Following the announcement made in early December 2020 that Salesforce—one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors—had acquired Slack for a whopping $27.7 billion, the supremacy battle has heightened even further. So who is king, you ask? Here are five reasons why Microsoft Teams is better than Slack.
1. Cost Comparison
Both Microsoft Teams and Slack are unbelievably powerful enterprise collaboration tools. If you are a small business looking for a collaboration platform to test drive, platforms offer free plans. However, bigger and growing teams will feel the limitations that come with these free plans.
When it comes to paid plans, Microsoft Teams gives you three pricing plans to choose from. To receive a broader range of features, different productivity apps, and secure cloud services, then you should consider one of three other Microsoft 365 paid plans.
The Microsoft Teams Business Essentials Plan that costs $5.00 per month gives 1TB per user for OneDrive personal file storage, file attachments in chat, and file sharing within Microsoft Teams and channels. The plan also adds administration capabilities, security and compliance, and extra Office 365 services like Yammer, SharePoint Online, Planner, and Stream.
Slack also comes with three paid pricing plans. To access Microsoft Teams productivity apps, external collaboration, administrative features, you’ll have to invest in one of Slack’s other three paid plans.
Slack’s Standard Plan of $6.67 per user per month gives you unlimited message history, unlimited integrations, and file storage of 10GB per user. It also comes with external collaboration and security capabilities.
If you’re a small company looking to save some money, then Microsoft Teams standard plan is best price-wise. At only $5.00 per month, Microsoft Teams is cheaper than Slack and offers more features than Slack as it integrates with Office 365. For this reason, in terms of cost, we say Microsoft Teams gives you the best value for your money.
2. User Interface
When choosing a collaborative work platform, you want to ask yourself: How will this platform improve work within my team? Slack seems to have focused intensely on this question because it has a UI to be envied.
Not only is it visually appealing with bright colors, but it gives you or your workers an impeccably intuitive layout, striving for nothing other than usability. It has simplified navigation, customizable sidebars, and still, it has a step-by-step tutorial to help you get up to speed.
However, aesthetic appeals aside, when it comes to collaborative work platforms, the essential distinguishing factor for an exemplary user interface is its ability to guarantee a seamless work experience. Simply put, the less you need to leave the site to get work done, the better.
While the Microsoft Teams user interface might seem tricky for newcomers to navigate, it provides an uninterrupted workflow as the interface combines all collaboration tools and other Microsoft 365 productivity applications in a single dashboard.
Having all things in one place does come in handy, especially when trying to beat deadlines or sync deliverables for a specific project. On this, Microsoft Teams stands out in comparison to Slack.
3. Core Capabilities
When it boils down to the core capabilities, Microsoft Teams and Slack are almost equal. They offer channel-based messaging, audio and video conferencing, detailed message search features, storage, and more.
The difference, however, becomes visible when you analyze what you get with each plan. Taking the free version, for instance:
With Microsoft Teams, you can search your entire message history, while on Slack, you can only search up to 10,000 archived messages. Microsoft Teams also allows you to share your screen by default, while on Slack, you must upgrade to enable screen sharing. Most notably, with Microsoft Teams, you get video and voice calls for up to 300 users for the paid plan and up to 20 users for the free plan, while Slack only offers one-to-one video and voice calls.
This breakdown may not fully detail the capabilities of either platform. But, short as the list may be, it still shows that Microsoft Teams is in the lead.
4. Seamless Integrations
Microsoft Teams and Slack have tons of integrations that aim at improving user experience. Slack is definitely in the lead for app-related integrations with well over 1,500 third-party apps for users to make their pick, while Microsoft Teams only has half of that.
But remember, the whole point behind collaborative office platforms is to make sure that you and your employees can stay on the platform for as long as possible and be fully productive during this period.
It is at this point that Microsoft Teams gives Slack a thorough whooping. Because of Microsoft Teams’ integration to Office 365, you can access pretty much everything you need without having to leave. This isn’t the case on Slack, since most of the apps it links to are third-party apps hosted outside the platform.
5. Security and Data Protection
If ever there was a word that could best describe Microsoft’s stronghold, it would be security. Microsoft Teams is no different. The platform is close to impenetrable as far as breaches are concerned.
It comes complete with a list of security measures such as end-to-end encryption, secure real-time transport protocol technology for video and audio data, multi-factor authentication, rights management services support, and privacy policy.
Even though Slack also shares some of these security features, Microsoft Teams is a step ahead as it provides admin controls that are more extensive than other platforms. Microsoft also uses its security protections, such as data loss prevention (DLP) and encryption, to keep your company’s most important information safe. It also has robust security controls to limit who can access chat rooms and what they can do within them.
Can Slack Beat Microsoft Teams?
Following Slack’s acquisition by Salesforce, things are bound to get feisty in the arena of work stream collaboration business. Slack already has extensive applications in the marketplace, and its UI is the benchmark for industry standards.
At the same time, Microsoft Teams users by far get the best value for their cash, have uninterrupted work time courtesy of the Microsoft 365 stack, and can sleep soundly knowing they’ve got robust security. We dare say that as it stands, Microsoft Teams is basking in the glory of being the leading software in the workplace collaboration space.
