Today’s business environment requires chat-based collaboration software, and Slack and Microsoft Teams are the two most popular choices. Business collaboration and remote work are the future. The pandemic has made this clear.
A year after going public in 2019, Slack was acquired by enterprise software giant Salesforce for $27.7 billion in July 2021. Microsoft, whose Office 365 and Microsoft 365 plans include Teams for free, had a gazillion revenue streams to rely on until Slack was acquired. Slack can now better compete now that it has Salesforce behind it, with a valuation of more than $200 billion and annual revenues exceeding $20 billion.
As important as Windows was to Microsoft’s past, Microsoft executive Jared Spataro believes Teams will be to its future. The pandemic had not yet hit. As a result, its importance has increased.
Team users are on the rise, and Microsoft has touted 250 million active users as of July 2021. The Slack user community is more active as well, on average interacting with Slack 120 minutes per day and taking more than five billion actions per week. As of August 2021, Slack had more than 177,000 paid customers.
Which winner will take home the prize? It’s you. Both collaboration platforms are excellent, and they’re constantly improving with new features. Choosing between the two isn’t an easy task. There are some enterprises that have effectively avoided making a choice.
Slack and Teams for enterprise have been compared in six categories: interface and usability; integrations; notable differences; mobile and browser apps; security, compliance, and enterprise management; and pricing. The following is a summary of what we found by examining Teams primarily as a text-based workspace rather than its videoconferencing capabilities.
Slack vs Teams: Interface and usability
Look and feel: Slack and Teams both feature easily navigable desktop apps that focus on messaging. Differences in style can be observed. Some might consider Slack to be a tad chaotic, given its freeform nature. This app is more streamlined than its competitors, but it still feels like it’s generic, with a vaguely corporate appearance.
Aside from offering more customization options, Slack offers a wide range of options for customizing the look and what appears in its sidebar, such as excluding all direct messages, sorting content, etc. The customization options offered by Teams are limited to three: default (light), dark, and high contrast.
Navigation: Both clients have left-hand sidebars for their main navigation. Slack places greater emphasis on channels, work areas created around projects, topics, or teams. Teams navigation is more focused on teams, while Slack emphasizes channels.
A team’s sidebar includes icons for Activity, Chat, Teams, Files, as well as Calendar, Calls, and more, depending on how it is configured. Your Activity dashboard gives you a quick view of what is taking place in your organization. A handy way to get focused is to filter the feed by ‘My Activity’ so you only see conversations in which you’ve participated. Conversations, Files, and a team wiki are all available from Teams’ top-line navigation.
Aside from channels, threads, direct messages (DMs), Slack’s sidebar includes a list of unseen messages, including “All Unreads.” You can also access Slackbot in the sidebar, an automated chatbot. In that regard…
In-app help: Teams offers links to Topics, Training, and What’s New at the bottom of the sidebar. In addition to being well organized, each tab provides easy access to help content – although you are welcome to search as well. Training tab articles include a reading time estimate, so you can decide before clicking whether it’s worth the effort.
The voting goes to Slackbot, which is an in-app chatbot. The interface is dead-simple. Slackbot will (usually) respond within seconds if you type a keyword or fully formed question into a DM. There were only a few times when Slackbot got it wrong in its replies out of dozens of queries.
Search: Both are excellent at searching. Slack search feels more robust, particularly for those who are used to customizing Gmail search results. Slack, for example, lets you search by from:@username or before:8/31/2021.
Messaging and chat: Both products do a good job in communicating via messaging. Consider these features as differentiators:
Messages can be formatted in both programs. You can see these options in Slack and Teams by clicking the “Aa” icon below the text box; in Teams, click the paintbrush icon next to the “A” icon. Nevertheless, Teams offers a more word processing-like interface, as you can choose a font color, choose a font size, insert a table, undo and redo typing, apply paragraph styles, etc. We appreciate these options, but some may find them overkill.
It is possible to use emojis in both applications. Slack offers GIFs through an app integration, however Teams offers additional options natively, such as an integration with GIPHY.
Voice and video chat are available in both apps, natively and through app integrations. You’ll get the most functionality with Slack when you integrate it with Zoom, Webex, Google Hangouts, or others. Microsoft Teams has videoconferencing built in, but it also has a number of other features, including the ability to call people outside your organization using its cloud-based phone system. Video chats and calls can be recorded and transcribed depending on how Slack or Teams is configured.
Notifications: You should control when, how, and how often these apps notify you, given how intrusive they can be.
There is granular control over how and when you receive notifications – chats, mentions, replies, likes, reactions, missed calls, voicemails, etc. Depending on how you prefer to receive notifications, you can choose to receive them via banner or email on your desktop. The desktop app also allows you to preview messages.
In comparison with Slack, there are fewer options for notifications. Our team appreciates the ability to configure different notification settings for mobile devices and desktops, as well as to receive notifications whenever a keyword is entered.
The Do Not Disturb controls in Slack are much needed. If you want your notifications to be silenced for 30 minutes, one hour, two hours, until tomorrow, until next week, or for a custom time period, you can do so. You can also schedule notifications so that you receive them only during specific times and days.
Also, Teams lets you mute all notifications during quiet hours, as well as designate quiet days, such as Sundays; however, they are only available in the Teams mobile app.
When you’re inactive on the desktop client for a specified period of time, Slack can send you notifications on your mobile device automatically, ranging from ‘right away’ to ‘after 30 minutes’. In Teams, you can toggle between receiving mobile notifications for Mentions, Calls, and Meetings. The Teams desktop app and meeting app both allow you to mute mobile notifications.
More features: Both regularly release new features. The Slack Huddle feature, for instance, allows users to have quick, informal conversations with others within Slack. Last year, Slack added short audio and video clips that could be shared with individuals or channels. During a huddle, audio-only conversations are held live. Live captioning is available in huddles.
For its part, Microsoft recently introduced its “Fluid components” to Teams via chat. By connecting Microsoft collaboration and productivity apps through the Fluid Framework, in which Fluid components are a part, Fluid components, for example, allow different people to update elements like tables and charts in real time using different tools, thereby connecting Microsoft collaboration and productivity apps. Among other things, in Teams, users can work on a shared to-do list simultaneously with a colleague in Outlook, which allows them to update the list in Teams at the same time.
Top takeaway: Teams’ message formatting and Slack’s customizability options stand out in the interface and usability category. Slack wins this comparison over Teams by a small margin.
Slack vs Teams: Integrations
Both Slack and Teams do a great deal on their own, but they are enhanced by integrations with other apps and services. Particularly when it comes to integration with productivity suites, there are some notable differences to consider.
Teams is the winner for Microsoft 365/Office 365 app integration. As expected, Teams allows you to integrate apps from Microsoft Office 365. Work on a file in real-time with colleagues and create, edit, and format it in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and others while collaborating in Teams. It made sense for organizations that are embedded within Microsoft’s ecosystem to have deep integration with OneDrive/SharePoint and Office apps. Microsoft’s CRM platform Dynamics 365 also integrates well with Teams.
Despite Teams’ Microsoft 365 integrations, Slack also offers Microsoft integrations, such as Outlook calendar, email, OneDrive, and SharePoint.
Slack is the pick for Google Workspace integration. Alternatively, Slack integrates with Google applications, such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Google Sheets. The simplest of integrations aren’t available in Teams.
Slack excels at Salesforce integration. In July 2021, Salesforce acquired Slack, and the two have been integrating well ever since. You can set up record alerts in Slack channels when Salesforce records are published to Slack, view Salesforce records in Slack, and send Salesforce records to Slack. Adding Slack messages to Salesforce records and sending Salesforce alerts to Slack channels are both possible with a Salesforce app for Slack. Slack will be integrated with Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Education Cloud, and Salesforce Financial Services Cloud in 2022, according to Salesforce.
Despite having a limited Salesforce integration, Teams allows Salesforce users to update Salesforce records from within Teams and chat about sales pipelines and service cases from Teams.
Slack offers way more third-party app integrations. It shows when it comes to integrations, as Slack (which launched in 2013) had a headstart on Teams (which debuted in 2017). About 700 apps are integrated with Teams versus 2,400 with Slack.
Customers can build custom apps and integrations for both Slack and Microsoft Teams. At the end of September 2021, 935,000 custom apps built by customers were used on a typical week by Slack users. Power Platform developer tools enable Microsoft to create custom apps and integrations.
Takeaways: Slack is your best choice if you’re a ‘best-of-breed’ believer who doesn’t want to get too deep into one vendor’s ecosystem. In spite of this, Microsoft 365 apps are well integrated with Teams, so it’s worth considering if you use Microsoft products.
