In our today’s reality when most of the IT companies’ employees work remotely, finding the right team chat tool can make a huge difference in the quality of communication between team members and can help to create a collaborative working environment that will help each member to thrive.
In the article we will compare market leaders Slack, MS Teams and popular gamers chat which is currently gaining team communication tools market – Discord.
It might seem quite difficult to decide which one is better for your team, but you just need to determine what you will use the tool for / what functions are crucial for your team communication. To make your choice easier, here we will delve into main differences of the software mentioned.
Price
I’d like to begin with the pricing, as it can easily become a determining factor between the tools. What comes to Discord, you can avail of most of the features for free (there is a Nitro plan, for those who like a little extra, as it gives you a few perks for 4.99$ or 9.99$ per month). Slack and MS Teams also have free plans, but the features available are very limited. As for paid plans: Slack starts its plans at $6.67 per user per month, while Microsoft Teams starts its plans at $12.50 per user per month.
File sharing / message history
Using Microsoft Teams organizations receive 1 TB of storage, plus 10 GB of additional space for each licensed user. Slack allows you to share files of up to 1GB size, but the one cannot keep these files forever as the free plan limits the storage to 5GB. The limit can be extended to 10GB in the paid versions of the tool. In Discord, the size of files shared is limited to 8MB, which can be upgraded 50MB with the Nitro plan. Moreover, on its free plan, Slack limits the message history to 10,000 messages. MS Teams as well as Discord don’t have any limits on the amount of massages available in message history.
Audio / video calls
The free Microsoft Teams plan includes screen sharing, team video calls and small-scale video conferencing, but with Slack, you’ll be limited to one-on-one audio and video calls and won’t have an opportunity to share screen while using the free version. Using Discord, anyone can take advantage of one-to-one calls, or calls with up to ten people in a direct messaging group. One also has an opportunity to share their screen during the video call.
Third-party integrations
Slack and Microsoft Teams integrate with a number of third-party apps. Slack allow its users to integrate with more than 800 apps, but only up to 10 integrations are allowed on their free plan. Even thought Microsoft Teams allows unlimited integrations for all the plans, it integrates with approximately 180 apps only. However, it is obvious that Microsoft Teams has the best integration with Microsoft Office products. Discord, on the other hand, does not integrate with any applications.
Data protection
In terms of data protection, Discord uses standard encryption but does not provide its video chats with end-to-end encryption, so the best way to use Discord is to only engage with people you already know and to do it on private servers. Both Slack and Microsoft Teams support two-factor authentication within all their plans. As Microsoft Teams is a part of Microsoft Office 365 family, they have better control over how data and other files are shared, that’s why IT teams at large organizations may lean towards Microsoft Teams as a tool of choice.
Conclusion
Now that the main points have been mulled over, we can actually say that Discord is still not the best choice when it comes to work and projects (but if you are looking for something free and relatively convenient, then why not), MS teams and Slack would be better choices, as they were initially aimed to be team communication tools. Mostly, Slack is used by smaller teams / companies and MS Teams is the choice for enterprises, but it’s up to you to decide who you think is your winner in this battle.
Lera Maslova
Business Development Manager
