Microsoft revealed that its workplace messaging tool, Teams, has 13m daily users — more than its flashy rival Slack, which only had 10m users as of this past April.
Slack is hot at startups, Teams is doing better among big businesses
Although surpassing Slack in user count is a big win for Microsoft, Slack still has more clients than Microsoft — 600k vs. Teams’ 500k.
This divide shows that Microsoft is doing well among companies with large numbers of employees while Slack reigns supreme among startups and their Google doc-using employees.
How did Microsoft grow Teams so fast?
Microsoft launched Teams 3 years after Slack, but managed to get tons of users by offering free trials of Teams to users of Microsoft’s other products — Excel, Word, Outlook, Skype, etc.
When it comes to the workplace-messaging war, Microsoft doesn’t mess around: Internally, Microsoft put Slack on a list of “prohibited and discouraged” software to prevent employees from Slacking.
The battle rages on: Both Teams and Slack are rolling out new features constantly to out-optimize each other, and — to make matters more insane, Facebook Workplace is also gaining steam.