Wednesday, 10 July 2019 22:35

Microsoft Teams is now officially bigger than Slack

Microsoft Teams may have only been around for two years, but the group-chat platform is already larger than one of its main competitors. Microsoft announced that Teams has more than 13 million daily active users. The amount rises to 19 million when looking at weekly active users. That means the service is now officially bigger than Slack, an independent platform for online chatting and collaboration.

This is the most specific Microsoft has gotten yet with information about its group-chatting platform. The only other update the company gave was back in March, when it revealed that 500,000 organizations were using the service.

In addition to the audience news, Microsoft shared some upcoming features for Teams. Today, it is rolling out what it's calling "announcements," which allows important news to be highlighted in a channel. It plans to roll out channel moderation and priority notifications, which will ping a recipient every two minutes until a response is made, later this month. Finally, cross-channel posting will be coming "soon."

Microsoft introduced Teams to users on Office 365 subscriptions in March 2017 and then added a free version in July 2018. The service has been pitched as a replacement for Slack ever since launch. Catching up so quickly in audience size over two years when Slack has been around since August 2013 is a feather in Microsoft’s cap and may be a reason why it has opted to wait so long to announce any numbers about Teams.

Despite the obvious comparisons, Microsoft and Slack have plenty of instances where they aren't targeting the same audiences. Microsoft has an established reputation among enterprise businesses, and being a part of the Office 365 suite makes it a preferred choice for groups that are already working in that ecosystem. For smaller organizations, or even large ones that rely more on Google systems, Slack remains an alternative.