Microsoft Teams Powers Past Slack

Slack, the company behind the popular workplace collaboration tool of the same name, saw its share price drop by more than 8 percent on Tuesday after Microsoft announced that Teams, a direct Slack competitor, now has 20 million daily active users. That’s up more than 50 percent from July 2019, when Teams had 13 million daily users.

As our chart illustrates, it took Teams roughly three years since its beta release in November 2016 to reach 20 million users, blowing past former market leader Slack in the process. Slack passed 12 million daily active users in September, up from 10 million at the beginning of the year. In an October blog post titled “Not all Daily Active Users are created equal”, Slack pointed towards its high user engagement. “It’s not a successful collaboration tool if people don’t use it,” the post reads – a dig pretty obviously directed at Microsoft and the fact that Teams is bundled with Office365 and user numbers could therefore be inflated.

Investors still seem nervous about the growing competition in the workplace collaboration market, as yesterday's reaction to Microsoft's announcement showed. Apart from Microsoft, Slack is also competing with Facebook and Cisco, who offer (somewhat) similar functionality in Workplace by Facebook and Webex Teams, respectively. Slack is currently valued at $11.5 billion, down from roughly $23 billion when the company went public in a direct listing in June 2019.