How Teams and Slack Communication Tools can improve team efficiency and workflow.

Microsoft teams and slack both are applications for collaboration with paid and free versions. Both have lots of similar features. Slack was launched in August 2013 and Microsoft teams were launched in November 2016. Microsoft teams came into existence as a competitor to Slack. Both teams and slack provide people to collaborate and communicate. 

Slack is a chatting app for business purposes that gathers people to the information that they need. 

Microsoft team is the collaboration application that assists your team to stay organized and have discussions all in one place. 

The two leading instant messaging services are Microsoft Teams and Slack. Each service is available to users in different regions, but the exact number of countries differs only by one country. At this time, Slack is offered to customers in more than 150 countries around the world while Microsoft Teams counts 181 countries. One other notable difference between the two is that users can choose from 19 languages across all Microsoft Teams tools, significantly exceeding 11 language options for Slack. 

Pricing: Slack and Teams 

The Slack and Microsoft team has both a free version and paid version. The paid version provides you more features. 

	Microsoft Teams	Slack
Screen sharing	Supported	Not supported
Apps	180 apps integrated and fully integrated with office 365	Over 800 third-party applications integrated
External usage	External users not allowed	Allows access to external users
Free version	Doesn’t offer any free trials	Offers free version to start with
Collaboration	Real-time collaboration in office apps, guest access, and support for more than 250 app integrations	File sharing and support for 10 third-party app integrations
Number of users	unlimited	300
Number of messages	10000	unlimited
Content indexing	No limit on messages and indexing	10000 of teams most recent messages
File storage	2GB for one user and 10 GB of shared memory	5 GB total
Channel meeting	Yes	No

Microsoft teams VS Slack – Comparison 

• Microsoft teams and Slack provide exceptional security, particularly when used in the enterprise version. 
• Teams is a finer solution for the largest enterprises as it allows more people than Slack. 
• Slack is the best option for businesses that are not concerned with instantly integrating Microsoft solutions. 

Similarities between Slack and Teams: 

Both applications support gifs, stickers, plaintext, tagging within the chatbox. Both offer screen-sharing features.  

External users are not allowed in teams. Whereas slack allows external users to access 

Unique features in slack: 

• customization: Slack offers you to customize the experience of your slack’s UX with a different theme and color choice so that it suits your desired look. 

• Hundreds of integrations: Slack connects with more than 800 various app integrations. 

• 1:1 video calling: This feature provides you free, you can include 15 guests per call for paid subscribers.  

• Simplicity: With smaller bells and whistles, slack is simple to implement and requires little training for new users. 

• Remainder setting: You can use the remainder command to recollect yourself if you have any deadline to submit assignments or projects, to send an email, any events to attend, it is the best feature that users like. You can also include a calendar so that you can schedule your meeting when you are free. If you add a calendar you can concentrate on your work without any distractions and you don’t miss any important meetings and updates. 
• Pinning messages: If you want any information,  that you will be in a hurry. If you have pinned that message you can easily check the message. The maximum you can pin 100 messages in each channel. 

Unique features in Microsoft Teams: 

• Advanced bots: The built-in bots in teams purchase AI to get it simple for subscribers to look up for organizational and individual data of other subscribers and get linked to the correct person rapidly.  

• Microsoft team integrating with Microsoft office 365: Since this application is bought by Microsoft, it’s manually featured in the office 365 package, meaning it also incorporates all other applications in that suite.  

• Huge scale video or audio communication: Teams include two voice and video conference tools for up to 250 attendees at a time, there is also a feature for those who are not able to attend the live class or meeting or who wish to watch a replay to take extra notes. 

• Encoded data and integrations: Data security is a precedence on teams, with things like two-factor authentication necessary for subscribers. Teams also have a number of 180 app combinations it works with, which is slightly less than slack, still reasonably strong.  

•  A time limit of the call: Teams don’t have any time limits for meetings. 

• Recording your meeting call: Team members can also record their team meetings and group calls. The recording starts in the cloud and is archived in Microsoft Stream. Following a meeting, users can share it with anyone, along with colleagues who had to attend. 

• Screen sharing: It is possible to share one’s desktop. It offers users to share their screens during a meeting. Computer sharing in Microsoft Teams can be equipped by admins to enable users to share a screen, an app, or a file. 

Storage capacities: 

Slack: In the free version of Slack consists of 5Giga bytes of file memory for a team, in paid plans increment to 10GB for one user and 20GB per user. 10,000 message histories will be available in the free version but unlimited messages for paid versions. 

Teams: In the free version of Teams provides 2GB of memory per user and 10GB for shared memory for a team.  

 The protection of video conferencing tools: 

Microsoft Teams: 

Microsoft Teams encode your data while it is “in transit.” They keep your data safe in a system of protected cloud data centers and then use Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) for video, audio, and personal sharing. 

The challenge for enterprises is that this software is controlled by Microsoft, but rather by the enterprise. The specific details of end-to-end encrypted communication support are sketchy. 

Slack: 

1. In transit, all data is generated. 

2. SRTP is used to encrypt media traffic via a DTLS-SRTP key exchange. 

3. DTLS is utilized to encode instantaneous data channel traffic. 

4. For sending signals communication with our media server, HTTPS or secure WebSockets using TLS 1.2 are used.