Overview, Benefits, and Costs of Microsoft Teams and Slack
During this entire 2020 year, many businesses, schools, and folks have had to transition from open communication to only online options. Collaboration apps like Microsoft Teams and Slack have surged in popularity over the last eight months as the majority of the United States have been under stay-at-home orders. These orders required people to adjust to virtual tools that promote social distance learning, work, and meetings.
The COVID-19 situation has also led most executives to shift towards strict remote work, chatting, and collaboration alternatives. Nonetheless, these executives have run into issues when deciding what platform to use to host video conferences, unite their workforce, and communicate within teams. Most organizations have narrowed their choice to the two most prominent remote collaboration platforms in the market today, Microsoft Teams and Slack.
It can be unclear deciding which platform offers your organization’s best ROI when just glancing at a quick summary of both. Throughout this entire 2020 year, both platforms have grown an impressive number of users and have integrated components, updates, and tools that address remote users’ needs.
Most recently, Slack has reported a total count of 12 million active users. However, Microsoft Teams has left all competition behind by surpassing 115 million daily active users, a number that has risen by 53 percent since early May when last published by Microsoft. The dominant success of Microsoft Teams is no coincidence. Their adjustments, functionality, partnerships, and enterprise flexibility has globally revolutionized digital collaboration for all users and set the bar high for other collaboration platforms. In this article, we aim to clarify which platform is best for your business by comparing the overview, benefits, and costs of Microsoft Teams and Slack.
Overview
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace with audio and video calls; it supports integration with Microsoft 365, which, as a result, creates a holistic workspace. Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork that enables teams to be more productive by giving them a single and secure location for everything a team needs: chats, meetings, calls, files, apps, and tools. Ultimately, Teams is designed to improve internal communications, provide cross-functional collaboration software, and deliver a high-performance video, chatting, and audio tool.
What is Slack?
Slack is a simple messaging platform. The slack platform is intended to support teams work together more effectively, find information, and connect their services all within an enterprise environment.
Benefits
Microsoft Teams gives you great communication options, document management and governance control, and an integrated collaboration platform package with Microsoft 365. Benefits include:
- Built-in apps including Excel, Lists, OneDrive, OneNote, Power Platform, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Stream, Planner, and more
- 250 people, 10,000 for live streaming
- Focus on text-based communication and content (e.g., workspaces with channels, file sharing, instant messaging, searchable conversations, and automation tools). You can collaborate and share documents without having to leave the team’s site.
- Access to the full suite of Microsoft desktop solutions
- Intuitive communication coverage, such as message translation, meeting recordings, transcripts, etc.
- 24/7 available on-call Microsoft support
Slack helps organize company-wide communications into sub-categories, while direct messaging allows for more intimate one-on-one. Benefits include
- Over 2,000 integration apps
- Wide range of privacy settings and channel types
- Monthly billing, so you can cancel at any time.
Cost
Microsoft Teams
- $5 per month per user
- Some extra costs (webinars)>
- Premium subscription, which costs a monthly fee of $12.50 per person, however once equipped, productivity apps and services, meetings and calls, and security are available for up to 300 users.
Slack
- Standard subscription – $6.67 user/month.
- If you look to upgrade your plan to an enterprise plan, the monthly fee will increase to $12.50 per user, plus any additional costs for added services.
It is important to note that both Teams and Slack have free options you can try out to see which is best. Additionally, Microsoft has made a free 6-month trial of Teams available to users. You can use each platform to build an inclusive environment for communication, complete with integration, and even telephony.
Conclusion: Microsoft Teams WINS
In the past few months, Slack has become famous for several valid reasons. Many workers, students, and businesses amidst this crisis have fully integrated with Slack and have found the instant messaging and video conference solutions very attractive. Nonetheless, many businesses and users have various drawbacks to Slack. These are some of the most prominent problems that Slack users face:
- Lack of technical support and unique templates
- Unequipped full suite enterprise solutions
- Limited to only chatting does not support video, audio, or other communication options
- Overwhelming content management and tedious document collaboration processes
- Pricey plan that does not include other add-on services
- Difficulty to teach new hires or new users
- Data loss prevention and backups require third party integrations
- Restricted to only storing data in the US
Microsoft teams have a tight app integration within Microsoft 365 productivity apps. Therefore, Microsoft Teams is perfect for internal collaboration. It offers straightforward prices, security, and channel solutions; it can do everything Slack can do and more. Microsoft Teams can keep your entire organization all within an intuitive, collaborative, and scalable platform.
To answer the question “Which is best for your business?” you must decide what you are looking for in a collaboration tool. If instant chatting and single team collaboration features are the most important to your organization, Slack is a viable option. However, if you are looking for a platform that can integrate with your entire workspace, support your team-environments and content management efforts, and allow for more flexibility while offering renowned security, Microsoft Teams is your best option.
Microsoft Teams is a very sophisticated modern platform that has various functionalities, tools, and collaboration options. 115 million users have taken daily steps to invest in this valuable Microsoft 365 business app; however, not everyone has received guidance or expert support to use and deploy it effectively throughout their organization. Get ahead of the curve by supporting your people now and after this quarantine.
It is no coincidence that Microsoft Teams is the number one corporate communication tool. Microsoft’s ability to listen to all users’ needs across various segments has made Teams the superior communication/collaboration platform, especially during this COVID-19 pandemic.
The inability to adapt to an in-house and remote software post-quarantine will make organizations lose effort, money, and time. No matter when, where, and how you decide to work, Microsoft Teams is the foundation for having successful internal collaboration and united company culture.
Klarinet Solutions specialize in optimizing your Microsoft Teams, implementing policies to secure your data, and developing a streamlined process that supports business objectives. If you want to hear the latest news, insightful hacks, or ways to leverage Microsoft Teams, contact us at 866.211.8191 or through email at info@klarinetsolutions.com.
