Microsoft Teams gains ground on Slack
Two years after its launch, Microsoft Teams is outpacing team chat rival Slack – largely thanks to Teams’ free availability as part of Office 365 subscriptions. That’s according to a survey of 900 IT decision makers in North America and Europe conducted by Spiceworks.
The results indicate that Teams is now the second most popular business chat app and is used by 21% of respondents, up from 3% in a similar Spiceworks survey in 2016. That ranks it ahead of third-place Slack, the popular standalone team chat tool in use by 15% of businesses polled. (That represents a slight increase from 13% in 2016.)
The most popular tool is another Microsoft app, Skype for Business. It’s used by 44% of surveyed businesses, up from 36% two years ago. Another rival, Google Hangouts (now Google Hangouts Chat), meanwhile, saw use drop to 11%, from 16% two years ago. Facebook’s Workplace remained at 1%, while stats for Cisco’s Webex Teams (formerly Cisco Spark) were not provided.