Is Microsoft Teams growing faster than Slack?
Microsoft Teams was launched in March 2017. Slack was launched in August 2013, almost 4 years earlier. In July 2019, Microsoft Teams reached 13 million daily active users, surpassing Slack’s 12 million active users as of September 2019. Simply put, Microsoft Teams likely still surpasses Slack in the number of daily active users.
How did Microsoft do this in 3 years? One word—leverage. Microsoft leveraged its enterprise relationships and sales team to grow Teams at an exponential rate. Microsoft provides Teams for free to Office 365 customers, so companies that use Office 365 (the majority of S&P 500 companies) are most likely to use Teams, the free solution, even though Slack may be the better product. Microsoft is clearly investing aggressively in Teams, and the approach is working tremendously well.
An astute observer would also note that not all users are created equal. In fact, Slack proudly announces that engagement is what matters, and it has that in spades. Paying customers spend more than 9 hours per workday connected to Slack and 90 minutes per workday actively using Slack. The nearly 600K active registered developers building on the Slack ecosystem continue to grow the existing 1,800+ apps and 500K custom apps on the platform. In September 2019, this resulted in more than 5 billion weekly actions (e.g., writing and reading messages, uploading documents, and commenting on files) on Slack during a typical workweek.