In yet another addition to a growing roster of business-oriented social networks, Facebook at Work will launch next month, according to several reports.

Facebook has been testing its enterprise messaging competitor to the likes of Slack Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Yammer and Skype since early 2015 with some 400 or so customers. A Facebook executive told The Information that the company will charge companies per monthly user rather than offering it free but charging for additional services such as connections to other apps.

That puts the service in line with the pricing method of enterprise messaging phenom Slack, which charges about $6.67 per active user. One early customer told Business Insider that monthly pricing could range from $1 to $5 a user. Oddly enough, given that Facebook at Work director Julien Codoniou commented publicly, the company declined to comment further.

The imminent launch of Facebook at Work comes amid a furious round of launches, deals and strategy shifts in business messaging. Slack today announced it’s integrating some of its services into cloud customer relationship management giant Salesforce.com Inc., including the ability to search for leads from Salesforce within Slack and keep updates from Slack and Salesforce’s own Chatter messaging app in sync. That’s a sign that Slack is getting more serious about moving beyond its team focus to larger enterprises

On Monday, Microsoft said its Yammer enterprise communications service will be integrated in phases with the Office 365 Groups but Yammer itself no longer will be sold as a standalone product. Last week, Cisco Systems Inc. said it will integrate its Spark team communications and WebEx online meeting services into Salesforce’s cloud starting in the middle of next year. Salesforce itself bought the collaboration app Quip Inc. in August.

Because of its consumer-oriented roots, Facebook will face a challenge getting corporate enterprises to take Facebook at Work seriously, especially when Slack seems to be capturing new users at a fast clip. But if the product works, especially for workgroups that often drive new communications technologies into the larger enterprise, Facebook’s ubiquity may force chief information officers to pay attention.

“They have executed pretty well,” said Ross Mayfield, chief executive of Pingpad Inc., which makes a Slack app for document collaboration. He think there will be a market for Facebook at Work partly because it may help companies focus their employees’ attention less on their friends’ photos while they’re at work, and more on their colleagues’ messages.

Slack had a period of relatively little competition, Mayfield said. Its success now has probably ensured that period is coming to an end.

But whether Facebook will be the key competitor, or even whether it can make much of a dent in Slack, remains in doubt. “Slack has reached escape velocity,” he said. “Even Facebook will have a challenge catching up with their growth.”

What’s more, while Facebook in a sense has a freemium service model starting with its free consumer app and website, its apparent plan to charge from the get-go may put it at a further disadvantage to Slack’s model, which offers a free service up to limits such as 10,000 messages. “The freemium model has made it easy for teams to directly access these services, leading to large user acquisitions,” said Forrester Research Inc. analyst T.J. Keitt. “This is something Facebook will have to acknowledge in their offering as all of their potential competitors in enterprise social have a solution that can be put to the purpose of team messaging.”

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