Slack vs. Microsoft Teams - Collaboration Showdown

Remote work and collaboration are critical to 2020 productivity so collaboration and communication. Slack vs Microsoft Teams may be the question that you're asking? While both provide the tools for effective collaboration each software approach is a bit different.

Teams vs Slack is about the culture of your company and the operating system for your business. While Teams offers a Microsoft centric approach, it's more than just real-time chat. Microsoft Teams offers an entire suite of collaboration software. Slack, on the other hand, offers a more focused conversational tool for chatting and while it touches other areas it's a more focused tool.

Both products have a free collaboration tier allowing you to get started for low or no money.

I’m sure you’re busy so this isn’t going to be an in-depth review of every feature of either #Slack or #Teams but I do want to talk through the pros and cons of each product and how you should pick the best product for your company. I’ve used both Slack and Teams for multiple years and while each has strengths each also has weaknesses.

Communication tools reflect the culture of the company and the way the culture and leaders of the company choose to communicate. If your culture is broken, or your company is dysfunctional, tools aren’t likely to fix it. Also if the leadership of an organization doesn’t lean-in, the tools will be less impactful and there are tons of examples of either Slack or Teams being rolled out and not really embraced by the executives of the organization.

So… if you’re going to take the dive into these tools, really try to get the commitment of all-senior-leadership to try to use these tools in favor of long email chains and countless meetings. This time in history is unique because remote work cultures are really well suited for these types of tools. Organizations that take the plunge now should commit to the tool for at least a few months to really understand the organic benefits.

If you’re new to these tools, it’s important to understand how they may be different from your existing communication tools. These aren't in competition to your email, they're used for a more real-time collaborative basis.

In this video I give a Slack 101 tour and a Microsoft Teams 101 tour for those who are new to the tool and looking to Learn Teams or Learn Slack.

While Slack was a leader in this space, it wasn’t the first chat-based collaboration tool. There are alternatives like Campfire, IRC, HipChat, Discord, Yammer, and others. What made Slack successful was its timing and freemium model that appealed to early-stage startups and their approach to business making the product fit-in with larger companies.

The freemium model allows anyone to set up a Slack for their company for no cost and gets an initial Slack experience that works with all the bells and whistles while keeping a history of up to 10,000 messages. This led to the rapid growth of Slack and a lot of adoption from early-stage startups.

Microsoft Teams on the other hand is part of the Microsoft Office suite, so while it’s not free, it’s often perceived as free because it’s included as part of the Microsoft 365 Business suite.

The basic paid version of Slack is $6.67/user/month and the paid version of Microsoft Basic Business is $5/user/month.

Recommendations
If your organization is using the Microsoft tools already, including Sharepoint, Outlook and Skype for business meeting infrastructure then Teams is really compelling both from a configuration standpoint and a cost perspective. There’s less external dependencies and you’ll get the majority of the benefits. In general, I feel that many of Microsofts tools are good enough. I do hesitate to call them great and the shortcoming is from many layers of software that try to tie together but don’t always.

Slack on the other hand is very well suited for organizations large and small. The stand-alone nature of slack means that they focused more on API’s and integration points to allow third-party chatbots to extend the functionality of Slack. While I think it’s ideally suited for small to medium size organizations, companies as large as IBM are using slack with their 350,000 employees.

Companies that aren’t as tied into the Microsoft ecosystem will have an easier time choosing slack because they require deeper integration into DropBox, Box, Zoom, or GSuite.

Remember how I said that communication is a company-culture thing? Well, a key reason for that is that these chat tools can make it easy to give your organization to offer company transparency.

Different teams or departments can have their own channels but often these channels aren’t set to private making it easy to both find important company information and understand how decisions were made through discussion. This idea of being more public by default is a powerful idea and it allows organizations to move faster. #slackvteams

[adithyan-rk]

Slack Pros:

1. Cool UI (This is very important to keep-up employees' productivity)
2. Reply/ Quote feature for individual chat
3. Global Search
4. Better Support
5. Drawing feature in screenshare

Slack Cons:

1. Low Call Connectivity (We fixed this by using free Zoom subscription, do you know that you can replace default call button with zoom)
2. Remote access in video - This too taken care by Zoom
3. Cost (Just try asking them in ticket to reduce the cost, they will do it. We have had experience)

Teams Pros:

1. Together mode in Video
2. Video & Call Quality
3. Office files editing & One Drive integration

Teams Cons:

1. Worst UI/UX - Coming from slack makes teams look like Windows 98
2. Restrictions - For example: if you make a channel private, you cannot move it to public again. vice versa.
3. Conversations - Still many features like direct reply is missing.
4. Half baked Integrations without bots.
5. Remote access feature is not stable. Their support accepted this flaw and still not fixed.

Final Comments: If you are not a windows person, don't even think of Teams. Its still not matured enough as Slack. The only disadvantage of Slack is on the video/call, this can be replaced by Zoom . Our vote is for SLACK!

[tomdaoust]

Excellent. To the point. Helpful. Thanks for sharing. Note: I’m in an org that uses Teams, but I’m looking to buy stock in Slack.

[luketarbutton]

Good content - a little challenging to hear with music so loud

[irvingandralphandchester]

With Slack, I'm free to choose Linux.

[literary-spice]

Thanks for this video. I’m trying to find the good in Teams as my org is migrating to Teams from Slack. I will miss the thousands of emojis and ability to utilize any gif I can get my hands on.
I’m an organization freak though and I hear Teams is great for that.
I’m sure there’s been further updates over the last year too.

[stevebi]

Oh c'mon just say it... Slack is better. M$ copied it, then gave it away for free to try and kill the competition.

the background music is a bit annoying

[cybermonkeyusa]

I disagree with the assessment of Teams. Team's in our organization is thriving. The issue with both is it is more digital noise vying for our attention.

[samuszerosuit]

Teams has better integration with Poly Plantronics headsets so its better at least for my case.

[MonsieurDee]

With Microsoft teams can you integrate 3rd party apps?

[ruffrider]

Slack doesn’t seem to be built for business, at best a glorified forum with channels. Not meant for corporate world at all. Teams is industrial grade best in class global, corporate businesses.
In short, Slack is for fun, like for kids. Teams on the other hand is for real business, for real men. Go TEAMS !!