Slack vs. Microsoft Teams - Which offers more functionality?

While Slack may have been a small start-up newcomer on the scene as little as five years ago, it’s risen to prominence of association: when on the topic of collaborative solutions, Slack is always on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

While not as flashy as Slack, there’s another powerful collaboration platform on the market — Microsoft Teams. Let’s compare the two:

SLACK VS TEAMS: FEATURES

In terms of standard available features, Microsoft Teams wins hands down. This comparison is a little unfair however; Teams is a service available through the Microsoft Office 365 environment, a comprehensive business solutions sweet with enterprise level functionality.

Through Office 365, you can gain access to all Office products (Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access) and all Office Services (Teams, Exchange, OneDrive, and Sharepoint).  Comparing Slack to an entire enterprise-level solution should be unfair, and it would be, if not for one key detail: a fully-functional slack experience costs $12.50 per user per month.

Microsoft Office 365 costs the same amount of money per user per month, but with much more functionality attached to its cost.

While both Teams and Slack offer chat, audio, video, conference calls, high levels of security, and file sharing, Teams offers a key feature that Slack does not: recording. Through any meeting held in Teams, you can record all audio and video, which is automatically uploaded to Microsoft Streams - from which it can be downloaded, edited, and distributed however you see fit. This makes it perfect for recording training sessions.

Microsoft Teams also allows you to host up to ten thousand (!) participants in a meeting — Slack offers video calls for up to fifteen participants.

SLACK VS TEAMS: INTEGRATIONS

Both Slack and Teams offer high levels of integration — but Teams was designed to integrate specifically with Office 365.

While Teams can easily integrate with project management applications like Trello or Asana, and CRMs like Salesforce and Zendesk, Slack was designed to do one thing and do it well: provide a space for collaboration through communication.

Because Slack is highly specialized, it offers a great environment for integrations: rarely if ever will you find clashing functionalities, and it was designed with third party integrations in mind. This affords you the option to find highly specialized solutions for every aspect of your business — which, while nice, can lead to high monthly expenses, and failure-prone environments.

These Slack integrations only come into play, of course, when your team is small enough to favor Slack over Teams.

SLACK VS TEAMS: EASE OF USE

Navigability is an oft over-looked aspect of functionality — your employees are only functioning at full capacity when they are able to use their tools properly — and collaboration software has just jumped to the most used tool in everyone’s tool belt.

In the terms of instant messaging, Slack wins out when it comes to ease of use. Slack boasts a very clean user interface (UI), and because of this, has an edge against Teams.

When it comes to creating, hosting, and managing virtual meetings, however, Teams is the clear winner. This is for two reasons: A company using Slack can only host meetings with fifteen participants, and Microsoft Outlook’s meeting scheduler automatically provides Teams Meeting integration via a single click.

When it comes to file sharing and storage, Teams is once again the victor. Teams comes standard with OneDrive and Sharepoint Integration, so it’s simply a matter of one click to find, store, and share files with your coworkers.

SLACK VS TEAMS: WHO WINS?

As it goes with most things in life, there is no right answer one hundred percent of the time. If your company is small (as in under fifteen employees small), Slack may be the best fit for you; just be careful over your monthly spend rising as you add integrations to improve your functionality.

If your business is already part of the Office 365 environment, Teams is the obvious choice. And if your company has over fifteen employees, and wants to host a company-wide meeting, Teams will be able to provide a solution while Slack won’t. These strikes against Slack would be forgivable if it cost less than Teams — but the fact that both Slack and Teams cost the same per user per month seals the deal.

In terms of looks, Slack is the winner. In terms of functionality, power, and price, Teams comes out on top.