What Teams lacks that Slack offers: Twitter users chime in

There have been many battles in Microsoft’s history. Windows vs MacOS, iPad vs Surface, but now there is Teams vs Slack. This is a topic we’ve covered extensively, but recently, a tweet from Microsoft Cloud Advocate Sonia Cuff has set off a new Teams vs Slack debate: What does Team lack that Slack offers?

Going to open the floodgates here: give me your one feature request or annoyance that bugs you about Microsoft Teams but is amazing in Slack. *braces*
No debates – pure feature feedback.

— Sonia Cuff (@SoniaCuff) February 18, 2020

In the reply to the tweet, many people who use both Teams and Slack, including our own Abhishek Baxi, give their take on the controversial question. At the heart of the debate for many, it would appear, is Teams’ lack of support for multiple identities and switching between them. This is something Teams does not yet support, and users who need to switch between multiple Teams accounts and workspaces have to run the desktop app and the web version at the same time. This feature has actually been requested since 2017, but it has yet to be implemented.

Other users also point out some minor user interface imperfections, like the “Start a new thread” box being too close to the one which lets you reply to an existing thread. Some have also had issues with the white space in conversation view, and find it way too irritating, along with buggy scrolling. Christina Warren, a senior cloud advocate at Microsoft, was also quick to point out that Teams’ notifications system is a bit flawed, and had her own suggestions on how to make them more granular.

Sonia’s Twitter thread is full of lots of thoughtful responses as to what Teams slacks that Slack offers, which we can’t possibly cover in just this one post. These include more than 6 emoji responses, custom emojis, the “bananas” business of hiding and unhiding channels, and the way search works. Oh, and we’d also like to mention our personal favorite, native ARM support on Windows, native notifications on Windows and Mac, and a store version of the app.

Microsoft is always looking for Feedback on Teams, and as it becomes just as popular as Slack, for many, there’s still a bit more that it has to go before becoming truly perfect. There are many features planned for Teams in the months ahead, which we’ve previously talked about here, so there could be hope for those who hold Slack close to their hearts.