Microsoft Teams now has over 13 million daily active users

Shawn Knight

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Staff member
Bottom line: Microsoft in just over two years has managed to grow its Slack competitor by leaps and bounds. Given its latest milestones, Microsoft Teams is likely now more popular than its rival.

Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, revealed on Thursday that Teams now has more than 13 million daily users with over 19 million people relying on the teamwork hub on a weekly basis. By comparison, Slack at the end of January said it had more than 10 million daily active users.

I suppose it’s possible that Slack could have picked up three million users over the past five months although given its growth curve over the past several years, it seems unlikely.

This is the first time Microsoft has publicly provided user numbers for Teams.

Spataro further revealed that Teams is now available in 53 languages across more than 180 markets. He also announced several new features coming to Teams that’ll make it easier for users to communicate and collaborate including priority notifications, read receipts, channel cross posting and a time clock, among others.

Those interested in giving Teams a try can get the ball rolling over on Microsoft’s website or grab a direct download here.

Masthead credit: Microsoft Teams android app by dennizn

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This is interesting, but not surprising.

I'm employed by a fortune 500 company, and one division of our IT department is trialing out Slack, while another division is trying out Teams.

What we have noticed thus far, is that Slack is infinitely easier to set up, manage, has far more integrations with other business platforms, has a more intuitive UI, and has a stellar mobile app.

The biggest plus that the "Teams" team has driven, is that the base version comes included with office 365. The full office integration is very nice with Teams, yet Slack offers the same full MS Office, AD, and SSO offerings. The biggest advantage that I have seen for Teams, is that the video conferencing uses the back bone of Skype, and is significantly higher quality than the default conference bridge that Slack offers - up to either 8 or 15 users max, my memory eludes me currently.

This being said, Slack easily integrates with our core Skype platform, therefore eliminating that issue completely. At least at this point in time, I see no benefit of using Teams over Slack, other than the organization being lazy, seeing an MS product, and shrugging while going along with it. Inversely, it's a Microsoft product. That alone is concerning to say the least. Look at how they butchered Skype. That is why we are attempting to move to effective platforms.

I'm curious if any other users here have personally done a live comparison between the two. Because the time for our department to begin deciding is nearing.
 
This is interesting, but not surprising.

I'm employed by a fortune 500 company, and one division of our IT department is trialing out Slack, while another division is trying out Teams.

What we have noticed thus far, is that Slack is infinitely easier to set up, manage, has far more integrations with other business platforms, has a more intuitive UI, and has a stellar mobile app.

The biggest plus that the "Teams" team has driven, is that the base version comes included with office 365. The full office integration is very nice with Teams, yet Slack offers the same full MS Office, AD, and SSO offerings. The biggest advantage that I have seen for Teams, is that the video conferencing uses the back bone of Skype, and is significantly higher quality than the default conference bridge that Slack offers - up to either 8 or 15 users max, my memory eludes me currently.

This being said, Slack easily integrates with our core Skype platform, therefore eliminating that issue completely. At least at this point in time, I see no benefit of using Teams over Slack, other than the organization being lazy, seeing an MS product, and shrugging while going along with it. Inversely, it's a Microsoft product. That alone is concerning to say the least. Look at how they butchered Skype. That is why we are attempting to move to effective platforms.

I'm curious if any other users here have personally done a live comparison between the two. Because the time for our department to begin deciding is nearing.
We had a quick look at Slack(at the time was mostly for UI/collaborative features research for our own in house products) but since we were migrating from Lotus Domino mail system to Exchange/Office365 it was better value to include Teams in our subscription than go for something else. Something I have found good in terms of integration is the support for "connectors" (webhook, JSON card message format). I setup one that our Jenkins automation build server ( https://cardano.github.io/blog/2018/03/01/microsoft-teams-jenkins-connector ) so it sends notifications messages straight into a Teams channel so we no longer have people asking "Is this built and ready for testing yet?" and having to log into Jenkins portal and manually check. There are also connectors for many different services, I might look into the one for Atlassian's Jira next as we use that quite heavily.
 
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...I'm employed by a fortune 500 company, and one division of our IT department is trialing out Slack, while another division is trying out Teams...The biggest plus that the "Teams" team has driven, is that the base version comes included with office 365...I see no benefit of using Teams over Slack...
You already own the licenses, depending on the size and I'm assuming it's big, it might end up boiling down to costs.
 
Microsoft Teams: Microsoft's newest, most aggressive self-installing software that we in the IT department have to wait to auto-install, so we can uninstall it to prevent complaints of popups later. *sigh*
 
You already own the licenses, depending on the size and I'm assuming it's big, it might end up boiling down to costs.

Unfortunately I think that's the bottom line here over quality, which again, isn't terribly surprising.

The scope of this platform would start somewhere between 50-800 users, and creep into the tens of thousands if it's formally adopted. I understand cost, but after a few conference calls with Slack, they have some pretty righteous deals for large deployments once you get into the weeds of it.
 
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