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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Well, thanks to this today I learned that Microsoft had a product called Teams. I didn't see anybody using it but I saw plenty of people using Slack. Maybe is Team addressed to big companies? My customers are all medium or small.

Does anyone here have some experience using Teams? Is it really in competition with Slack?

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I use Teams at work. Rumor has it that we are switching (back) to Slack, and I cannot wait. Teams is terrible. The UI is sluggish, and the UX is unintuitive to the point that it almost feels intentionally confusing.

Teams is a shitty version of Slack but it’s bundled and included with Office 365 which almost every big business licenses. Free is a hard offer to refuse.

Teams at the moment is mostly used by massive companies, as Slack is really built for smaller teams. I like Slack, but it is very unreliable. I am constantly disconnected, have messages never sent. This is not on the free version, it's almost inexcusable in the amount of times it happens.

> I am constantly disconnected, have messages never sent.

Weird, I have never had those issues, and have been using Slack heavily on a daily basis for a couple of years.

I used it in two different jobs, both with paid plans (and obviously different internet services) and both have had the same disconnection problems. Maybe it's a regional issue? I'm around Nashville/Atlanta. I have had multiple instances of someone asking me why I haven't replied only to see a message marked as "failed to send" because of a disconnection. This is multiple team members too, not just myself.

We have both HipChat and Teams at work, with my team using HipChat. My team ran an experiment to move all conversations and collaboration to Teams for a trial period. That trial period ended with everyone feeling very frustrated that they spent more time trying to figure out WHERE things were going on in Teams rather than the content of actual collaboration efforts. Teams has a horrible design for threads, and is ill-suited for the type of rapid-fire communication of a highly vocal team. I dread having to go back to that product and will be pushing either Slack or Mattermost as a migration path from HipChat Data Center.

I use Teams in a small, half-remote team within a large company (50K+ employees). It's been great in comparison to the other option available to us, which is Skype for Business.

The huge advance of Teams is that you get it in a package if you buy Office365. Otherwise it is a chat app similar to Slack with less ready made integrations.

I oversee a ten person team, we use Teams and love it.

Teams also did not have a free version until about a week ago.

Teams is bundled into Office365, so if you use that for email or Office software, you've got it for free.

It's exactly the same product as Slack, almost carbon copy.

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