The Activity dashboard provides an at-a-glance overview of everything happening in your organization. The Teams sidebar includes icons for Activity, Chat, Teams, Files, and depending on how the organization sets it up, Calendar, Calls, and more. Slack’s interface is more visual than Teams’ and a bit more fun. Teams navigation is more focused on teams, while Slack puts more emphasis on channels, work areas that users create around projects, topics, or teams. Navigation: Both clients offer their main navigation in sidebars on the left-hand side. By comparison, Teams offers only three customization options: default (light), dark, and high contrast. Of the two, Slack offers more customization options, with many different ways to tweak the sidebar’s look and what appears on it, such as whether to always include all direct messages, how to sort content, and so on. The Teams look and feel is well organized and efficient, with messaging front and center. Teams has a vaguely corporate look, which feels more streamlined but generic.

Slack has a freeform, looser feel that we like but some might consider a tad chaotic. Look and feel: Both the Slack and Teams desktop apps have easily navigated interfaces, with messaging front and center as the focus. (Note that in this story we’re looking at Teams primarily as a work hub based on text chat, not at its videoconferencing features.) Here’s what we found. To make your decision a little easier, we’ve compared Slack and Teams for enterprises in six categories: interface and usability integrations additional noteworthy differences mobile and browser apps security, compliance, and enterprise management and pricing. In fact, some enterprises have effectively chosen not to choose. There are two excellent collaboration platforms from which to choose, both of which are constantly getting better as new features are added. Slack said its paid customer base was more than 177,000 in August 2021. For its part, Slack has said its own users are more actively engaged, interacting with Slack on average 120 minutes a day and overall taking more than five billion actions a week. Indeed, Microsoft has been touting Teams’ growing user numbers with great fanfare, citing 250 million active daily users as of July 2021.

Slack channel