Slack vs Teams: Which collaboration hub is right for you in 2025?

The whole Slack vs Teams thing isn’t just about picking a chat app. It’s about choosing your company’s digital office, the place where work actually happens. This one decision has a huge ripple effect on your team’s daily habits, the company culture, and how much you get done. And while both are titans in the world of work chat, they come at it from completely different angles. One gives you a slick, best-in-class chat that plugs into everything else you use, while the other is a tightly integrated hub for the massive Microsoft software universe.

This guide is here to help you figure it all out. We’ll look at them from three angles: what they’re like to use day-to-day, how they play with other apps, and the business side of things (like price and security). By the end, you’ll have a much clearer picture of which one makes sense for your team and how to get even more out of it.

What are Slack and Microsoft Teams?

Slack is a messaging app built around channels. People love it because it’s clean, easy to use, and connects with a ton of other third-party apps. It was literally designed to replace internal email, pushing for quicker, more organized chats in dedicated spaces.

Microsoft Teams is more of an all-in-one package for communication and collaboration. It bundles together chat, video meetings, file storage, and app integrations. As a key part of the Microsoft 365 suite, it’s built to be the central spot for teamwork, especially for businesses already living in the Microsoft world.

A head-to-head comparison of Slack vs Teams

If you’re in a hurry, here’s the quick and dirty breakdown of how these two stack up.

Teams really shines if your company is all-in on Microsoft 365. It’s an all-in-one hub where everything just works together. Its free plan is also quite generous, offering unlimited message history and solid built-in video calls. Slack, on the other hand, is all about being the best chat experience possible and letting you connect it to whatever other tools you love, from Google to Asana. Its free plan is more of a teaser, with a 90-day message history limit.

Generally, tech-focused teams, startups, or any company that uses a mix of different software tends to lean toward Slack. Large companies, especially those already paying for Microsoft 365, often find Teams to be the more logical and cost-effective choice.

User experience and collaboration

Features are one thing, but how does it actually feel to spend your entire workday in one of these apps? The daily user experience is where the different philosophies of Slack and Teams really hit home, and it’s often the deciding factor for most teams.

Channels, teams, and conversation structure

Slack operates on a flexible, open-by-default channel system. Pretty much anyone can spin up a new public channel for a project, a topic, or even a channel for sharing dog pictures. This makes it super easy to get cross-functional conversations going and tends to create a more transparent culture. The catch? You can end up with "channel chaos," a sidebar that feels like an endless scrolling list of channels you can’t keep up with.

Microsoft Teams takes a more structured, hierarchical approach. In Teams, channels live inside specific "Teams." You might have a "Marketing" Team, and inside that, you’ll find channels like "#q4-campaign" and "#social-media." It keeps things tidy but can also mean more clicking around to find what you need. Some folks feel this setup can sometimes get in the way of the spontaneous, cross-departmental chats that Slack is so good at. For example, creating an open support channel for a 10,000-person company is simple in Slack but can be a permissions headache in Teams.

Chat, threads, and notifications

When it comes to the core messaging experience, almost everyone agrees: Slack’s interface is just nicer. The design is cleaner, formatting text is more intuitive, and fun little features like custom emojis and powerful search filters ("from:@user", "in:#channel", "has::emoji:") make it feel more dynamic and efficient.

Teams’ chat works just fine, but it can feel a bit clunky by comparison. You’ll often hear people complain about small but persistent frustrations, like how copy-pasting code snippets can break the formatting, or that the whole thing just feels less polished.

Slack also has a clear edge with its notification controls. You can mute some channels, get alerts for specific keywords in others, and have different settings for your phone versus your desktop. That level of control is a lifesaver for cutting down on distractions and staying focused.

Managing noise in internal support channels

Whether it’s an #it-support channel in Slack or a dedicated Team for HR, internal support channels have a knack for getting clogged with the same questions over and over. "What’s the wifi password again?" "Where do I find the form for time off?" This is a huge productivity drain for your support staff and makes it harder for everyone else to find answers without bugging someone.

That’s a headache no chat platform can fix on its own. You need something smarter layered on top. This is where a tool like eesel AI comes in handy. You can connect it to your existing knowledge bases, like Confluence or Google Docs, and it deploys an AI assistant right inside Slack or Microsoft Teams. It serves up instant, reliable answers from your own documentation, freeing up your support teams to handle the trickier stuff.

An eesel AI assistant answering a question directly within a Slack channel.

Ecosystem and integrations

A chat tool is only as good as the other apps it works with. Its real power comes from how well it connects to the tools you use every day. This is where the choice between Slack and Teams presents a real fork in the road.

Microsoft 365 integration vs. Slack’s open marketplace

Here’s the main decider in the Slack vs Teams debate. If your company is built on Microsoft 365, Teams is the hands-down winner for integration. Being able to edit a Word doc, grab a file from SharePoint, or look at a PowerBI dashboard without leaving the Teams app is a massive workflow boost. For companies committed to the Microsoft suite, it’s just the easiest path.

Slack’s advantage is its neutrality and sheer variety. With over 2,600 integrations, it connects smoothly with tools from all over the map: Google Workspace, Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence, Asana, Salesforce, you name it. For companies that have pieced together their own "best-of-breed" set of tools, Slack is a more flexible and open hub to tie them all together.

Video conferencing capabilities

Microsoft Teams isn’t just a chat app that happens to have video. It’s a full-on video conferencing tool that goes toe-to-toe with Zoom and Google Meet. It can handle large meetings (up to 300 people on standard plans), record sessions, provide live captions, and all the other advanced features you’d expect.

Slack’s "Huddles" are meant for quick, informal chats, more like tapping someone on the shoulder than booking a conference room. They’re fantastic for quick problem-solving but aren’t designed for formal presentations. For anything more structured, Slack leans on its excellent integrations with dedicated tools like Zoom or Google Calendar. If your team spends its days in back-to-back meetings, Teams has the native advantage.

The universal challenge of scattered knowledge

It doesn’t matter if your team uses the full Microsoft suite or a hodgepodge of third-party apps, one problem is the same everywhere: your company’s knowledge is scattered all over the place. Important info is buried in Zendesk tickets, Confluence pages, Google Docs, and SharePoint sites.

The real trick is getting that information into the chat tool where people are actually asking their questions. eesel AI bridges this gap by acting as a single knowledge layer. It connects to all your different sources and uses that info to power an AI agent that gives accurate answers right inside Slack or Microsoft Teams. You can get it running in minutes, creating a single source of truth for your team without having to move a single document.

Pricing, security, and scalability

For the people holding the purse strings, the decision often boils down to the practical stuff: cost, security, and whether the tool can grow with the company.

Pricing: Free vs. paid plans

• Free Plans: Microsoft Teams has a more compelling free offer, giving you unlimited message history and basic video calls for up to 300 people. Slack’s free plan feels more like a trial, limiting you to 90 days of searchable messages and only 10 integrations.

• Paid Plans: Slack’s pricing is pretty straightforward: you pay a fee per user each month, starting at $7.25 (billed annually). Teams is usually included in Microsoft 365 Business plans, which can start as low as $6.00 per user per month and come with a bunch of other apps like Exchange, OneDrive, and SharePoint. This often makes Teams much cheaper for companies already paying for Microsoft’s office software. If you’re not a Microsoft shop, the math gets a little fuzzier.

Security and compliance

Both platforms are serious about security, offering things like two-factor authentication and compliance with major standards. However, Teams generally comes with more advanced, enterprise-level security and compliance features baked in, even on its cheaper plans.

Slack is very secure, but to get specific compliance levels like HIPAA, you often have to spring for their expensive Enterprise Grid plan. For big companies in heavily regulated fields like finance or healthcare, Teams often has the upper hand by providing these controls right out of the box.

The verdict: How to choose between Slack vs Teams

So, how do you choose? It really comes down to who you are as a company: your culture, your budget, and the software you already use.

Choose Slack if:

Your team values a top-notch chat experience above all else, uses a diverse set of non-Microsoft tools, and works best in a culture of flexible, open communication. It’s for teams who want the best tool for the job, connected to all their other favorite tools.

Choose Teams if:

Your company is already deeply invested in the Microsoft 365 world, depends on formal video meetings, and needs a more structured communication tool with enterprise-grade security included from the start. For Microsoft-powered businesses, it’s often the path of least resistance, and a very powerful one at that.

This video provides a detailed comparison to help you decide which platform, Slack or Teams, is the right fit for your team in 2025.

Make your choice even better with AI

Picking the right platform is just the first step. The real magic happens when you make that platform smarter. Instead of your chat tool being just a place to talk, it can become a place to get instant answers and automate tedious work.

eesel AI can upgrade either platform by turning your chat tool into a smart AI assistant. It learns from your old help desk tickets and connects to all your scattered documents to automate support and answer internal questions in a snap.

See how an eesel AI Agent can automate support and provide instant answers within your collaboration hub.

The best part? You can get it running in minutes. With simple one-click integrations, you can connect your tools and even run a simulation on your past conversations to see what the potential return on investment is before you fully commit. When you’re ready, you can roll it out slowly, with total control over what the AI handles.

Final thoughts on Slack vs Teams

At the end of the day, both Slack and Microsoft Teams are fantastic tools, but they’re built for different kinds of teams. One is a focused communication app that plugs into everything; the other is the communication hub for a deeply integrated software family. The right choice depends on your tech stack, budget, and culture. The smartest choice is to pick the tool that fits your workflow, then boost its power with an AI knowledge layer to really change how your team works.

Ready to see how AI can transform your support in Slack or Teams? Get started with eesel AI for free.