Slack has become the industry standard for modern developers’ communities, but Microsoft Teams has emerged as a challenger. However, what exactly does Teams offer, and why is it considered inferior?
The main reason is that Teams did not commit to conducting research on what is needed to facilitate effective communication in a rapidly growing environment. This lack of attention to detail is evident in certain elements of the interface.
Let’s start with the roster, which is a list of available chat entities and users. In Slack, it is streamlined and designed with use cases in mind, while in Teams, it is merely a simulacrum.
For instance:
- In Slack, finding a chat only requires one click, while in Teams, you need to switch between group chats and private chats, which can be slow.
- Slack has a well-designed interface for threads, making them easy to see and use. In contrast, Teams has a bloated and poorly functioning mechanism that is difficult to use.
- In Slack, there is one roster for all chats, while in Teams, there are several different rosters for everything, which does not aid productivity.
- The chat window and input area in Slack are simple yet sophisticated, while in Teams, they are overly complex and confusing.
- Code pasting is impossible to do smoothly in Teams, whereas Slack allows for seamless pasting by simply inputting standard markdown backticks. Additionally, Teams do not differentiate between one backtick and triple backticks and does not change highlighting styles.
- After pasting a message in Teams, the interface can cause the message to appear out of order and even before the previous message.
So why is Teams inferior to Slack? The main reason is that Teams has not invested enough in conducting research and designing an interface that is user-friendly and efficient. Slack, on the other hand, has a well-designed interface that is tailored to the needs of developers, making it the preferred choice in the industry.
Although I am not an advocate for Slack, I believe that Teams is a subpar platform that is not yet ready for production use. While it has many integrations and functionalities, it appears as though they were simply created to imitate Slack and give the impression that “Yes, we have that too.”