI, dated look. Needs an IT admin just to onboard a team.
"A modern workspace without the IT-admin tax."
Solved file sync for 2014. Paper never caught on. The team needs chat, tasks, video — Dropbox can't grow into them.
"Files plus the rest of the collaboration stack — one tool, one bill."
For EU customers, Notion / Drive / SharePoint all send data to US-controlled servers. Even Microsoft's "EU-only" option can still be reached by US authorities under US law (the CLOUD Act). Polybase in Frankfurt sidesteps the whole conversation — and unlocks customers who legally can't use the US incumbents (German public sector, EU healthcare, EU banking).
↗When the customer says "we already use Miro / Mural."
Miro is the leading infinite canvas — and the most orphaned tool in most stacks. After the workshop, action items are manually copied to Jira; the board sits dead until the next retro. Polybase Boards keeps brainstorms inside the channel where they convert.
For design and product teams that live in vector canvas (wireframes, journey maps), Miro stays. Polybase Boards is for the rest — retros, kanban-like grouping, sticky-note exercises that should produce tasks.
↗50-person creative / digital agency. The textbook "five tools" customer.
Hybrid team across two EU cities. 12 active client projects. PMs, designers, copywriters, devs, account managers.
Current stack (5 tools)One workspace, one bill, one onboarding. Existing PowerPoint / Word / Excel files come in via import, leave the same way.
Ask these on the first call. A "yes" to any two = strong fit.
One parent channel per client, sub-channels per project. 30 days, one PM + three contributors. If it sticks, the rest follows.
↗200-person EU mid-market firm under EU compliance pressure (NIS2, DORA, GDPR — the cybersecurity, financial-services and data-protection rulebooks).
German Mittelstand, Dutch financial-services, French industrial. On Microsoft 365 today. CIO under pressure from new EU cybersecurity and financial-services rules (NIS2, DORA).
Current stack (Microsoft 365)Even Microsoft's EU-only option can still be requested by US authorities under US law. Legal has flagged it.
Frankfurt-hosted, EU-owned — or run it on the customer's own servers. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files round-trip cleanly, so the existing Office library carries over.
Sovereignty deals close slower (3–9 months) but bring much bigger contracts. Patience pays.
One team (often legal, HR, or strategy) on a self-hosted instance. IT sees the deployment story works; the team sees the UX. The org follows.
↗30-engineer team replacing Linear + Slack + Notion. Hardest deal but stickiest customer.
SaaS company, 2–6 year-old codebase. Code-review heavy workflow. Async-first culture but standups still happen on Zoom.
Current stackDon't ask them to drop Linear week one. Pitch the design docs + standup + cross-team coordination layer first.
Talk to the tech-lead or eng-manager first, not the CTO. They live the pain daily.
"Our design discussions die in Slack threads no one can find 3 months later" — if you hear this, the PolyDocs + threading combo wins the demo.
↗The GTM team itself — the customer Polybase reps know best because it's them.
Mixed AE / SDR / CS team. Account-based GTM. Touchpoints scatter across CRM, chat, email, calendar, slide decks, recordings.
Current stack60% of post-call context never makes it into the CRM. Renewal risk lives in DMs.
HubSpot stays — it's the system of record. Polybase becomes the system of work around each deal.
Sales / CS leaders make decisions fast. Push for a 14-day pilot on the next call.
Open the customer's #acme channel — show CRM event, thread, last call recording, the PolyDeck proposal, all in one scroll.
↗Four plans. Memorise the per-user numbers — they decide the conversation pace.
For comparison: Slack Pro €7.25 · Asana Starter €10.99 · Zoom Pro €13.99 — each.
Pay annually upfront: 17% off (built into the public list). Non-profit / education: 50% off. Sovereign (self-hosted) deals: priced as an annual licence, not per-seat — bring the playbook before quoting.
↗The eight objections you'll hear on every call. Internalise the responses.
"We're already paying for Slack / Asana — switching is too painful."
Don't ask for a hard cutover. Run a 30-day pilot on one team. Pricing alone usually justifies it; integrated UX makes it irreversible.
"You're a young company. What if you go under?"
Open APIs. Full Word, Excel and PowerPoint export. Run it on your own servers today. Worst case the customer keeps running it themselves — they can't be held hostage.
"Does Polybase have feature X?"
Likely yes — refer to the platform slide (presence, search, mobile, push, integrations). If genuinely missing, file it as a roadmap request; don't fake it.
"We need enterprise single sign-on (SAML / SCIM)."
Available on Business and Sovereign plans. For Free / Team, point to email-link login + per-channel role controls. Most small companies are fine without enterprise SSO until 50+ seats.
"How does AI handle our data?"
Customer brings their own AI provider key (OpenAI / Gemini / local model). The assistant only sees what that user already has access to — no cross-channel leakage. For the strictest customers, run an open model (Llama) on their own servers.
"Can we import from Notion / Confluence / Jira?"
Word and Markdown import covers most Notion / Confluence exports. Spreadsheet import handles Asana / Linear / Jira tickets. Direct importers are on the roadmap; flag deals where this is a hard blocker.
"Do you have mobile apps?"
Yes — real iOS and Android apps. Push notifications, offline reading, calls. Demo on the rep's phone if the prospect doubts it.
"We work in regulated industries (banking / health / public sector)."
This is the Sovereign-plan sweet spot. Polybase runs on the customer's own servers. EU-owned, so US authorities can't legally request the data. Bring the named solutions engineer to the second call.
↗Where to go after this deck. Bookmark these four.
Come back to this deck before any call where you're not sure of the talk-track. Press ? for shortcuts.
polybase.app — landing page, feature pages, and 12 per-competitor comparison pages.
Built from /landing/ in the repo
The investor pitch (13 slides) covers vision, market, and the EU sovereignty thesis end-to-end.
Lives at /investors/ — clone the URL pattern
We use Polybase to run Sales and CS. The fastest way to learn the product is to live in it for a week.
Ask Ops for your account
Internal Polybase channels for live questions. Tag the Solutions Engineer on tricky calls.
Workspace: polybase.app/internal