Japan's largest messenger app is taking on Slack with chat for work

One hot rival has entered the arena for workplace messaging.

Japan's most popular messenger app Line announced on Thursday the launch of Line Works, its chat app for offices.

Line Works is available for iOS and Android smartphones, and for Windows and Mac on the desktop.

The company, which is owned by South Korean web firm Naver, has an average of 218 million monthly active users, and is immensely popular in Japan and other Asian countries such as Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia.

Line is well known for its iconic stickers, which generated $280 million for the company in 2015.

The stickers are usually used in place of emojis or GIFs -- and there's one for almost every emotion.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Line is hoping these stickers will set Line Works apart, although it's launched the office-ready platform with more traditional features like a calendar, cloud storage and an address book.

But Line Works faces some heavy competition.

Microsoft last year announced the launch of its own group chat for office -- Microsoft Teams -- which comes free as part of Office 365.

Facebook too has jumped on the bandwagon with its product Workplace, which lets companies create their own internal Facebook-like group for employees.

Facebook is charging a per-user-fee for Workplace, at $3 per person for the first 1,000 active users; $2 for the next 1,000 - 10,000 people; and $1 for more than 10,000 active users.

Line and Slack, on the other hand, are sticking to a monthly subscription payment plan, that doesn't change regardless of the number of users. That might be attractive to smaller firms with fewer employees.

Line's subscription rate is priced at around $2.70 - $10 per user, which could potentially beat out Slack's pricing range of $6 - $15.

So the next time you find yourself reaching for the perfect reaction GIF, remember that you could be posting a nifty Line sticker instead.