Microsoft Teams gains ground on Slack

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, announced the public preview of Microsoft Teams in 2016

Two years after its launch, Microsoft Teams is outpacing team chat rival Slack – largely thanks to Teams’ free availability as part of Office 365 subscriptions.

That’s according to a survey of 900 IT decision makers in North America and Europe conducted by Spiceworks.

The results indicate that Teams is now the second most popular business chat app and is used by 21 per cent of respondents, up from three per cent in a similar Spiceworks survey in 2016.

That ranks it ahead of third-place Slack, the popular standalone team chat tool in use by 15 per cent of businesses polled - that represents a slight increase from 13 per cent in 2016.

The most popular tool is another Microsoft app, Skype for Business. It’s used by 44 per cent of surveyed businesses, up from 36 per cent two years ago.

Another rival, Google Hangouts (now Google Hangouts Chat), meanwhile, saw use drop to 11 per cent, from 16 per cent two years ago. Facebook’s Workplace remained at one per cent, while stats for Cisco’s Webex Teams (formerly Cisco Spark) were not provided.

Furthermore, the Spiceworks report claims that Teams is set for the fastest growth of all business chat apps over the next two years. The survey indicates that 41 per cent of respondents expect to use Teams by 2020, compared to 18 per cent for Slack.

Credit for Microsoft Teams’ growth lies in its availability within Office 365 subscriptions. The office productivity suite is used by 155 million businesses worldwide, thus putting Teams in the hands of a massive audience.

“The rise in use of Microsoft Teams is likely influenced by the fact that it’s available at no additional cost to Office 365 users,” Spiceworks wrote in a company blog post. “And considering more than half of businesses use Office 365, it’s enticing organisations to give Teams a try.”

Teams was unveiled in 2016 as a rival to Slack, and has since been placed at the core of Microsoft’s communication and collaboration strategy, replacing Skype for Business Online over time.

Microsoft has also launched a free version of Teams in a bid to attract a user base outside of Office 365 subscribers.

Teams is now used by 329,000 organisations worldwide, Microsoft said during this year’s Ignite conference, up from 125,000 a year ago. “That is about twice the rate [of growth] that we see from Slack,” said Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of communications ahead of the conference.

That said, the Spiceworks report and Microsoft’s statistics show only part of the picture; actual usage rates are less solid.

Microsoft has not provided total daily active user figures for Teams, unlike Slack, which touts 8 million daily active users, including 3 million paid users. Slack declined to comment on the Spiceworks report.

According to Spiceworks, Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams are most frequently used by large and mid-sized businesses, while Slack is commonly deployed by smaller organisations.

It also shows that, while email is still the most popular workplace communication tool (used by 99 per cent of respondents), overall demand for business chat apps continues to grow.

Adoption is highest among large organisations (70 per cent, compared to 53 per cent in 2016), followed by mid-size firms (61 per cent, up from 38 per cent two years ago) and finally, small businesses (58 per cent, up from 42 per cent).