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.
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.
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.