Slack vs. Teams: Which should your business use? [2026]

When it comes to team chat apps for business, there are two clear leaders: Slack and Microsoft Teams. And they're pretty similar.

How are you supposed to decide which tool you want to use? Without giving too much away, I think Microsoft Teams is the obvious choice for organizations that are already using a lot of Microsoft tools, if only because it's included with practically all Microsoft 365 subscriptions. It's also the better tool for video calls. Slack, on the other hand, is better at integrating with a wide variety of applications and, arguably, is better for text-based conversation. 

That's just a high-level breakdown, though. There's a lot of nuance here, which is the kind of thing I love breaking down. So let's do just that—here's everything you should consider before committing to either Microsoft Teams or Slack. 

Table of contents:

• Slack vs. Teams at a glance

• Slack has the better free version, but Teams has cheaper paid plans

• Both apps have solid AI features, but Microsoft charges extra for them

• Slack is the better messaging tool (by a bit)

• Teams is the better video conferencing tool (by a lot)

• Teams has more security certifications

• Slack integrates with more tools

• Slack offers custom emoji

• Slack vs. Teams: Which should you choose?

Slack vs. Teams at a glance

Slack has the better free version, but Teams has cheaper paid plans

Both Slack and Teams offer a free version, but they're not really comparable. The free version of Slack allows you to set up a workspace for your company and invite your employees—the main catch is that you'll only have up to 90 days of message history and that video meetings can only take place between two people. 

The free version of Teams, meanwhile, is only offered for individuals, not companies. It doesn't allow you to set up a workspace for your organization, meaning you could really only use it for direct messages and the occasional video meeting (up to 100 participants but limited to 60 minutes). 

If you want to quickly set up a free team chat app for your business, Slack is the better choice. If you're mostly interested in video meetings—and don't mind a 60-minute cut-off—Teams is the better tool. 

Once you get into paid plans, it's hard to directly compare the price of paid Slack and Microsoft Teams, in part because Teams is primarily offered as part of the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Another complicating factor: Microsoft only offers annual billing, while Slack bills monthly by default or annually with a slight discount if you dig around through the settings. For the sake of comparison, I'm going to compare Slack's annual pricing with that of Teams, ignoring any discounts or promotions. 

The cheapest Teams plan is called Teams Essentials, which costs $4/person/month, billed annually. It's the only way to get Teams without paying for the rest of Microsoft 365, and it offers 10 GB of storage and video conferencing, complete with recordings and live captions. There are no AI features included with this plan. 

The cheapest Slack plan is called Slack Pro, which costs $7.25/person/month, billed annually. This offers unlimited message history, group video meetings, and AI conversation summaries. This is quite a bit more expensive than Teams' cheapest plan, but the AI features are a plus. 

Microsoft 365 Business Basic is perhaps a better contrast here. This bundle, which costs $6/person/month, billed annually, offers Microsoft Teams alongside Microsoft Office tools, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, along with email hosting and 1 TB of cloud storage. That's a lot of value for less money than Slack's cheapest plan. 

Teams' value is particularly clear if you're already paying for Microsoft 365, because it's part of that bundle. The story is similar as you look at the higher-tier plans—dollar for dollar, you get more from Microsoft—with one exception, so let's look at that now.

Both apps have solid AI features, but Microsoft charges extra for them

If using AI for things like conversation and document summaries is important to you, Slack potentially offers more value (especially if you're not interested in using the other Microsoft Office applications). This is because Slack offers AI features as part of its bundles, while Microsoft offers them as a separate add-on. 

Slack's Business+ plan, for example, costs $15/person/month, the main additional feature being AI search, daily recaps, and file summaries, along with an AI-powered Slackbot you can use to learn about the various conversations and files stored on Slack. 

If you want comparable AI features with Teams, you'll need to pay $21/person/month on top of your other subscription for Microsoft 365 Copilot Business. This still might be worthwhile if your organization is going to be using Copilot for its other features, granted, but for the purposes of directly comparing Slack and Teams, it's a significant added expense. 

Put simply: Slack offers AI features at a lower price than Microsoft. 

Slack is the better messaging tool (by a bit)

Slack is organized in channels, which anyone can make by default. You can make channels for teams, specific projects, or even for side conversations. There are also optional threads, allowing conversations to splinter off into a smaller group. Users can customize and arrange the channels in their sidebars, which is a nice touch. 

Teams, meanwhile, has a bit more hierarchy. Your company is divided into teams, and each team has its own channels. You can't have a channel that isn't part of a team, which is slightly clunky for cross-functional work, but some people will prefer this kind of organization. Teams now supports threading in channels, so that's no longer a distinguishing feature for Slack (but there are no threads in chats, which is the direct message feature). 

Both applications support rich text formatting like bold, italics, bullet lists, and links, either by using the toolbar or Markdown. Teams offers a few things Slack doesn't, including changing the color of your text.

A big edge Slack has, though, is search. Slack's search tool lets you filter by sender, channel, date, and file type. It's generally pretty quick to find that thing you remembered. Teams also offers search, but it's just a little bit clunkier. 

Another edge for Slack are notifications, mostly because it gives people a lot of freedom to customize which notifications they do and don't see. You can choose not to get notifications from a particular channel, for example, or to filter out notifications that mention specific words. It sounds like a small thing, but this can go a long way toward reducing interruptions. 

If text-based communication is your top priority, Slack really is a bit better. The interface is cleaner, search works better, and (to be honest) just kinda feels nice to use. But Microsoft has improved on this front a lot, so it's not as clear-cut an advantage as it used to be. 

Teams is the better video conferencing tool (by a lot)

If there's one thing Teams is obviously better at than Slack, it's video conferencing. Teams evolved from Skype, an iconic early video conferencing tool acquired by Microsoft. Slack, meanwhile, treats video very much as an additional feature—not a core one. 

The numbers make this obvious. Meetings in Teams support up to 300 participants; huddles on Slack support up to 50. Teams is the clear winner here already, but with a Business Standard plan, there's also support for webinars with up to 1,000 attendees. Both services offer live transcriptions, but Teams also offers full recordings of meetings. 

This isn't to say Slack has nothing to offer when it comes to meetings. The huddles feature is designed for spontaneous conversations, and works well for this. Slack also offers the ability to quickly create and post video clips, making it easy to talk out an idea and share it with your team. 

But for capital-m Meetings? Teams is the clear winner. Personally, every Slack-using company I've worked for uses some other video conferencing software. Teams users don't have to do that. 

Teams has more security certifications

For most companies, there's not much of a difference when it comes to security. Both Slack and Teams use encryption in transit. Both support two-factor authentication (2FA) and single sign-on (SSO). Both are SOC 2 certified and GDPR compliant. 

For some companies, though, Teams is the clear choice. If you're an American healthcare company, for example, all paid Teams plans offer HIPAA compliance, whereas Slack only offers that in their Enterprise tiers, and comes with certain usage restrictions. 

The story is similar for many certifications. For a complete breakdown, check out the Microsoft and Slack certifications pages—it doesn't take long to notice that Microsoft has an advantage here. In some cases, that's going to be the defining difference. 

Slack integrates with more tools

Slack integrates with around 2,600 apps, according to the company. It also has an extensive API, which makes it easy for companies to build integrations. This makes Slack the perfect tool if your organization uses a wide variety of tools from different software companies—an integration either exists, or it's easy to build yourself. 

Microsoft, meanwhile, claims integrations with around 700 apps. The real strength, though, is deep integrations with Microsoft products specifically. Your Outlook calendar, for example, is built in. You can write a Word document without leaving the Teams window. Files in Teams show up in SharePoint. If your company runs on Microsoft software, Teams is going to fit your workflows well. 

If you use Zapier, you can connect both Slack and Teams to thousands of other apps, too, so all the tools in your tech stack can talk to each other. For example, you can get notifications in Slack or Teams whenever you have a new lead or automatically send saved items to a to-do list.

Learn more about how to automate Slack and how to automate Microsoft Teams, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Slack offers custom emoji

Slack allows you to add custom emoji. Teams does not.

Should this be its own section? Yes. Is this the most important consideration? Possibly not (for example, if you hate joy). But the Zapier team uses custom Slack emoji every single day, and we think they're important. If you want custom emoji (you do), Slack is your only option. 

Slack vs. Teams: which should you choose?

That was a lot to digest, and there's still not a clear winner—it really depends on the needs of your company. In general, though: 

• Microsoft Teams is the better option if you already pay for a Microsoft 365 Business account, want your team chat experience to be tightly integrated with Microsoft apps, or need excellent video calling and meeting features included in your communication tool. 

• Slack is the better option if you're not loyal to any one tech ecosystem, like integrating with various tools, and use messaging more than calls. It doesn't hurt that AI features come bundled, and that there's a pretty good free version. 

Choosing a team chat app is a big deal—it's likely going to end up being the main coordination platform for your entire company. Take the time to try out both tools, if you can, and think carefully about which features matter most to your team. 

Read more:

• Google Chat vs. Slack: Which is better?

• How to record a Teams meeting

• Zoom vs. Teams: Which is better?

• The best Slack alternatives

• How to blur your background in Teams

• Automatically send a Slack message for new Google Sheets activity

This article was originally published in July 2018 by Jill Duffy and has also had contributions from Katie Paterson. The most recent update was in April 2026.