Social behind the firewall: the battle of team collaboration apps

It all started with an ad – a full-page open letter in the New York Times, to be exact. Slack, a popular business chat app, published this ad the day Microsoft Teams launched. Up until this point, Slack had been in a league of its own. Valued at an estimated $3.8 billion, no other platform allowed coworkers to connect and collaborate in the way Slack did. But with the launch of Microsoft Teams, Slack suddenly faced something they’d never known before: major competition.

That feeling when you think “we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter,” and then you do. ? pic.twitter.com/BQiEawRA6d

— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) November 2, 2016

In recent years, team collaboration apps have become commonplace in many workplaces, from small businesses to mega corporations. As multiple companies look to encroach on Slack’s territory, could the startup’s reign as leading chat app be coming to an end?

Passive aggressive letters aside, which collaboration tool is most suitable for your business? To help you get a sense of the options available, we’ve covered three of the biggest platforms.

Here’s how the biggest team collaboration apps stack up:

1. Slack Enterprise Grid: Innovative, easy-to-use and forever evolving, Slack aims to streamline internal communications while providing a sense of humour. Slack’s newest endeavour, Enterprise Grid, provides admins with more control than ever before, making it easy to separate employees by department while still allowing for cross-department collaboration (hence the name “grid”.) Combine this with easy integration of third-party apps, and it’s no wonder this platform is so popular.

 

2. Microsoft Teams: An estimated 70 million people use Office 365 on a monthly basis. Teams is not as flexible as Slack (yet) as integration with third-party apps isn’t fully developed. As well, only users within an organization can join its team – clients are out of luck. However, Microsoft Teams is included with Office 360 Business and Enterprise subscriptions, so it’s worth a try for offices that already run on Microsoft.

 

3. Facebook Workplace: Workplace, Facebook’s entry into the team collaboration world, includes many of the social media giant’s main features – news feed, chat, groups and reactions. Many people already understand the ins and outs of Facebook, which makes the transition easy – and it’s more affordable than Slack. The platform is also optimized for mobile usage, enabling employees who don’t work from a computer to still stay connected.

At the end of the day, team collaboration apps exist to unite businesses and keep teams in sync. By ensuring that every employee is on the same page, communications drama can be left behind – just let the chat apps battle it out instead. In the competition between enterprise collaboration platforms, who wins your vote?