Teams vs Slack: which one is best for your company in 2026? - Round 2

In this article

• Ecosystem
• Pricing
• AI
• API
• External Discussions
• Final Thoughts

If you missed round 1, read Teams vs Slack round 1.

Ecosystem

While collaboration platforms were originally designed for messaging and audio/video calls, their widespread adoption in the workplace has led to the emergence of new use cases most notably, integration with external applications.

Both Slack and Microsoft Teams now offer extensive app marketplaces, enabling users to expand each platform's core functionality to better suit specific workflows, tools, and organizational needs.

Initially, Microsoft Teams’ marketplace lagged behind Slack’s in size and diversity. Today, however, they are nearly equal in scale: Slack reports over 2,889 apps, while Teams lists 3031.

• Most popular common apps : Trello, Zoom, Google Drive, GitHub, Jira, Asana, Polly, Jira, Miro, Zendesk, Miro, etc.
• Slack exclusive apps (not exhaustive !) : perplexity, loom, The NY Times, Workstreams, proper, etc Teams exclusive apps (not exhaustive !): Bookings, Power BI, OneNote, SharePoint, Viva Insights, etc.

If you look for some apps, here where to find them for Slack and Teams

🥇Winner: Teams, by a very small margin thanks to a slightly larger number of apps.

Pricing

Let's move on to pricing. Slack is owned by Salesforce, and Teams by Microsoft neither of which are known for offering their products purely out of goodwill. As expected, these professional communication platforms come at a cost.

Here's a breakdown of Slack's pricing, highlighting the key features added at each tier compared to the previous one (as of june 2026):

• Free plan
  • free ;)
  • 90 days history
  • 1:1 calls only
• Pro plan
  • $7.25/user/month
  • Unlimited history
  • Group meetings
  • Lists & documents
• Business +
  • $15/user/month
  • SSO + user provisioning / deprovisioning
  • Data exports
  • Entreprise Grid : custom
  • data loss prevention
  • HIPAA compliant
  • Built-in Directory

See the official Slack pricing page.

Teams pricing follows a different structure and, as is often the case with Microsoft, can be somewhat complex.

• Home plans (consumers)
  • Free
    • Free ;)
    • 60 minutes calls + max 100 participants
    • 5GB of storage
  • Microsoft 365 Personal (that includes Teams)
    • $9.99/user/month
    • 30h calls + max 300 participants
    • 1TB of storage
    • 1 user
  • Microsoft 365 Family (that includes Teams)
    • $12.99/month
    • 6 users
    • 1TB of of storage per user
• Pro plans
  • Microsoft Teams Essentials
    • $4/user/month
    • 30h calls + max 300 participants
    • 10GB of storage per user
    • English only live captions
  • Microsoft 365 Business Basic (that includes Teams)
    • $6/user/month
    • Identity, access and user management for up to 300 employees
    • 30 languages live captions
    • Microsoft 365 Business Standard
    • $12.50/user/month
    • Webinar tool

It's worth noting that the bundling of Teams within Microsoft 365 has come under scrutiny from European regulators for potential abuse of dominant market position. As a result, some changes are already evident: Teams is now offered separately in certain Microsoft 365 enterprise plans. Microsoft 365 E3 (no Teams): $27.45 per user/month or $36 with Teams Microsoft 365 E5 (no Teams): $48.45 per user/month or $57 with Teams Read the official Microsoft Teams unbundling announcement. See the Microsoft Teams pricing page.

🥇Winner: Teams as usually cheaper than Slack (Slack free excluded)

AI

In 2026, leaving AI out of a comparison between collaborative solutions would be a significant oversight. While previous sections show Slack and Teams to be quite similar in many respects, their approaches to AI diverge considerably likely influenced by the strategies of their respective parent companies

• Slack

Slack positions itself as an AI-powered collaboration platform focused on fast communication, async work, and workflow efficiency. Since May 2026, 30 AI features have been introduced

New features include meeting transcription and summaries, AI-generated action items, email drafting and sending, scheduling assistance, enterprise search, web search, CRM updates, reusable AI skills, intelligent workflow automation, and cross-app reasoning through Salesforce and third-party integrations.

Slackbot can now leverage context from conversations, files, connected tools, customer data, calendars, and meetings to proactively assist users directly inside Slack.

Slack also introduced AI-powered experiences such as personalized daily briefings, account preparation, task prioritization, native charts, profile summaries, file summaries, and agent-based workflows.

Its strengths remain channels, threads, integrations, automation, and a large ecosystem of third-party applications.

Strengths:

1. Excellent channel, thread, and conversation summaries
2. AI feels naturally embedded into conversations and workflows
3. Fast contextual search across chats and connected apps
4. Strong workflow automation and AI agent integration

Weaknesses:

1. AI scope is still mostly centered around Slack conversations and connected tools
2. Less powerful cross-document reasoning than Microsoft Copilot
3. Meeting AI remains less advanced than Teams
4. Enterprise knowledge graph is more limited
5. Advanced AI capabilities often require additional paid licenses

• Teams

Microsoft Teams integrates AI through Microsoft Copilot, which is deeply connected to the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem rather than only the Teams application itself. Unlike standalone chat assistants, Copilot leverages Microsoft Graph to understand relationships between meetings, chats, emails, files, calendars, documents, tasks, and organizational context.

Inside Teams meetings, AI can generate live transcription, speaker attribution, intelligent recaps, action items, meeting chapters, summaries, and contextual Q&A during or after the call.
Users can ask questions such as “What decisions were made?”, “What did Sarah say about pricing?”, or “Summarize the last 20 minutes.”

In chats and channels, Copilot can summarize conversations, identify unresolved questions, draft replies, suggest tasks, and surface relevant files or past discussions.
AI is also integrated into collaborative workflows through Copilot Studio and Power Platform, allowing companies to build custom AI agents connected to internal systems, CRMs, ERPs, HR platforms, or knowledge bases.

A major differentiator is cross-application reasoning: Copilot can combine Teams conversations with Outlook emails, SharePoint documents, Word reports, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to answer complex enterprise questions. For example, a user can ask: “Create a customer renewal summary using recent Teams meetings, emails, CRM notes, and the latest QBR presentation.

Strengths:

1. Extremely powerful enterprise-wide AI capabilities
2. AI can reason across Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and OneDrive
3. Best-in-class meeting AI with transcription, summaries, live Q&A, and intelligent recap
4. Strong enterprise search and organizational knowledge retrieval

Weaknesses:

1. AI experience can feel heavier and less conversational than Slack
2. Copilot setup and governance can be complex in large enterprises
3. Some AI experiences depend heavily on Microsoft ecosystem adoption
4. Less flexible and developer-friendly than Slack for custom conversational workflows
5. Premium Copilot licensing can become expensive at scale

🥇Winner: Slack

But it was not an easy win, as both competitors are very strong in AI and investing heavily in the space. What ultimately made the difference were two things:

• how seamlessly Slackbot is integrated within Slack, it feels extremely natural to use,
• its attractive pricing, included in the Business+ plan at $15/user/month.

API

If you are a g33k and looking to interact with Slack or Teams via their APIs whether to build a custom app or develop tailored integrations within your IT ecosystem here's a comparison table outlining the key differences between the two platforms.

🥇Winner: Slack
As it offers a much more accessible and developer-friendly API compared to Microsoft Teams. Its documentation is clear and well-structured, and the API capabilities closely reflect what you can do through the Slack user interface.
In contrast, Microsoft Teams’ API, primarily accessed through Microsoft Graph is more fragmented, with overlapping functionality across different services. While it’s less approachable and has a steeper learning curve, it can be very powerful and robust, especially when integrated across the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

External discussions

Slack and Teams are great tools for internal communication with colleagues. However, collaboration becomes even more powerful when it extends to external contacts such as partners, clients, suppliers, or freelancers.
Both Slack and Teams offer features to support these external interactions: guest access and organization linking.

1. Guest access
   Inviting someone as a guest is a practical solution when you're working with an external professional who uses a different platform than your own. For example, if your organization uses Slack and your accountant uses Teams, you can invite them as a guest to your Slack workspace (or vice versa).

Pros

• You continue using your own preferred platform without disruption.

Cons

• The guest has to juggle multiple platforms daily using their own internal system or workplace while switching to another one for specific clients.

Below is a detailed comparison of how guest access works in Slack versus Teams:

2. Bridging companies using SAME collaboration platforms

Linking organizations is an ideal solution when your company regularly collaborates with multiple professionals from another company that uses the same platform as you.

For instance, if both your company and your marketing agency use Slack, you can take full advantage of Slack Connect. Similarly, if both organizations use Microsoft Teams, External Access is the way to go.
These features allow seamless communication without the need to switch platforms or accounts.

Below is a detailed comparison of how these two solutions, Slack Connect and Teams External Access, work:

3. Bridging companies using DIFFERENT collaboration platforms

As mentioned earlier, inviting guests can work in theory but in practice, it often leads to a less-than-ideal experience. One party ends up working outside their primary platform, switching between tools and disrupting their workflow.
Linking companies through Slack Connect or Teams External Access is excellent when both use the same platform.
But what if both sides could continue using their preferred collaboration tool and still communicate effortlessly?

That's exactly where convly comes in. With convly, a company using Slack can seamlessly chat with another company using Teams without either side leaving their own favorite platform.

convly supports: one-to-one private messages, group private messages, channels, file sharing, images, reactions, mentions, etc.
With convly, everyone stays in their familiar environment, and collaboration flows naturally across platforms
Learn more about convly for Slack and Microsoft Teams.

🥇Winner: Equality
Since both platforms offer quite the same possibilities to work with external companies.

Final Thoughts

As this in-depth comparison has shown, Slack and Teams are neck and neck each scoring 6. It's a true tie.
Slack excels in search, productivity tools, AI and API capabilities.
Teams stands out in video and voice integration, usage limits, and pricing.
Both are on par when it comes to core collaboration, ecosystem integration, and external communication.

If certain features are especially important to your workflow, they may guide your decision.

• Choose Microsoft Teams if you're looking for a robust, deeply integrated solution within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
• Go with Slack if you prefer a more platform-agnostic tool with a strong developer community and a proven record in flexible, tech-driven environments.

Whichever path you take, you're covered: convly supports external messaging between both platforms so you can't go wrong 😊.