Slack vs. Microsoft Teams - Collaboration Showdown

Remote work and collaboration are critical to 2020 productivity so collaboration and communication. Slack vs Microsoft Teams may be the question that you're asking? While both provide the tools for effective collaboration each software approach is a bit different.

Teams vs Slack is about the culture of your company and the operating system for your business. While Teams offers a Microsoft centric approach, it's more than just real-time chat. Microsoft Teams offers an entire suite of collaboration software. Slack, on the other hand, offers a more focused conversational tool for chatting and while it touches other areas it's a more focused tool.

Both products have a free collaboration tier allowing you to get started for low or no money.

I’m sure you’re busy so this isn’t going to be an in-depth review of every feature of either #Slack or #Teams but I do want to talk through the pros and cons of each product and how you should pick the best product for your company. I’ve used both Slack and Teams for multiple years and while each has strengths each also has weaknesses.

Communication tools reflect the culture of the company and the way the culture and leaders of the company choose to communicate. If your culture is broken, or your company is dysfunctional, tools aren’t likely to fix it. Also if the leadership of an organization doesn’t lean-in, the tools will be less impactful and there are tons of examples of either Slack or Teams being rolled out and not really embraced by the executives of the organization.

So… if you’re going to take the dive into these tools, really try to get the commitment of all-senior-leadership to try to use these tools in favor of long email chains and countless meetings. This time in history is unique because remote work cultures are really well suited for these types of tools. Organizations that take the plunge now should commit to the tool for at least a few months to really understand the organic benefits.

If you’re new to these tools, it’s important to understand how they may be different from your existing communication tools. These aren't in competition to your email, they're used for a more real-time collaborative basis.

In this video I give a Slack 101 tour and a Microsoft Teams 101 tour for those who are new to the tool and looking to Learn Teams or Learn Slack.

While Slack was a leader in this space, it wasn’t the first chat-based collaboration tool. There are alternatives like Campfire, IRC, HipChat, Discord, Yammer, and others. What made Slack successful was its timing and freemium model that appealed to early-stage startups and their approach to business making the product fit-in with larger companies.

The freemium model allows anyone to set up a Slack for their company for no cost and gets an initial Slack experience that works with all the bells and whistles while keeping a history of up to 10,000 messages. This led to the rapid growth of Slack and a lot of adoption from early-stage startups.

Microsoft Teams on the other hand is part of the Microsoft Office suite, so while it’s not free, it’s often perceived as free because it’s included as part of the Microsoft 365 Business suite.

The basic paid version of Slack is $6.67/user/month and the paid version of Microsoft Basic Business is $5/user/month.

Recommendations
If your organization is using the Microsoft tools already, including Sharepoint, Outlook and Skype for business meeting infrastructure then Teams is really compelling both from a configuration standpoint and a cost perspective. There’s less external dependencies and you’ll get the majority of the benefits. In general, I feel that many of Microsofts tools are good enough. I do hesitate to call them great and the shortcoming is from many layers of software that try to tie together but don’t always.

Slack on the other hand is very well suited for organizations large and small. The stand-alone nature of slack means that they focused more on API’s and integration points to allow third-party chatbots to extend the functionality of Slack. While I think it’s ideally suited for small to medium size organizations, companies as large as IBM are using slack with their 350,000 employees.

Companies that aren’t as tied into the Microsoft ecosystem will have an easier time choosing slack because they require deeper integration into DropBox, Box, Zoom, or GSuite.

Remember how I said that communication is a company-culture thing? Well, a key reason for that is that these chat tools can make it easy to give your organization to offer company transparency.

Different teams or departments can have their own channels but often these channels aren’t set to private making it easy to both find important company information and understand how decisions were made through discussion. This idea of being more public by default is a powerful idea and it allows organizations to move faster. #slackvteams

Видео Slack vs. Microsoft Teams - Collaboration Showdown канала Greg Raiz