Microsoft Teams

Teams, the business messaging and video conferencing software from Microsoft, is like Ikea's self-service section. If you know how it works, you probably navigate it with ease. If you're a customer coming down from the showroom, however, it can take a while to find the right aisle, bin, and shelf for the product you want. Everything is in its place, you just have to know how to find it. Likewise, Microsoft Teams is orderly and hyper-compartmentalized, but frustrating to navigate. It has powerful features, copious tools, and innumerable places to hold conversations with colleagues, but you may find yourself asking, "Where the heck are they?"

Teams isn't just a chat app. Microsoft has done significant work outfitting it with video conferencing and voice over IP (VoIP) phone features. Teams is a top collaboration choice, but typically only for groups already using Microsoft products. For everyone else there's Slack, our Editors' Choice winner in the team messaging category. Slack's design makes communication faster, more open, and perhaps messier—but also more fun. For video calls, meanwhile, Zoom is our Editors' Choice for its stability and feature set.

What's New in Microsoft Teams?

As of this writing, one of the biggest changes to Microsoft Teams is the option to buy Teams Premium. Team Premium costs $10 per person per month, and it adds a bunch of new features, mostly powered by artificial intelligence (AI). According to Microsoft, the AI comes from large language models powered by OpenAI’s GPT.

With a Teams Premium account, the AI tools can do things like write a summary of points made in a meeting or action items that need following up after the meeting. If someone presents a PowerPoint Live slideshow during the meeting, the AI can create chapter markers based on the slides. In the future, this same feature, called Intelligent Recap, will do more to summarize presentations based on the text transcript generated while the presenters talk.

Another feature adds personalized markers to meeting recordings, so if you leave a meeting early, the AI will mark that place for you, letting you easily watch the parts of the meeting you missed.

As is the case with most AI-generated content, there's a garbage-in/garbage-out principle at play. In other words, the quality of the results depends a lot on the quality of the material you give the AI. So if your meeting is disorganized and no one makes any clear points, or if a PowerPoint presentation isn't organized clearly using the right slide templates to mark major sections of your talk, the AI summaries will reflect that.

With Windows 11, Teams comes built right into the operating system. A Teams icon shows up by default in the toolbar.

How Much Does Microsoft Teams Cost?

There are two ways to get a Microsoft Teams account. One is to sign up for a free account, and the other is to have a Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise account, where the app is included.

The free Teams account requires a Microsoft account or ID of any kind, such as a login for Outlook.com. With this account, you can invite up to 299 more people to join you, although everyone must also have a Microsoft account to use the app. You get all the primary features and only miss out on unique integration with business Office apps, such as scheduled meetings, Microsoft SharePoint access, and things of that nature. You also don't get a full roster of support or security and compliance tools for administrators. Free users can have video and audio calls up to 60 minutes with as many as 100 participants, and you get all the standard features such as screen-sharing and custom backgrounds.

The paid version of Teams that comes with Microsoft 365 adds all the tight integrations with Microsoft Office apps, plus 24/7 support and business-grade tools for administration, security, and compliance. You can have up to 300 team members unless you get the enterprise edition, which is good for as many people as you need.

There are three versions of Microsoft 365 that include Teams, all of which require an annual commitment:

• Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $72 per person per year
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard: $150 per person per year
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium: $264 per person per year

You can get a one-month free trial, though signing up for it requires your email address, contact information, an active phone number, and credit or debit card.

How Do Microsoft Teams' Prices Compare?

Comparing the costs of Teams with those of other business messaging apps isn't an apples-to-apples affair. The prices above are for bundles of software, not just Teams, and because of that, the value is incredibly high considering all that's included. 

In any event, to get a sense of the market, the average price for a team messaging app hovers around $6 per person per month. That's how much Flock and Twist by Doist both cost for their paid tier of service.

Slack costs more than just about any team messaging app we've reviewed, charging $8.75 to $15 per person per month, with discounts offered if you pay for a year upfront.

Then there are apps that are stronger in their video calling services but also offer team chat, such as RingCentral Video. Its free limited version is generous, though its team messaging aspects are somewhat weak. Zoom added a team chat section to its app not too long ago, though I have my doubts it will ever take off. In any event, paid plans with both Zoom and RingCentral Video start at $14.99 per person per month.

In conclusion, Teams costs a lot less than Zoom, less than Slack but not by a huge margin, and about the same as Flock and Twist. But a Microsoft Business subscription gives you other apps and storage space included for the price, making the value quite high.

The Microsoft Teams Interface

Microsoft Teams is easiest to use as a desktop app for macOS or Windows. The web app is nearly as good as the desktop apps. There are mobile versions for Android and Apple iOS devices that work fine when you're on the go, but the desktop and web apps are easier (a truly relative word) to navigate.

On the left side of the interface, you get not one but two left rails for navigation, plus several tabs in the main window—how many depends on your organization's configuration. The tabs may include Activity, Chat, Teams, Meetings, Calls, Files, and any apps you've installed. At least you can customize the sidebar a little by pinning your favorite apps and chats to the top. 

Let's focus on the tab called Teams, since it's the heart of communication for a team messaging app.

Teams Are Best Restricted

When you click Teams, you see a list of teams, or different groups of people. This setup is unlike Slack, where Channels are in the primary navigation bar. Microsoft Teams instead has you first compartmentalize people into Teams. You might have an all-company team, a Sales team, human resources (HR) team, and other groups. You can create any teams you want, but fair warning: the more teams you create, the harder it becomes to navigate the app. As a result, it pays to plan your team structure in some detail and restrict the number of users who can create new teams.

Within each team you have channels. You might assume that a channel is a place for people on the same team to communicate via text chat synchronously or asynchronously, but you'd be wrong. A channel is merely the next layer of organization. Each channel has its own tabs, which you can customize, too. A tab called Posts is likely where most team communication happens, but you can also have tabs for wikis, Microsoft Word documents, OneNote notes, and more.

To understand the extent of Team's compartmentalized nature, we must dive yet one layer deeper. When you write something in Posts, it shows up in a feed. Anyone who reads your post will see a little Reply link at the bottom of it. Using the Reply function to a post creates a thread, whereby all additional comments to that post become contained below it. Visually, it's quite different from Slack's threads, which shoot off to the right, or even Twist's setup, which packages conversations into an email-like view.

In any event, Teams collapses long threads to minimize the amount of space they use. You can toggle open a thread any time, but they collapse by default at a certain point. The result is a highly organized interface, but one that feels like it has a lot of rules. By contrast, Slack comes off as a place where people are less inhibited to speak up, not that everyone uses that lack of inhibition wisely. Teams doesn't have that vibe.

Customizing Team Spaces

Any time you create a new channel, you get three default tabs: Posts, Files, and Wiki. You can keep all three, delete some, or add new tabs. The number and type of tabs you can add is tremendous. In addition to those already mentioned, there are tabs for Microsoft Excel, PDFs, YouTube, Evernote, Trello, Zoho CRM, and many more.

You can customize these spaces to a fine level, creating a space to store all the knowledge, raw information, and insight your team collectively keeps. Let's say for example an ad-sales team has a Posts tab for ongoing discussions, a Wiki filled with talking points for selling clients, an embedded Excel sheet showing rates for ads, and one more tab that points to a web page showing real-time news related to the business. That could all be in one channel. The ad-sales team could in fact have multiple channels within their team, perhaps a second one for brainstorming and a third for watercooler conversations.

The downside of this arrangement is the real risk that people may not see all the conversations that are relevant to them because they have to check several tabs within each channel to make sure they aren't missing anything. A global notifications icon helps with this a little, but there's a fine balance between allowing all notifications and simply being able to keep one eye on an ongoing conversation.

No matter how you view it, the fact of the matter is that Microsoft Teams gives you tight control and the power to organize and deeply compartmentalize team interactions, which is in stark contrast to the free-wheeling group stream-of-consciousness you're likely to find in a Slack channel. Is that good or bad? It depends on how your team members communicate best and how much communicating you want them to do.

Templates in Microsoft Teams

Teams includes templates and the ability to create custom templates for some handy use cases. For example, you can make a template for a Team. That way, when you need to create many Teams that are similar in their user settings, installed apps, and other details, you don't have to build each one from scratch. Microsoft gives you templates that you can use out of the box or customize, and there's an option to build your own templates as well. One thing missing is the ability to create private channels in the templates, however.

Another kind of template is a meeting template, although it's for Team Premium users only. The meeting template lets you save all the settings you want for particular kinds of meetings, such as a company all-hands meeting, a client call, or a webinar open to the public. Meeting templates are a huge help to busy people who know they should but often don't enable particular security settings before their meetings. Some of these templates are major time savers, as long as someone takes the time beforehand to create them and save them.

Important Included and Missing Chat Features in Teams

As a team messaging app, Teams has many features you'd expect to see, plus a few that are unique. Among the ones you'd expect are things like being able to turn any word into a searchable tag by adding a # to it. Or how about an edit button? After you write and post a message, you have an option to edit it, which most messaging apps let you do now, though it wasn't always the case. Pinning any post saves it to the top of a sidebar, letting you keep important details in view. If you want to keep a channel private, it's easy enough to leave it as invite-only. Those features are all fairly standard.

If you're used to other business messaging apps, you may lament the lack of a "@here" option to alert anyone who's part of a team or group message of an important post.

One of Teams' more unusual features is the ability to write one message and then post it to multiple channels. For people working in internal communications, it helps to broadcast important information quickly to those who need to see it. It also seems handy given how easy it is to lose track of where information lives—just put it everywhere.

Another nice feature is calendar integration because here in Teams, it's complete enough that you can actually schedule appointments from the view in Teams, whereas in some other apps, you get a read-only view.

Video Conferencing, Audio Calls, and Screen Sharing in Microsoft Teams

Most team messaging apps now offer video calling, audio calling, and screen sharing, either natively or through third-party add-ons. Microsoft Teams does, too. It works on the desktop, web, and mobile device clients, though on mobile devices, you must install the Teams app to join a call. You can't do it from a mobile browser.

One unique feature of Teams is that you can send a message to anyone on any device, so long as you have their phone number or email address. Additionally, you can make one-on-one calls or group calls with audio only or video, with screen sharing and group whiteboard options, too. In Teams, you can start a call anytime you see a video camera or phone icon. Click someone's name, and there it is. If you call someone and they don't answer, you can leave a voicemail. When viewing Posts, there's a camera icon in the upper right corner to start a call and invite everyone in that Channel to join you.

When you see a video camera icon next to a conversation, it means there's a video call in progress that you can join. No one has to dial you in, so to speak. Just click or tap and go. Video calls in Teams are separate from Skype conversations, so you don't have to worry about the back-end server implications of your Skype or Skype for Business accounts.

Teams does something unusual with the chat history of a video call. It saves it. The chat of your previous video calls resurfaces next time you talk to the same people. I can see how that would be useful in recurring meetings.

In testing, calls held up all right but the video quality had a noticeably lower resolution when viewed in the web app as opposed to the desktop app.

For scheduling calls, Teams has some nice tools and integrations with Outlook not found in most other team chat apps. You can schedule a call in advance, for example, and get an alert before it begins. You can schedule recurring calls, too. With the appropriate permissions, you can view someone's Outlook calendar to find a good time for a meeting. There are also options to designate an organizer or host prior to group calls.

Microsoft Teams Video Calling Features

While participating in a video meeting, you can choose whose video feed you want to see and pin it in your view. It works for multiple speakers at a time. So if you join a large group meeting and you want to watch your manager's reactions, you can.

Teams has several features that are less common in team messaging apps and more typical in video conferencing software, such as Zoom Meetings and ClickMeeting. For example, participants can virtually raise their hands during a meeting and they can apply a virtual background. Teams gives you background images to use, but you can also upload custom images. While some people see virtual backgrounds as a purely fun or aesthetic feature, they also help protect your privacy.

Teams has a few more video calling features worth noting. For example, you can record meetings so people can watch them later as videos. A virtual whiteboard is included where participants can brainstorm together, or you can make the whiteboard read-only and use it more for presentation purposes. Another advanced feature is the ability to give control of your keyboard and mouse to another person when you're sharing your screen, which is helpful when you want someone else to control your slides while you present. You can also use it for light tech support. Teams offers breakout rooms, a feature generally used in big meetings to send smaller groups into private pow-wows and then have everyone reconvene as one large group. Zoom has all those features, too, but Slack doesn't.

A more advanced accessibility feature is live captioning with speaker attribution. Another accessibility feature worth pointing out is that the app is available in 53 languages.

You can't live stream to a social media site, such as Facebook or YouTube. However, there is a "yet" attached to that statement, according to a Microsoft representative, and there are other ways to leverage social media in Teams at large. For example, let's say you have a training video hosted on YouTube that you want to share with a Channel. You can connect Teams to YouTube and create a tab that hosts the video for colleagues to watch right in the Teams interface.

Other Options for Meetings and Calls

For offices that have been with Microsoft for a while, it might take some time to figure out how you want your call system to work, as there are multiple options. For example, some features from Skype for Business have been rolled into Teams. Currently, you can connect Skype and Teams to some degree, but only for the consumer version of Skype. For business users, how Skype and Teams work together depends on how you set it up (see the link for details).

Teams does support VoIP calling features, in that you can call anyone with a phone using Microsoft's cloud-based PBX. When you click the Calls tab in Teams, you have a choice to open a dial pad and dial a number. The calling feature supports softphones on desktop and laptop computers and on iOS and Android devices. It also supports a limited number of desk telephones. Integration is still evolving, so be sure to read the company's document about Microsoft Teams Phone if this is a particular concern.

More advanced options for producing video calls let you turn them into professional-looking broadcasts. Tap into the Network Device Interface support, and producers can convert each presenter's or speaker's video into a discrete video source that can be used in the video streaming production tool of your choice. According to Microsoft, other advanced back-end changes in the works will give administrators more options as to how video is managed, such as restricting outgoing or incoming video and managing bandwidth.

Video calling capabilities in most team messaging apps don't match everything you get from a dedicated video conferencing service, though Microsoft Teams Meeting comes close. If you'd rather use another service, you can integrate your Teams account with several video calling apps, including Zoom, BlueJeans, Cisco Webex Meetings, and others. PCMag's Editors' Choices in this category are Zoom, Webex Meeting, and ClickMeeting, although that last one isn't currently supported by Teams.

If instead you're looking for a full-featured cloud PBX for your company, our current top picks are RingCentral MVP and Intermedia Unite. However, as mentioned, Microsoft now has its own dedicated cloud PBX space, Microsoft Teams Phone. While it isn't a top pick overall in our VoIP tests, it's still another attractive option for seriously Microsoft-centric shops since it, too, has a lot of integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 stack, including Teams.

Notifications and Curbing Distractions

As with other team chat apps, whenever someone mentions your name with an @ symbol or sends you a direct message, you receive a notification. You can also receive notifications for replies to conversations you start, replies to conversations that you've joined, any activity in channels that you follow, when certain team members appear as Available, Unavailable, Offline, and more. You can customize any option you enable so that you see a banner message, a banner message and email, or only an update in the feed.

Teams' notification settings aren't bad, but Slack has richer options, and they are a huge selling point for that service. You can enable and disable dozens of options. For example, Slack has a Do Not Disturb setting that you can run on a set schedule. Another option tells Slack to push notifications to your mobile device instead of the desktop when you've been inactive on the desktop for a period of time, and you get to choose how long.

The ability to selectively silence notifications is crucial for a team chat app's efficacy and an individual's ability to focus. With both Teams and Slack, you can turn notifications on or off for each channel. You must go to each channel to change it, however, rather than the application settings where all the other notification options live.

Speaking of distractions, Teams supports GIFs from Giphy, embedded images and polls, and other screen candy that makes the space more interactive, visually stimulating, and either fun or terribly annoying. Without leaving the app, you can create memes by clicking on a design, cartoon, or image and plugging in text. You can use emoji in your channel names if you like. Slack doesn't even allow for uppercase letters or spaces in channel names.

Microsoft Teams Apps and Integrations

Teams can integrate with a long list of other apps and services, though it has especially tight integration with other Microsoft apps, as you might expect. With Office apps, Teams supports integrated real-time content creation with Office Online for free accounts and Office desktop apps for paid accounts.

Integrations work differently depending on which app you choose. For example, if you connect to Asana, you can get updates about activity happening in the work management app as well as create new tasks from the Teams interface.

With other apps, such as those by Microsoft, you pull them into your interface as a new tab. Connect a Microsoft OneNote account to a Channel, for example, and you get a tab that contains one of your notebooks. It's completely interactive as if you have OneNote open in a browser tab.

The only problem, as mentioned, is that Channels can get really busy with too much information, and then it becomes extremely difficult to find what you need.

Team Messaging for Microsoft-Centric Offices

Microsoft Teams earns points for being highly customizable, supporting a wide range of apps and services for integration, and hitting all the major features one expects to see in a business chat app. Its growing video conferencing capabilities are also attractive. How well it will work for you comes down to how your organization sets it up and how the people in your organization use it. If you're not diligent with this tool, it can become a maze of information rather than a source of it.

The organizations likely to use Teams to its full potential are those already heavily invested in a Microsoft workplace. Many of the points of differentiation between Teams and its competitors are how deeply you can connect it with other Microsoft apps.

If you have a choice in your team messaging app, Slack remains our Editors' Choice winner and a favorite among users, despite its high cost. Slack doesn't excel at video calls, however, so for remote meetings and webinars we recommend a different app. Our Editors' Choice winners are Intermedia AnyMeeting, WebEx, and Zoom.