Slack vs. Teams: Which is best for your business?

Chat-based collaboration software is a must-have in today’s business environment, with Slack and Microsoft Teams the two leading options for the enterprise. The stakes couldn’t be higher — the pandemic made clear that remote work and collaboration are the future of business.

Slack, which went public back in 2019, was bought by enterprise software giant Salesforce in July 2021 for $27.7 billion. Until the acquisition, it wasn’t clear that Slack could survive against behemoth Microsoft, which has a gazillion revenue streams to rely upon and is giving Teams away for free in most Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans. But now that Slack has sugar daddy Salesforce behind it, with a valuation north of $200 billion and annual income of more than $20 billion, it can better compete.

Microsoft executive Jared Spataro has said that the company considers Teams to be as important to its future as Windows was to its past. And that was before the pandemic hit. It’s become even more important since then.

Indeed, Microsoft has been touting Teams’ growing user numbers with great fanfare, citing 250 million active daily users as of July 2021. For its part, Slack has said its own users are more actively engaged, interacting with Slack on average 120 minutes a day and overall taking more than five billion actions a week. Slack said its paid customer base was more than 177,000 in August 2021.

The winner of this competition? You. There are two excellent collaboration platforms from which to choose, both of which are constantly getting better as new features are added. But making that choice isn’t easy. In fact, some enterprises have effectively chosen not to choose.

To make your decision a little easier, we’ve compared Slack and Teams for enterprises in six categories: interface and usability; integrations; additional noteworthy differences; mobile and browser apps; security, compliance, and enterprise management; and pricing. (Note that in this story we’re looking at Teams primarily as a work hub based on text chat, not at its videoconferencing features.) Here’s what we found.

Slack vs. Teams: Interface and usability

Look and feel: Both the Slack and Teams desktop apps have easily navigated interfaces, with messaging front and center as the focus. There are some stylistic differences. Slack has a freeform, looser feel that we like but some might consider a tad chaotic. Teams has a vaguely corporate look, which feels more streamlined but generic.

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Of the two, Slack offers more customization options, with many different ways to tweak the sidebar’s look and what appears on it, such as whether to always include all direct messages, how to sort content, and so on. By comparison, Teams offers only three customization options: default (light), dark, and high contrast.

Navigation: Both clients offer their main navigation in sidebars on the left-hand side. Teams navigation is more focused on teams, while Slack puts more emphasis on channels, work areas that users create around projects, topics, or teams.

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The Teams sidebar includes icons for Activity, Chat, Teams, Files, and depending on how the organization sets it up, Calendar, Calls, and more. The Activity dashboard provides an at-a-glance overview of everything happening in your organization. You can filter the feed by ‘My Activity’ to see conversations in which you’ve been involved, a handy way to get focused. Teams’ top-line navigation includes tabs for Conversations, Files, and a team wiki.

Slack’s sidebar includes links to channels, threads, direct messages (DMs), and many more options, including “All Unreads,” which displays all unread messages in one convenient feed. The automated Slackbot, a chatbot for help, is also easily available in the sidebar. Speaking of which…

In-app help: Teams offers a Help icon at the bottom of the sidebar with links to Topics, Training, and What’s New. Each tab is well-organized, offering easily accessible help content without you having to search — although you can search, too, of course. Especially helpful on the Training tab is that each article tells you how long it will take to read, so you can decide before clicking if it’s worth your time.

But Slackbot, an in-app chatbot, gets our vote. It’s dead-simple to use. Just type a DM to Slackbot with a keyword or fully formed question and you’ll (usually) get exactly what you need within seconds. In dozens of queries, Slackbot only missed the mark once or twice in its answer.

Search: Both offer great search capabilities. But Slack search feels more robust to us, especially if you’re used to fine-tuning Gmail search results. For example, in Slack you can search using modifiers such as from:@username or before:8/31/2021.

Messaging and chat: Communication via messaging is clearly core to each product, and both do a fine job in this department. There are some differentiating features to consider:

Both offer some text formatting capabilities when writing messages. (To see these options in Slack, click the “Aa” icon below the text-entry box; in Teams, click the icon that looks like an “A” with a paintbrush over it.) But Teams provides a more word processing-like experience, with the abilities to choose a font color, select from three font sizes, insert a table, undo and redo typing, apply paragraph styles, and such. That may be overkill for some, but we appreciate these options.

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Both enable you to enliven messages with emojis. Teams offers additional options natively, such as integration with GIPHY for animated GIFs, though you can add GIFs to Slack through an app integration.

Both offer various levels of voice and video chat, natively and via app integrations, from within the apps. With Slack, your best bets for the most functionalities are via integrations with Zoom, Webex, Google Hangouts, or others. With Teams, videoconferencing is built in, but you’ve also got multiple other options, including the ability to use Microsoft’s cloud-based Phone System to call people outside your organization. Depending upon how Slack or Teams is configured, you can record video chats and calls as well as get transcriptions.

Notifications: Given how intrusive these apps can become if you let them, it’s imperative to control when, how, and how frequently they notify you.

Teams gives you granular controls over what you’re notified about — chats, mentions, replies, likes and reactions, missed calls, voicemails, and so forth. You can choose how you’d like to receive these notifications, such as via banner and email in the desktop app. You can also have messages previewed in the desktop app.

Slack doesn’t provide quite as many notification options. But we appreciate the ability to use different notification settings for a mobile device vs. your desktop and to be notified whenever someone uses a keyword you specify.

As for much-needed Do Not Disturb controls, Slack excels. You can silence incoming notifications for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, until tomorrow, until next week, or for a custom time period. You can also set a notification schedule, so you receive notifications only during the hours and days you designate.

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Teams also lets you specify quiet hours to mute all notifications, as well as designate quiet days, such as Sundays; however, these controls are available only in the Teams mobile app.

With Slack, you can automatically push notifications to mobile when you’ve been inactive on the desktop client for a specified period of time, from ‘as soon as I’m inactive’ to ‘after I’ve been inactive for 30 minutes.’ Teams lets you toggle mobile notifications on and off for Mentions, Calls, and Meetings. You can also mute mobile notifications if you’re in a meeting or using the Teams desktop app.

More features: Both frequently roll out new features. For example, last year Slack added the ability to record short audio and video clips that you can share with individuals or channels, as well as Slack Huddles, which lets you have quick, informal conversations with others in Slack. When you start a huddle, you launch a live, audio-only conversation. In huddles you can share your screen and use live captions.

For its part, Microsoft recently made its “Fluid components” available on Teams via chat. The “Fluid Framework,” of which Fluid components are a part, connects Microsoft collaboration and productivity apps by, for example, allowing elements such as tables and charts to be updated in real time by different people using different tools. In Teams, this means that users can, among other things, update a shared to-do list in Teams at the same time a colleague is working on it in Outlook.

Top takeaway: For us, the standouts in the interface and usability category are Slackbot’s in-app help, Slack’s customization options, and Teams’ message formatting. So, we’re giving Slack a slight edge over Teams here. 

Slack vs. Teams: Integrations

While each product does a lot on its own, Slack and Teams both rely upon integrations with other apps and services to extend their functionality. There are some noteworthy differences to consider, particularly regarding integration with productivity suites.  

Teams is the winner for Microsoft 365/Office 365 app integration. Not surprisingly, Teams lets you integrate apps from the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 suite. While working in Teams, you have full creating, editing, and formatting capabilities in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others and can collaborate with colleagues on a file in real time. The deep integration with Microsoft OneDrive/SharePoint and Office applications worked well in our tests and makes a lot of sense for organizations embedded in Microsoft’s ecosystem. Teams also has deep integrations with Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s CRM platform.

Slack offers Microsoft integrations as well, including Outlook calendar, and email, OneDrive and SharePoint, but they don’t go nearly as far as Teams’ Microsoft 365 integrations.

Slack is the pick for Google Workspace integration. On the other hand, Slack provides integrations with a variety of Google apps, including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Google Sheets. Teams doesn’t do any of that, or even the most basic of integrations.

Slack excels at Salesforce integration. Unsurpisingly, Slack integrates well with Salesforce, which bought the company in July 2021. A Slack app for Salesforce lets you view Slack messages associated with a Salesforce record, send Salesforce records to Slack, and set up record alerts in Slack channels. And a Salesforce app for Slack lets you add Slack messages to Salesforce records and send relevant Salesforce alerts to Slack channels. Salesforce has announced numerous additional Slack integrations coming in 2022, including with Salesforce CMS, Salesforce Education Cloud, and Salesforce Financial Services Cloud.

Teams integration with Salesforce doesn’t go as deep, although it does let Salesforce users update Salesforce records from within Teams and chat in Teams about topics related to their sales pipeline and service cases, among other capabilities.

Slack offers way more third-party app integrations. Slack (launched in 2013) had a running start on Teams (which debuted in 2017), and it shows in terms of integrations. Slack integrates with 2,400+ commercial, third-party apps compared to about 700 for Teams.

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Both Slack and Microsoft Teams enable customers to build their own custom apps and integrations. According to Slack, 935,000 custom apps built by customers were used in a typical week as of September 2021. Microsoft enables custom apps and integrations via its Power Platform developer tools.

Top takeaways: If you’re a ‘best-in-breed’ believer who wants the right tool for the job and doesn’t like going too deeply into any one vendor’s ecosystem, Slack is your best choice. That said, Teams’ integration with Microsoft 365 apps is excellent and should be strongly considered if you’re a Microsoft shop. 

Slack vs. Teams: Additional noteworthy differentiators

Slack and Teams developers are hard at work, perpetually cooking up new features to set their product apart. Thus, a complete list of notable differentiators would be too long to include. But here are some that impressed us.

Slack’s shared channels feature makes it super-easy to connect your company’s Slack workspaces to an external partner’s Slack workspace for seamless collaboration. Participants from outside your organization are clearly identifiable by their company logo embedded in their profile picture.

With Teams, it’s more complicated to chat with people outside your organization. You can add external access or guest access to outside parties. External access lets you communicate via voice or video chat and set up meetings with other organizations that use Teams, Skype for Business, or Skype. Guest access lets you add an individual outside your domain to channels, as well as communicate with them via calls or files.

Microsoft has announced its own shared channels feature for Teams, called Teams Connect. However, it’s not yet widely available, and has been in a private preview since it was announced in March 2021.

Slack can scale broadly. Slack can support an unlimited number of users per organization and channels per workspace and more than 100,000 users on a channel. (Slack says that no customer has ever reached the limit of users per channel.)

Teams also supports an unlimited number of users per organization; each team can have up to 25,000 participants, with 200 channels per team and 5,000 users on a channel.

Teams offers capabilities designed to help firstline workers who handle service- and task-oriented duties in retail, hospitality, travel, and manufacturing. The features are designed to make it easy for workers to clock in and out on their mobile devices, share their location and perform other tasks specific to their duties. Slack isn’t far behind, offering app integrations for firstline workers such as AttendanceBot, which helps manage time tracking, tracking breaks and lunches, hourly bill syncing, employee shift planning, and so on.

Teams offers an integrated Wiki feature for notes, which is helpful for pooling knowledge from team members. Slack offers team knowledge gathering through app integrations such as Guru, a bot for capturing and sharing information.

Teams offers message translation in 36 languages, so you can more easily communicate with colleagues who speak different languages. Slack takes a different approach, integrating with a number of translation apps, such as the real-time Rozetta Translator bot.   

Top takeaway: In our view, Slack has a few more notable differentiators than Teams, such as shared channels. At whatever point Microsoft releases Microsoft Teams Connect generally, however, that differentiator will no longer exist. At that point, we’ll consider this a tie. Which is better for you will depend on which capabilities your organization needs more.

Slack vs. Teams: Mobile and web apps

Some desktop applications shed features and capabilities in their web and/or mobile OS versions. In our tests, that’s not the case with either Teams or Slack. We found that the web apps looked and performed just like the desktop apps — they work essentially the same. Both Slack and Teams replicate the desktop experience reasonably well in their mobile apps too.

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Most importantly, you shouldn’t have to learn a different way to do things in the mobile versions of Slack or Teams, and you don’t — unlike the experience you get with, say, Microsoft Word’s desktop client vs. its mobile app.

There are some interface differences that are designed to accommodate a smaller, touch-enabled mobile device screen, of course. If you mouse over a message in Slack’s desktop client, for instance, you can add a reaction, start a thread, share the message and so on. On mobile, you tap and hold down a message to perform those same actions.

Top takeaway: This category is a tie; Slack and Teams both do an excellent job of maintaining a consistent feel across devices.

Slack vs. Teams: Security, compliance, and enterprise management

In terms of security, compliance, and enterprise management, there are lingering assumptions that Teams is the stronger choice given Microsoft’s much longer tenure in the enterprise. And if you’re an enterprise user of Office apps, you are getting top-notch security, compliance and enterprise management controls with Teams — especially if you’re a Microsoft 365 subscriber.

But these days, Slack and Teams both cover many of the expected security and compliance basics, though in some cases the features are native to the platform and in others, they’re through integrations. For example, both apps encrypt data in transit and at rest and support region-based data residency, data loss prevention, eDiscovery and legal hold, mobile application management, single sign-on, and the ability to require two-factor authentication — although some of those features are available only with higher-tier plans. (See the “Slack vs. Teams feature comparison” table below for more details.)

Slack is upping its game in this area, too, with the Enterprise Key Management add-on tool for its top-tier Slack Enterprise Grid plan. EKM enables organizations to use their own keys for encrypting messages and files shared within Slack. Also for Enterprise Grid, Slack has mobile security features that let admins configure Slack to require additional layers of security after single sign-on, such as Face ID and Touch ID on iOS.

Top takeaway: Slack offers what most small to midsize businesses (SMBs) may need in terms of security, compliance, and admin controls and is continually bolstering its security posture. But Microsoft Teams — by virtue of its integration with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 — may be the best bet for large enterprises.

Slack vs. Teams: Plans and pricing

Slack and Teams both offer free plans. Teams’ plan, which requires a free Microsoft account but not a paid Microsoft subscription, provides a fairly generous number of features: unlimited messages, meetings, and search; support for up to 500 internal and external users; 2GB of file storage per user and 10GB of shared storage; one-to-one audio and video chat; screen sharing; unlimited app integrations; two-factor authentication; and data encryption.

Slack’s free plan is more restrictive, allowing you to have up to 10,000 messages; 10 apps and integrations; one-to-one video calls; and two-factor authentication.

Beyond that, Slack plans start at $6.67 per user per month for the Pro plan and $12.50 per user per month for the Business+ plan. (Both are billed annually.) Pricing for the Enterprise Grid plan, which is meant for large organizations that want to support multiple interconnected workspaces, is available only by contacting Slack sales. Paid plans offer unlimited messages and integrations; screen sharing; guest access; shared channels; advanced search; and a range of security, compliance, support, and administrative capabilities that expand with each tier.

Microsoft offers a head-spinning number of business subscription plans that include Teams: the company’s Microsoft 365 small-business plans and Office 365 enterprise plans cost from $5 per user per month to $35 per user per month and add several capabilities to Teams itself — such as scheduled meetings; meeting recording; single sign-on and other security, compliance, and administration features — along with the rest of the apps and services in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Microsoft 365 enterprise plans, which cost from $32 per user per month to $57 per user per month, add Windows and advanced security management into the mix.

The differences in what you get with each company’s plans make an apples-to-apples comparison difficult. One way to look at pricing differences between the two is to consider what $12.50 per user per month gets you:

• From Microsoft, you get the Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription, which includes Teams with all its features including meetings and video calls for up to 300 people, plus Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and OneDrive for Business, plus the Windows-only Publisher and Access apps.
• From Slack, you get a Business+ subscription, which supports unlimited users and includes more Slack features than the Pro plan but fewer than the Enterprise Grid plan — and no productivity apps.

Top takeaways: Based on pricing, Teams has a significant advantage that could grow even stronger if the economy slows and IT spending contracts. If you’re already getting Teams included in an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 subscription, you may find it difficult to justify to your bosses why the company should also pay for Slack, despite its many great features.

If your organization has settled on Google Workspace or another office suite instead of Office, however, Teams’ cost advantage disappears. And if your company uses Salesforce, you may want to opt for Slack for the superior integrations — and expect even closer integration as time goes on.

Slack vs. Teams: Feature comparison

Final recommendations

As we mentioned earlier, some companies use both Slack and Teams. But that approach adds complexity and cost and isn’t a viable option for most organizations. If that’s true for you, here are our recommendations:

When it comes down to it, Slack and Teams are more alike than they differ. In many cases, both offer some version of the same features, either natively or through an app integration. And if one is missing a feature you need, chances are it will be added sooner than later, given the heated rivalry. The one thing you should pay attention to is: how much will an integrated service add to your total cost?

If you’re already deep in the Microsoft 365 world, Teams is a great choice. If nothing else, give Teams a sustained trial before deciding.

That said, a growing subset of Microsoft 365 customers are using Slack. According to data from access management platform Okta, 32% of its customers that use Microsoft 365 also use Slack, up from 32% in 2020, 31% in 2019 and 28% in 2018. And of Slack’s enterprise customers, 76% are also Microsoft 365 customers, according to data from Slack’s analytics team.

If you’re not beholden to Microsoft, you want to avoid vendor lock-in, you’re a Google Workspace shop, or you’re heavily invested in Salesforce, Slack is the way to go. It’s an excellent choice for those who prefer a “best-in-breed” technology stack, and it’s particularly popular among SMBs and tech companies.

This article was originally published in December 2019 and updated in February 2022.