Impressive new usage figures have been announced for Microsoft Teams. According to the tech giant, its enterprise chat software now boasts over 20 million daily active users. The reveal is a major blow to its main competitor, Slack, whose CEO previously accused Microsoft of being unsportsmanlike.
Figures from October put Slack at 12 million, and have not been updated since. With the sheer rate of growth of Teams, which was at 7 million in July, it’s fair to say it’s the dominant enterprise chat app.
“What’s clear from the data is that the future of workplace collaboration won’t be defined by any one technology,” said Jared Spataro, CVP of Microsoft 365, in a blog post. “Instead, successful teams need collaboration tools that combine a wide range of technologies in new and innovative ways. Teams brings together chat, meetings, calling, document collaboration, and workflow into a single app— and this unique combination is catching fire”.
220 Million File Actions
As well as its active users, Spataro highlighted the volume of actions performed on the platform. Last month customers participated in over 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files.
For comparison, Slack says its userbase performs 5 billion actions each week. However, these include metrics like emoji reactions, Asana and Drive actions, and more. It previously noted that such stats only show part of the story, pointing to the fact its users have 90 minutes of average active time per day.
Despite the criticism, Microsoft did not release active or connection time statistics. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield previously argued that pure user count is somewhat misleading due to Team’s inclusion in the Microsoft 365 subscription. He also likened it to the recently defunct Google+, which was shoehorned into other Alphabet Inc services.
That argument doesn’t seem to have swayed investors, with shares dipping over 10% following the announcement. Still, it’s worth noting that though Teams has more users, its rival’s platform is generally less sluggish and appeals strongly to companies outside of the Office ecosystem. As Slack is yet to respond to Microsoft’s announcement, it’s also unclear how its user count has changed since October.
