When Microsoft decided not to acquire Slack in 2016 and instead come up with their own collaboration app called Microsoft Teams, it meant war. 🥊

And it’s a close one!

Sure, if you compare Slack vs Microsoft Teams, it’s hard to spot a difference at first glance. 

However, each one can offer you something a little different when you look closer. 👀

Confused about which side to take in this Slack vs Microsoft Teams war? 

In this article, we’ll do a detailed Microsoft Teams vs Slack comparison to help you pick one. 

(We’ll also reveal the best alternative for these two apps.) 🤫

Ready for the showdown? Let’s begin.

Microsoft Teams vs Slack

There’s no denying that Slack and Microsoft Teams have identical features.

However, they do have some key differences too. 

Ready to find out? 

Let’s turn up the heat for this Slack vs Microsoft Teams battle. 🔥🔥🔥

1. User interface

A cluttered user interface is like a highly detailed clothing label. 

All you want to know is the size of the sweater, but instead, you could end up learning about the sheep that sourced the wool before you find the information you were looking for. 🙈

In short, keep it simple. 

Here’s what most users feel about these apps’ interfaces: 

A. Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams’ user interface feels pretty similar to that of Slack. 

*Psst* It looks like someone took some Slack inspiration.

If you’re a new user, you can get some onboarding help with its docs and tutorials.

The option to create embedded teams keeps conversations more organized. 

A big plus for companies with large teams. ➕➕➕

But if you like things to be more colorful, Microsoft Teams has only three theme options: dark gray, black, and white.

If you want to mix and match or tweak certain colors, you’re out of luck! 

B. Slack

On the other hand, the Slack workspace contains a user interface that is quite sleek and has become the industry standard. You have several color theme options to customize the app’s look to suit your preferences. 

As a new Slack user, you won’t need to watch boring tutorials to learn how to use the features because the app is quite intuitive and user-friendly. 

Slack isn’t slacking here. 😉

Additionally, it’s pretty easy to send a message to another user or team. Just tag teammates or channels and use the shortcuts to get things done on the fly. 

Team members remain engaged and stimulated with Slack’s ability to allow user customization. Unlike Microsoft Teams which has only three theme options: dark gray, black, and white, in Slack, remote employees enjoy channel personalization for each team. Having a specific channel that you only use for vital internal communications can ensure that all questions and queries also go through there so it is easy to find and read.

It’s incredibly easy to follow conversations with features like “Threads” (which Teams doesn’t offer) that allows you to reply to specific messages in a channel and start a private discussion relevant to it.

2. Channels and meetings

Back from your holiday? 

Now imagine the pain of searching through endless email threads just to find relevant work stuff. 😅

Luckily, with ‘teams’ in Microsoft Teams or ‘channels’ in Slack, finding all work-related conversations is easy because they’re all on one platform.

But just how good are Microsoft Teams and Slack at doing this? 🤔

A. Microsoft Teams 

In Microsoft Teams, a user can create sub-teams for better data management. You can even have a private channel within a team and control access to confidential X files. 

When it comes to meetings, you can make 60-minute audio or video calls with the free plan. 

You can also record meetings and use screen sharing for a better call experience. 

B. Slack

On the other hand, Slack doesn’t let you create channels within channels. 😒

Admins, good luck managing a zillion collaboration channels. 

For meetings, Slack users can only opt for one-on-one audio and video calling in its free plan.

Microsoft wins this round. 

3. Integrations

Collaboration software is truly worthy if it supports other productivity apps. It helps you do it all from a single platform. 

Which of these two apps can be a jack of all t̶r̶a̶d̶e̶s̶ apps?

Microsoft Teams Integrations	Slack Integrations
Thriv Cloud Zoom Wiki Yammer Trello	Thriv Cloud Asana Zoom Salesforce Zendesk

As of July 2021, Microsoft Teams offers an app integration with 700+ popular apps. 

And if you’re an Office 365 user, Microsoft Teams seems like the obvious choice. 

On the other hand…

Slack integration has over 2400 other apps available in its ecosystem. 

It even offers integration with every Microsoft product. 

A total integration powerhouse! 😎

4. Pricing

Whenever you’re comparing tools, you can’t leave out their prices, right?

Let’s take a look at which one is more friendly on your wallet:

Microsoft Teams Pricing 💸	Slack Pricing 💸
Free plan: unlimited message search, guest access, and 100 meeting participants	Free plan: search from 10,000 recent messages, 5GB file storage, audio, and video calls
Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan ($5 per user per month): 300 participants, meeting recordings, and 1TB file storage	Pro plan ($6.67 per month): unlimited integrations, group audio and video conferencing with 15 members, 10GB file storage per user
Microsoft 365 Business Standard plan ($12.50 per user per month): 300 participants, 1TB personal file storage, and access to any Microsoft Office desktop app	Business+ plan ($12.50 per month): unlimited message history, 20GB storage/team member, and 24/7 support

Teams vs Slack on Reddit

We took to Reddit to see where people land on Teams vs Slack. When you search Teams vs Slack on Reddit, many users agree that the overall user experience of Slack is better than Microsoft Teams.

“Slack wins on UI and has a better chat flow. Teams wins in price, integrations, and audio/video capabilities.”

Other Reddit users noted that despite Slack’s better UI and UX, if you’re going to be video conferencing, Teams is the clear winner:

“Teams is by far the best for video calls/meetings, it hands down beats slack in every way, shape and form there.

👉 Related: Slack vs Google Hangouts

Microsoft Teams Features

Microsoft Teams is a popular collaboration and communication tool that is a part of the Microsoft Office 365 suite. 

Apart from instant messaging, you can use this tool to make audio and video calls, share documents, take meeting notes, etc. 

Here are some of its best features. ✨

1. Teams

For effortless collaboration, Microsoft Teams lets you create ‘teams‘ for different projects or groups. Moreover, if you work in a large company, you can create teams within teams to keep the conversations more organized. 

You can even bold, italicize, or underline your messages in these teams, just like you do in Word. 

And while you interact and work in your team’s space, you can tag people to capture their attention. 

Our government client uses Teams which works really well for team meetings and concurrent chats. Participants can easily share their screen and transfer the sharing capability with the click of a button.

With Teams, it’s easy to manage larger team meeting participation because the ‘hand’ is raised feature allows the organizer to call on people, eliminating the talk on top of each other approach, or better yet, getting interrupted as a speaker. That feature alone is worth it!

2. Connected apps

Another key feature that makes Microsoft Teams a great tool is its MS Office 365 integration. 

When you create a team, a dedicated Office 365 group will be formed for you. This functionality allows access to file sharing across all the Office 365 suite apps from a single platform.

This way, Microsoft Teams users can work together on Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations, etc., in real-time.  

Microsoft Teams is a great choice for companies like us that already pay for Office 365. We share Office 365 files and work on them together in the workspace. Slack does not come with that option, so in order to edit documents, you have to download them and share them again.

Aside from that, Microsoft Teams also comes with a real time translation functionality, while Slack is only available in English. This really helps in reducing language barriers especially when working with employees from other parts of the world.

3. Audio and video conferencing

Microsoft Teams allows you to have one-on-one calls with anyone in your organization. 

And if you need to address a larger team, no worries.

You can host meetings with up to 100 attendees in the free version and host live events with up to 10,000 attendees, including employees and guests, when you upgrade to the paid plan!

Can it get any better? Yep. 

You can make calls more productive with meeting recordings, blur your background for better focus, schedule meetings, etc.  

4. Screen sharing

A Microsoft Teams user can collaborate from anywhere and on any device with the screen sharing option. You can even control what you want others to see or not see.👀 

Whether you want to give a product demo or conduct a town hall, you can keep everyone on the same page with screen-sharing functionality. 💻↔️💻

Not sure if Microsoft Teams can contribute to your team spirit? 

Now, let’s take a deeper look at one of those alternatives, Slack. 

Slack Features

The Slack app is one of the fastest-growing channel-based collaboration software today. 

It offers instant messaging, easy file sharing, and thoughtful accessibility features.

This platform even has a clever bot to send automated responses on your behalf while you’re busy photographing your cat for being the cutest one ever. 😼

Let’s look at the top features of the Slack messaging app: 

1. Organized channels

While the Microsoft Teams app lets you create channels within teams, Slack organizes all conversations under channels. According to Slack, “there’s nothing like too many channels.”

With the Slack app, you can easily create public and private channels based on topics, projects, office locations, etc.

You can use channels to send instant messages to teammates when the eureka moment hits.💡 Add funny work memes, quirky emojis, and gifs to make conversations fun.

Tired of flooded inboxes?

With Slack, each channel gets its unique email address in the paid version. 

You can push emails directly to a channel instead of forwarding them to every team member with this functionality. Good riddance, cc and bcc. 

Our marketing team is mostly made of people under the age of 25, and Slack is the key to our outstanding communication. We have over 20 channels that we use regularly. One of them (#marketing-casual-fun) is a place where we share memes or silly screenshots from work. This keeps the environment lively and lighthearted.

More importantly, the channels allow us to quickly switch from one mindset to another depending on the context and the people in each channel. Further, the push notifications and speed of Slack make sending a reply seem effortless. So, unlike Teams, we don’t hesitate to immediately respond to a Slack message, whereas a Teams message may involve hesitation.

2. Collaboration with external teams

Slack’s connect feature offers unlimited external collaboration in its paid version. This way, you can keep clients in the loop about project updates.  

Goodbye, confusing and misplaced email threads. 👋

You can move confidential conversations with any external user like vendors, clients, and agencies to Slack channels, making collaboration a piece of cake. 

3. Automations

Want to increase your productivity and save time on routine work? 

Use Slack’s workflow builder to automate everyday tasks like sharing updates or creating standard request processes. You can also integrate with apps like Zapier to automate workflows. 

For us, the big benefit of using Slack is Slackbot. When we were first setting up our Slack team and hiring new members, we noticed a lot of repetitive questions that needed quick answers. Slackbot told us it could answer those questions when they came up—all we had to do was enter the right responses and the program would take care of the rest.

Having that AI in the background to help us get the most out of Slack really appealed to us. I use Slackbot to set reminders, ping users when they’re mentioned in channels they’re not a part of, and get quick responses when I have a question about the software itself. That intuitiveness set this program apart from Microsoft’s competing product.

4. Audio and video calling

Not everyone is a chat person. 

For this reason, the Slack platform offers one-to-one audio and video calls to help you simplify and communicate ideas better. If you wish to add more people to your video meetings, go for the paid plan to add 15 participants in a call. 

But guess what? 

The Microsoft Teams platform lets you add 100 people even in its free version. 

If you’re a Slack user, we bet you’re feeling like this:

Slack does make amends by offering third-party integrations with other audio and video conferencing tools. You can even join calls without leaving important channel conversations. 

Not sure if Slack can save you from slacking? 

Now that we’ve explored what Slack and Microsoft Teams can do, let’s compare them on their best features.

Who conquers the Slack vs Microsoft Teams war?

Honestly, there’s no clear-cut winner here. 🤷‍♀️

The Microsoft Teams app is a better option if you already have an Office 365 subscription.

But it doesn’t offer anything exciting in terms of the user interface, and its app integration options are far less than Slack. 

On the other hand, Slack is one step ahead with an intuitive chat app and 2,000+ integrations.

However, Slack doesn’t let you create sub-channels for better task management.

Not to mention both these apps also lack task management functionalities like goal setting, creating and assigning tasks, and tracking work progress. 

If you want such features, you’ll probably have to go for a third-party app integration. 

Don’t worry. We have the perfect alternative to help you avoid this app war for good!

What Workplace Collaboration Tool Should You Use Instead?

There’s a one-word solution to all your task management and collaboration troubles—Thriv Cloud. 

Thriv Cloud is one of the highest-rated collaboration tools that’s used by productive teams worldwide. 

Whether you want to chat with your remote team, assign tasks, or automate internal business workflows, Thriv Cloud Tasks has you covered.

And the best part?

Thriv Cloud offers a wide range of features for free. 

No catch!

But don’t simply believe our words. 

Check out what we can do: 

1. Task management 

With Thriv Cloud, you can create and assign tasks for your project with ease. You can also assign tasks directly from a comment.

It lets you us Thriv Cloud‘s recurring tasks to create to-dos for routine work. 

Additionally, you can set color-coded task priorities to let your team know what’s urgent and needs to be tackled right away. 

And for the team members that often go…

We’re here for you. 

With Thriv Cloud Reminders, you can set powerful reminders to keep things on track. 

You can even use Custom notifications to set where and how you would like to be notified. 

2. Comments 

Want to share your thoughts on a task? 

You can reply to your teammate’s comments in separate threads and keep conversations organized. 

And if you’re too fast and furious, you can edit typos quickly to save yourself from a crashing moment. 

But that’s not all! 

You can even assign comments to others when you want a team member to act on something.

The assignee can then use the ‘Remind me’ option to turn a comment into a reminder too. 

You see, we don’t “Slack” either. 😉

3. Integrations 

Use Thriv Cloud to streamline your workflows.

For starters, it offers integration with both Slack and Microsoft Teams. 

Makes us wonder why we’re comparing these two apps in the first place. 

Can Thriv Cloud End the Collaboration App War?

There’s no denying that both Slack and Microsoft Teams can do their job. 

But they can’t do it all for you.

Essentially, they are team chat apps that let you, well, chat! 

That’s why you need Thriv Cloud!

It’s the ultimate online collaboration platform and project management tool that lets you converse, collaborate, and manage remote work from one place.

With Thriv Cloud, you can organize conversations with the Chat view, create task checklists, assign comments, set Reminders… the list is never-ending.