Are Microsoft Teams and Slack in a state of feature parity?

In September 12, 2019, Slack launched shared channels to the public. This feature, while simple in concept, gives Slack an important advantage over Teams.

“Shared channels allow customers to securely collaborate with external partners, suppliers and their own customers in channels, while still maintaining their internal controls and compliance policies.” – Slack website 

With the risk of oversimplifying the concept, we can compare it to having one unified email inbox for all your email accounts versus having a separate inbox for each account. The effects are amplified when you take into consideration that chat is higher in frequency and faster in response time. In other words, it greatly benefits collaboration among organizations.

The Teams sales team will show you on paper that Teams can do everything that Slack can do—that they have feature parity. This could be technically true if it weren’t for the shared channels. However, anybody who has used both services will tell you that the user experience is far from equal. Slack was built to delight and sell itself, with the finesse on par to the best consumer products, while Teams was built in response to Slack and with Microsoft’s business customers in mind—and it shows.

The results are obvious in both good and bad ways. Teams integrates with Office 365 like a dream, so if your company’s workflow revolves around Office 365, Teams is a clear winner. However, if you step outside the cozy Microsoft ecosystem, you'll find your experience lacking. Slack has over 1,800 apps, whereas Teams has 220. Even the apps available on both services are not created equal (think the early days of Android and iOS).

In conclusion, Teams has not achieved feature parity with Slack. Slack is more feature-rich, has a stronger ecosystem, and is easier to use. Whether this matters or not for Slack’s success is a separate discussion.