Nothing about the core Slack-versus-Teams tradeoff has moved since the original comparison: Slack still costs more per seat and wins on developer experience, Teams still comes bundled into Microsoft 365 and wins on being already paid for. What's worth re-checking is whether the pricing gap and the performance complaints on each side still hold up before an enterprise commits to either one for the next contract cycle.
What Slack actually costs now
Free covers 90 days of message history and 10 app integrations, a real limitation for any team that wants searchable institutional knowledge rather than a rolling three-month window. Pro is $8.75/user/month with unlimited history and integrations, group Huddles, and Workflow Builder. Business+ runs $12.50/user/month, and Enterprise is custom-quoted for the largest deployments.
The free tier's 90-day cap is still the single biggest friction point, and it hasn't gotten more generous. Losing older messages entirely makes Free unsuitable for anything beyond a very small team's short-term chat, and the jump to Pro is effectively mandatory the moment a team wants to search back further than three months. Slack's real differentiator remains its app ecosystem: 2,600-plus integrations, the Bolt SDK for building custom Slack apps, and Workflow Builder for no-code automation. For engineering-heavy teams doing async-first communication with real tooling integration needs, that ecosystem is still hard to replace.
What Microsoft Teams actually costs now
Free covers basic chat with 60-minute meeting caps and 5GB storage. Essentials is $4/month with 30-hour meetings and 10GB storage. Business Basic runs $6/month and includes full Office web apps plus 1TB of storage and webinar hosting. For most enterprises, though, Teams isn't purchased as a standalone line item at all, it comes bundled into existing Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise licenses that many organizations already pay for, which is the real reason the per-seat sticker price undersells Teams' actual cost advantage for Microsoft-shop companies.
That bundling is Teams' entire pitch: SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office document collaboration integrate natively, and for a company already paying for Microsoft 365 licensing, Teams effectively costs nothing incremental. Enterprise security and compliance certifications (HIPAA, GDPR) are also a real draw for regulated industries that need that paper trail regardless of which chat tool their employees prefer.
Have the performance complaints held up?
They have, and this is the part of the original comparison most worth re-verifying because it's a real, ongoing pattern rather than a one-time launch issue. Teams still carries a documented reputation for high CPU and RAM usage, and Mac users specifically report screen sharing causing significant system lag, a complaint that shows up consistently enough in Reddit threads to be a real planning consideration for any organization with a meaningful Mac-using population, not just an isolated grievance. Notifications arriving late or not at all, and search functionality that lags noticeably behind Slack's, both remain common complaints as of this review, not resolved pain points from an earlier product generation.
Slack's side of the ledger hasn't changed either: it remains distracting by default, and serious notification management takes real configuration effort to avoid channel overload, a genuine cost in setup time even though it's not a performance problem in the way Teams' resource usage is.
Real cost at enterprise scale
A 200-person company already paying for Microsoft 365 Business Premium: Teams costs effectively $0 incremental, since it's bundled into a license the company already holds for Outlook, Word, and SharePoint access.
The same 200-person company adopting Slack Pro instead: $8.75 x 200 = $1,750/month, or $21,000/year, an entirely new line item on top of whatever Microsoft 365 licensing the company still needs for its actual productivity suite.
A 200-person company on Slack Business+ for the admin controls large orgs typically need: $12.50 x 200 = $2,500/month, or $30,000/year.
The math is stark when framed this way, but it leaves out the real variable: developer and knowledge-worker productivity lost to Teams' performance issues and weaker search is a genuine, if harder-to-quantify, cost that the $21,000-30,000/year Slack premium is partly paying to avoid.
Where each one still wins
Slack still wins decisively for engineering organizations and any team that lives inside integrations, its developer tooling and app ecosystem depth remain unmatched by Teams. It also wins on raw day-to-day usability, cleaner UI, faster search, fewer performance complaints, for teams that aren't already locked into Microsoft's ecosystem.
Teams still wins on total cost of ownership for any organization already committed to Microsoft 365, and on compliance credentials for regulated industries that need HIPAA or GDPR certification baked into their communication platform by default rather than bolted on.
What migrating between them actually involves
Moving an existing team's channel structure and message history between Slack and Teams isn't a clean swap in either direction. Slack's export tools produce a full JSON archive of message history, but Teams doesn't have a native one-click import for that format, so a real migration usually means manually recreating channel structure and accepting that historical searchable conversation context doesn't carry over cleanly, only files and a few structured records survive the move intact. That asymmetry matters most for teams sitting on years of Slack history used as informal institutional knowledge: switching to Teams effectively means starting that knowledge base over, not relocating it.
Integrations are the other real migration cost. Slack's 2,600-plus app ecosystem and custom Bolt SDK apps don't have Teams equivalents in most cases, so a team with deep custom tooling built on Slack's API is looking at real re-engineering work, not a configuration change, if it ever moves to Teams. That asymmetric switching cost is worth factoring in before treating either platform as a low-risk experiment; the bundling economics favor Teams, but the lock-in favors whichever platform a team has already invested years of custom tooling into.
Which one to actually pick
Pick Slack if developer tooling integration and daily usability matter enough to justify $21,000-30,000/year in incremental cost for a 200-person org, and if the team isn't heavily Mac-based colliding with Teams' known performance issues.
Pick Teams if Microsoft 365 licensing is already a sunk cost across the organization, making Teams' incremental price effectively zero, and if compliance certifications are a hard requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
The honest bottom line
Nothing about this comparison has actually shifted since the original review: Slack costs real money that Teams effectively doesn't for Microsoft-committed organizations, and Teams' performance and search complaints remain persistent enough that this isn't a stale grievance from an earlier product cycle. The decision still comes down to whether an organization is already paying for Microsoft 365 licensing that makes Teams free in practice, or whether Slack's tooling and usability advantages are worth paying a real premium to get.