Slack or Microsoft Teams for a small business
This one is usually decided before anybody compares features — by what your email and files already sit on. The interesting question is what you give up either way.
By SoftSelect Editorial4 min read
Most small companies decide this without noticing they have decided. The office suite comes first, chat follows it, and by the time anyone runs a comparison the answer has already been made by an email migration two years earlier. That is not a bad way to decide — but it is worth knowing what you traded.
The question underneath the question
If your mail, calendar and documents are in Microsoft 365, Teams is the path of least resistance: identity, single sign-on, file storage and meeting scheduling are already solved, and everything you add lives in the same admin centre. If you are on Google Workspace or on nothing in particular, Slack is a standalone purchase competing against a standalone purchase, and the licensing argument disappears.
One thing to check rather than assume: Microsoft has separated Teams from its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites, so whether it is included depends on which subscription you are actually on. "It comes with our licences" is a sentence to verify in your own tenant, not to accept from memory.
Where they genuinely differ
- Structure. Slack is channels, flat and cheap to create. Teams nests channels inside teams, and each team brings a group, a mailbox and a document library with it. Slack is easier to start; Teams is easier to govern once you have thirty of them.
- Files. Teams puts files in SharePoint by default, with the versioning and permissions that come with it. Slack treats files as attachments and expects your documents to live elsewhere.
- External collaboration. Both do it. The question is whether your clients and suppliers are already on one of them, because working with an external party who uses the same platform is materially smoother than either bridge.
- Meetings and voice. Teams is a full meeting platform with a telephony story attached. Slack does calls well enough for a small team and most companies pair it with a separate meetings tool.
- Integrations. Slack has the larger and more varied third-party directory. Teams is deeper on Microsoft, and Microsoft is a lot of what a small company uses.
- Retention on free plans. Both free tiers limit history in ways that matter if chat is where decisions get made. Check the current limits before you rely on search.
Five things that actually decide it
- Where your files and identity already are. This is worth more than every feature difference combined.
- Whether you meet with external people more than internally.
- Whether anyone in the company will administer it. Teams rewards an admin and punishes the absence of one.
- Whether your clients are on one of them. Being reachable where your customers already are is a real advantage.
- Whether you need phone numbers and call routing, in which case the Microsoft path is shorter.
Language, which is easy to overlook
Our catalogue lists Microsoft Teams with a Polish interface and Polish-language support from the vendor. Slack is listed without a Polish interface. For an all-English team that is irrelevant. For a mixed team, or one where warehouse and office staff use the same tool, it is one of the larger practical differences between the two.
Two mistakes to avoid
The first is running both. It happens gradually — one department, one client project — and it ends with two search indexes, two notification habits and a standing question about where something was said. Pick one and put the other in the same category as a fax number.
The second is treating chat as a system of record. Decisions made in a channel are decisions nobody outside the channel can find. Whichever tool you pick, agree where a decision goes to live once it is made — a document, a ticket, a project tool — and hold to it.
Chat is where work is coordinated, not where it is stored. Every team that forgets this rediscovers it during an audit.
Set two things on day one
- A channel naming convention. Prefix by purpose, not by department. It costs ten minutes now and saves an unbrowsable list later.
- A retention decision. How long messages are kept, and whether that is a compliance answer or a cost answer. Both platforms let you set it; almost nobody does until they have to.
Compare the two, and the rest of the field, in our team communication category. If cost is the deciding factor, read the pricing pages with our guide to free plans and free trials — the bundling makes a straight per-seat comparison misleading in both directions.