6 ms·

Teams suck. Google Chat? What’s that? I’ll stick with Slack.

Karunamon 6y ago
Teams, indeed, sucks. The problem is that the people responsible for mandating its usage don't care how much it sucks, they care that it's working enterprise IM and they get it for free with the Office subs they're already paying for.
colinmhayes 6y ago
I don't disagree, but unless you're at a startup you probably don't get to choose. It's some executive choosing, and saying we saved a boatload by moving to the app that's included with our productivity suite is enticing.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Exactly. At companies that are large customers, employees don't get to choose. You get Google Chat integrated into your email inbox, and connections to Slack are blocked.
CharlesW 6y ago
Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck. It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.
- jasonv 6y ago
  Switching channels/teams in Teams is far less efficient than moving through channels in Slack, which means I'm less likely to engage well in Teams.
  - blackrock 6y ago
    I’m going to say it again. Good grief! Teams, suck!
- djsumdog 6y ago
  The way rooms is organized is really annoying. It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet. The rooms also show what appears to be IMs for group chats (the style/UI) instead of a chatroom. The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are good, but The Linux version of their client just stops pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9 pulseaudio` and restart it (and it's the only app left where I still have to do that). Teams gets a big "Meh" for me on calls and awful for text chat.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet. Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic) and then you have to click to see the full list. Maddening.
    - prepend 6y ago
      Clicking in every channel to see what’s new is insane. I’m in 15 “teams” and they each probably average 10 channels. I see the alerts that there are new messages but I would need to go into each one to check them out. As a result, I ignore them all. They need some sort of “feed” feature.
  - isolli 6y ago
    Yes, this is infuriating. And users report similar problems with audio in Windows too... Unfortunately your killall workaround does not work for me. I have to restart my laptop every time I have a Teams meeting -.-
    - pferde 6y ago
      That's odd. I'm using Linux Teams client in a Docker container, and it gets many days of uptime (and many voice calls per day) between restarts (for unrelated reasons). No problems with integrating with host pulseaudio server. I'm quite a happy user of Teams, the only thing I'm missing is ability to share my desktop with giving control to a remote caller - but I only needed that maybe once or twice over this entire year so far.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  We use Teams at work, and for that it works quite well. Calls and desktop sharing work well, the channels do what they do, integration with OneDrive and the wiki thing is nice etc. But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is that a CF. Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team active. Notifications from the other are horribly unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client. So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".
  - shreyshrey 6y ago
    Shameless plug. AirSend (https://www.airsend.io https://www.airsend.io) offers the bare essentials one need to collaborate with both internal team members & external clients in one elegant package. Collaborating across organization boundaries is really hard with both ms teams and slack. Thats the problem we are trying to solve with airsend. AirSend gives you a few simple (chat, voice/video, files, tasks and wiki) but powerful tools and then get out of the way.
  - syshum 6y ago
    >>and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client. This was largely fixed, you may have to enable the "new meeting experience" though, which starts your meeting / call in a separate window from the main client
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      I have that enabled and I still get the message that my call will end when I try to switch teams while in a call. Last tried this a couple of days ago.
      - syshum 6y ago
        I am not sure what you mean by "switch teams". Are you attempting to Switch Tenants?
- mrgordon 6y ago
  I definitely prefer Slack. Here are a few reasons off the top of my head. 1. Many users have issues where the unmute button is unresponsive. Typically the workaround is to turn off incoming video feeds which isn't exactly ideal. This is a major turnoff. 2. Difficult to stay involved in multiple channels as described by another comment. I find it tedious to find what's happened if I've been away for a while. 3. Slack has bots that do various helpful things including leaving channels you don't use, asking you for your daily standup feedback if you don't have an in person meeting, referencing external content, etc. I assume Teams must have something similar but I've never seen them used which likely indicates its a lot easier to do with Slack. 4. Nicer UI as you allude to yourself 5. Slack works with several video chat options including their own (based on AWS tools I believe?) and Zoom. I actually prefer Slack video chat over Zoom or Teams for pair programming as its so easy to annotate the screen without clicking into a bunch of menus or being the meeting owner or something. You literally just start drawing on the screen and your coworkers see it 6. Excellent mobile app which is quite important for a chat client 7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually) 8. Not tied in to only Microsoft products
  - nkerkin 6y ago
    > 7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually) Looks like there's a free [0] version of teams that supports unlimited search, unlimited app integrations and meetings of up to 100 attendees. Compare to free [1] slack that has limitations of 10k searchable messages, 10 app integrations and only 1-1 meetings [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/free https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-team... [1]: https://slack.com/intl/en-au/pricing https://slack.com/intl/en-au/pricing
    - mrgordon 6y ago
      Fair enough, not too surprising Microsoft can offer a limited version for free. The Microsoft free version is much more limited than you imply though. The "meetings of up to 100 attendees" are for 60 minutes maximum versus the Slack ones which have no cap. Not to mention many people use Slack + an external video chat app so they wouldn't care.
- prepend 6y ago
  Teams just doesn’t seem very good for team collaboration outside of video/audio. Their client feels cramped and stifling and their web version is not feature complete. Basic stuff like just linking to a document or wiki page or tab in Teams doesn’t work well so you end up with stuff like “Open the Foo team, look in the Bar channel and click the second link in the header to see the dashboard.” instead of just adding a link to it. The integration and embedding of office/powerbi/etc is neat, but it forces it into a Teams frame. For some reason, some things launch SharePoint with its own bag of shit for trying to make its own version of web sites. I’m in a big org with Teams for almost a year. We have thousands of employees who aren’t as active as hundred person free slack open source projects. People aren’t using it to communicate much with each other. They keep emailing, or texting or IMing. I get more Skype IMs a day than Teams. And do you know how horrible Skype is? Because of this, I think it sucks as a superset of Slack. Sure, it nominally has all those features, but in practice they aren’t usable. I hope that MS just keeps iterating and it eventually gets better. I think it’s better now than a year ago.
trilinearnz 6y ago
The thing I like about Teams is the way you can have collaboratively-editable documents localised to a particular channel by way of the Files tab, which is great for organisations that don't yet have an ingrained online Office 365 or Google Sheets culture. Apart from that, I find it clunky, unwieldy, and it has that unfortunate soullessness that permeates many 'productivity' applications (exemplified by the sterile selection of reaction emoji). For me: Slack has character, and works well.
- prepend 6y ago
  I don’t like this because I would like to store my doc in OneDrive or some other team and link them into a teams channel to edit. So while the collab works well, it’s a lot of work to then organize the files so anything beyond literal ephemeral scratch pads sucks for “power users” and completely confuses regular users.

Teams, indeed, sucks. The problem is that the people responsible for mandating its usage don't care how much it sucks, they care that it's working enterprise IM and they get it for free with the Office subs they're already paying for.

colinmhayes 6y ago

I don't disagree, but unless you're at a startup you probably don't get to choose. It's some executive choosing, and saying we saved a boatload by moving to the app that's included with our productivity suite is enticing.

benhurmarcel 6y ago
Exactly. At companies that are large customers, employees don't get to choose. You get Google Chat integrated into your email inbox, and connections to Slack are blocked.

CharlesW 6y ago

Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck. It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.

jasonv 6y ago
Switching channels/teams in Teams is far less efficient than moving through channels in Slack, which means I'm less likely to engage well in Teams.
- blackrock 6y ago
  I’m going to say it again. Good grief! Teams, suck!
djsumdog 6y ago
The way rooms is organized is really annoying. It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet. The rooms also show what appears to be IMs for group chats (the style/UI) instead of a chatroom. The calendar integration is nice and the video chats are good, but The Linux version of their client just stops pulling audio all the time unless I do a `killall -9 pulseaudio` and restart it (and it's the only app left where I still have to do that). Teams gets a big "Meh" for me on calls and awful for text chat.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > It's not just a straight list of chatrooms like ... every other chat app on the planet. Yes, it's odd. For those who haven't used Teams, it defaults to showing you a team's channels you use most frequently (I guess? I never quite understood the logic) and then you have to click to see the full list. Maddening.
  - prepend 6y ago
    Clicking in every channel to see what’s new is insane. I’m in 15 “teams” and they each probably average 10 channels. I see the alerts that there are new messages but I would need to go into each one to check them out. As a result, I ignore them all. They need some sort of “feed” feature.
- isolli 6y ago
  Yes, this is infuriating. And users report similar problems with audio in Windows too... Unfortunately your killall workaround does not work for me. I have to restart my laptop every time I have a Teams meeting -.-
  - pferde 6y ago
    That's odd. I'm using Linux Teams client in a Docker container, and it gets many days of uptime (and many voice calls per day) between restarts (for unrelated reasons). No problems with integrating with host pulseaudio server. I'm quite a happy user of Teams, the only thing I'm missing is ability to share my desktop with giving control to a remote caller - but I only needed that maybe once or twice over this entire year so far.
magicalhippo 6y ago
We use Teams at work, and for that it works quite well. Calls and desktop sharing work well, the channels do what they do, integration with OneDrive and the wiki thing is nice etc. But then I got a member of a different Team, for one of our customers, as part of some integration work. And boy is that a CF. Unlike Discord you either have this team or that team active. Notifications from the other are horribly unreliable, and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client. So as such, "Teams" really should have been named "Team".
- shreyshrey 6y ago
  Shameless plug. AirSend (https://www.airsend.io https://www.airsend.io) offers the bare essentials one need to collaborate with both internal team members & external clients in one elegant package. Collaborating across organization boundaries is really hard with both ms teams and slack. Thats the problem we are trying to solve with airsend. AirSend gives you a few simple (chat, voice/video, files, tasks and wiki) but powerful tools and then get out of the way.
- syshum 6y ago
  >>and there's no way to chat with someone in one team while you're in a call with someone from the other team besides running a separate client. This was largely fixed, you may have to enable the "new meeting experience" though, which starts your meeting / call in a separate window from the main client
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    I have that enabled and I still get the message that my call will end when I try to switch teams while in a call. Last tried this a couple of days ago.
    - syshum 6y ago
      I am not sure what you mean by "switch teams". Are you attempting to Switch Tenants?
mrgordon 6y ago
I definitely prefer Slack. Here are a few reasons off the top of my head. 1. Many users have issues where the unmute button is unresponsive. Typically the workaround is to turn off incoming video feeds which isn't exactly ideal. This is a major turnoff. 2. Difficult to stay involved in multiple channels as described by another comment. I find it tedious to find what's happened if I've been away for a while. 3. Slack has bots that do various helpful things including leaving channels you don't use, asking you for your daily standup feedback if you don't have an in person meeting, referencing external content, etc. I assume Teams must have something similar but I've never seen them used which likely indicates its a lot easier to do with Slack. 4. Nicer UI as you allude to yourself 5. Slack works with several video chat options including their own (based on AWS tools I believe?) and Zoom. I actually prefer Slack video chat over Zoom or Teams for pair programming as its so easy to annotate the screen without clicking into a bunch of menus or being the meeting owner or something. You literally just start drawing on the screen and your coworkers see it 6. Excellent mobile app which is quite important for a chat client 7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually) 8. Not tied in to only Microsoft products
- nkerkin 6y ago
  > 7. Ability to run a small chatroom for free which AFAIK Microsoft doesn't offer (its included with other Microsoft products that were paid for usually) Looks like there's a free [0] version of teams that supports unlimited search, unlimited app integrations and meetings of up to 100 attendees. Compare to free [1] slack that has limitations of 10k searchable messages, 10 app integrations and only 1-1 meetings [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/free https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/microsoft-team... [1]: https://slack.com/intl/en-au/pricing https://slack.com/intl/en-au/pricing
  - mrgordon 6y ago
    Fair enough, not too surprising Microsoft can offer a limited version for free. The Microsoft free version is much more limited than you imply though. The "meetings of up to 100 attendees" are for 60 minutes maximum versus the Slack ones which have no cap. Not to mention many people use Slack + an external video chat app so they wouldn't care.
prepend 6y ago
Teams just doesn’t seem very good for team collaboration outside of video/audio. Their client feels cramped and stifling and their web version is not feature complete. Basic stuff like just linking to a document or wiki page or tab in Teams doesn’t work well so you end up with stuff like “Open the Foo team, look in the Bar channel and click the second link in the header to see the dashboard.” instead of just adding a link to it. The integration and embedding of office/powerbi/etc is neat, but it forces it into a Teams frame. For some reason, some things launch SharePoint with its own bag of shit for trying to make its own version of web sites. I’m in a big org with Teams for almost a year. We have thousands of employees who aren’t as active as hundred person free slack open source projects. People aren’t using it to communicate much with each other. They keep emailing, or texting or IMing. I get more Skype IMs a day than Teams. And do you know how horrible Skype is? Because of this, I think it sucks as a superset of Slack. Sure, it nominally has all those features, but in practice they aren’t usable. I hope that MS just keeps iterating and it eventually gets better. I think it’s better now than a year ago.

trilinearnz 6y ago

The thing I like about Teams is the way you can have collaboratively-editable documents localised to a particular channel by way of the Files tab, which is great for organisations that don't yet have an ingrained online Office 365 or Google Sheets culture. Apart from that, I find it clunky, unwieldy, and it has that unfortunate soullessness that permeates many 'productivity' applications (exemplified by the sterile selection of reaction emoji). For me: Slack has character, and works well.

prepend 6y ago
I don’t like this because I would like to store my doc in OneDrive or some other team and link them into a teams channel to edit. So while the collab works well, it’s a lot of work to then organize the files so anything beyond literal ephemeral scratch pads sucks for “power users” and completely confuses regular users.