What is Microsoft Teams? The Slack rival does things other collaborative tools can’t

By Jon Martindale and Rami Tabari Updated October 17, 2025

Looking for a place to conveniently collaborate with your team across the world? Microsoft Teams might be what you’re looking for, at least if you want to avoid the cluster of group emails and chaotically coordinated phone calls beyond your working hours. Teams will allow you to work together in real time and establish clear communication across your workforce.

With Microsoft Teams, you’re able to chat, video conference, share documents and edit them together, and easily coordinate schedules and workflows. Recently, Microsoft Teams did get a price bump for Microsoft Personal users (from $7 to $10), and the company also added a wave of AI agents into the mix.

However, Teams is technically free to start, and depending on your use case, you can take advantage of the AI tools that Teams has to offer. Here’s what it’s all about.

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace initially introduced in 2016 for customers subscribing to the Office 365 Enterprise and Business plans, serving as the successor to Microsoft’s Skype for Business platform. It also replaced the Microsoft Classroom service in Office 365 Education.

Microsoft Teams became widely available on March 14, 2017, for all Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions. A free version arrived on July 12, 2018, providing most of the subscription-based features while limiting storage capacity and user count. The mobile version received family-friendly features starting in March 2020.

Overall, Microsoft Teams breaks down into five main components:

Administrators first create a team followed by individual channels. For large organizations, multiple teams with a handful of channels may be necessary. The client supports more than one team, allowing members to access multiple teams through a single interface.

Members of a team have access to a pool of shared documents by clicking Files in the client, including images and videos uploaded in channels. Members can open these files in a browser, download them to their PC, or retrieve a link to share with others. The OneDrive feature enables users to create shared folders, Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations, and more.

Microsoft Teams integrates with third-party apps, including Trello, Zoom, Asana, GitHub, Evernote, Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and many more. It even works with social apps like YouTube, StubHub, and several others.

Like most tech companies, Microsoft is riding that AI wave, so recently the company added “AI agents” to Teams. They’re Copilot assistants designed to be in every channel, meeting, and community. They can sit in meetings to take notes, answer questions, suggest times for different meeting topics, and let people know when the meeting should be over. As lovely as all of that assistance sounds, adding AI agents to your Teams is, thankfully, optional.

If you really want it, there are Facilitator agents available that can create documents, manage notes, agendas, and follow-up tasks. For those who really know what they’re doing, you can even build an AI agent yourself.

Microsoft Teams is one of several team collaboration tools. Its biggest competitor is Slack, and both have their strengths and weaknesses. Our comparison of Slack vs. Microsoft Teams showed that if you need a tool that works alongside Microsoft 365, Teams is your best bet.

Workplace from Facebook was a similar business-oriented collaboration tool. Unfortunately, it’s officially in read-only mode as of September 1, 2025, and will continue to be until May 31, 2026. You can still sign in and export all your data right now. But afterward, Workplace will be deleted.

Another popular team collaboration tool is Discord. It targets gamers, offering free voice and instant message capabilities. In this scenario, gamers create or join public and private “servers” rather than “teams.” Like Microsoft Teams, each building (server) hosts multiple rooms (channels), only these rooms are dedicated to either text or voice, not both. Well, technically, voice chats have their own text chat, but it doesn’t make sense to use it unless you’re in a call.

There is a Go Live feature as well that automatically detects your game and allows you to stream it directly to your Discord server. Want to make a video call to friends or family? Discord has your back too — all for free.

The interface presents a few basic components. On the left is the navigation bar hosting multiple tabs: Activity, Chat, and Teams. At the top, you’ll see options for things like Posts, Chat, and Files depending on which tab you choose on the left.

Information in the second column is determined by the tab you select in the navigation bar. Click Activity and the second column lists all the mentions, replies, and other notifications. Select one of these activities and the third column displays the related conversation. Click the filter button in the second column and enter a search term.

Likewise, if you click the Chat tab, the second column lists your private conversations by the recipient (including a section for Microsoft Copilot). Select a listed recipient, and the third column displays the entire conversation. Click the three-dot ellipsis icon next to the recipient to pin, mute, or hide the conversation, receive a notification when the individual signs on, and more.

Finally, click the Teams tab, and a list of your connected teams and their channels appears in the second column. Channels with new activity are highlighted in bold text. Select a channel, and the messages contained within that channel appear in the third column. Any mentions within an unselected channel are highlighted by an exclamation point next to the channel name.

When typing a message, you’ll find formatting tools similar to Slack, such as setting the font size, creating a bullet list, inserting a link, using a highlight, and more. You can also mark a message as a new conversation or announcement, lock responses only to you and moderators, and post the message to multiple channels (if allowed). Other tools include adding emoji, stickers, GIFs, and files.

To conduct an audio call or video meeting, you can simply click the Meet Now drop-down arrow on the message toolbar at the top, and the invited attendees can then join the Teams meeting. Scheduling requires a paid plan, which appears as a calendar icon on the message toolbar.

If you got flashbanged by the bright white app like I did, you can hop over to Settings, click Appearance, and change your app’s Theme. Unfortunately, the Dark theme is not good. There are way too many colors and none of them contrast well with each other. I didn’t know where the app started and where it ended (this is not an exaggeration). So you’ll have to choose your headache: navigate madness or experience the light of the sun (I chose the latter, and I don’t know how I feel about that).

You can choose from several Microsoft Teams plans for home or business.

The free Home plan includes the following features:

For features like increased group calling options, more storage, creative tools, and live captions, you can look at paid Home plans starting at $10 monthly.

For Businesses, the Microsoft Teams Essentials plan costs $4 per user/month (paid yearly) and provides these features:

For features like user management for employees, more storage, a custom business email, and spam and malware filtering, you can check out Business Basic for $6 monthly or Business Standard for $12.50 monthly. If you need advanced security, access and data control, and cyber-threat protection, look at Business Premium for $22 monthly.

Microsoft Teams is available on the following platforms:

If you want to sample Microsoft’s collaboration platform, here’s how. For the free version, the only requirement is a Microsoft account, which you can create during the setup process. You do not need a Microsoft 365 subscription to use Microsoft Teams for free.

Go to teams.microsoft.com and enter a Microsoft account email address and password. If you use a different email address, it will be used to create a Microsoft account.

Optionally check the box to sync Outlook and Skype contacts, and select Continue.

You’ll then land on the Chat tab, ready for you to start a new chat or meet now.

Microsoft Teams is a growing platform for business communications that’s adding more features all the time. Are you ready to start using it? Here’s everything you need to know about how to install Microsoft Teams and using Teams.