How does Zoom Team Chat stack up against Slack and Microsoft Teams?

Many organizations are now supporting a distributed workforce, which means they’re tasked with fostering meaningful collaboration around the globe all while trying to unearth new revenue streams. To do this, we have to find ways to be more nimble, work smarter, and communicate better. 

Our instant messaging offering, Zoom Team Chat, is the key to unlocking that level of agility. It equips you with all the same messaging features as other providers, like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and comes automatically with all of Zoom’s solutions — flowing throughout modalities to reduce complexity and enable seamless workflows. This dynamic chat solution helps power collaboration across meetings, phone, whiteboard, and more — and your workforce as a result.

When you first hear “Zoom Team Chat” you may initially think of “meeting chat,” which allows you to send messages while in a Zoom Meeting. Zoom Team Chat is our persistent chat solution, letting you keep the conversation going in groups, chat 1:1, take notes, set up public or private channels, and search for previously shared information and resources from our mobile, web, or desktop apps. It comes included with other Zoom products, meaning you already have Zoom Team Chat — and its advanced capabilities — right at your fingertips.

Because it’s tightly integrated with Zoom’s other products, Zoom Team Chat helps you cut back on toggle tax so you can move through your workday with the speed and ease you need. By having all your communications and collaboration in one app, you can quickly share documents, take notes, set up a call or video with a teammate, or even fire off a quick email.   

Simple and easy to use, our chat solution’s familiar interface helps instill simplicity and flexibility throughout your teams’ day-to-day. You can provide immediate value to your organization without putting a dent in your budget.

Chat products have become the backbone of modern collaboration, with technology providers around the globe all offering their own flavor of instant messaging. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom — you may be wondering what’s the real difference between the three. Let’s take a look:

Expanding capabilities through an integrated platform

Zoom Team Chat has quite a few things in common with Slack. You can organize chat channels, search for key information and resources, and seamlessly chat externally on both. Chat apps and integrations, as well as file storage management, are available on either solution. Even advanced security features like Zoom Customer Managed Key are supported by Zoom Team Chat. 

However, there are also a few key differences between the two, mainly stemming from Zoom Team’s Chat role in the broader Zoom unified communications platform. Zoom Team Chat offers continuous meeting chat — which allows meeting attendees to chat before, during, and after a meeting — the ability to schedule a meeting directly from a chat channel, and an AI-powered meeting summary whereas Slack currently does not. All of those capabilities are possible because Zoom Team Chat seamlessly integrates with the rest of the Zoom platform. Zoom Team Chat comes included with other Zoom products at no additional cost. 

Our enterprise-grade collaboration hub offers a dynamic chat experience, while also enhancing how you use Zoom for meetings, phone, whiteboard, and more. While Zoom Team Chat equips you with similar features to those offered by providers like Slack, it does so without the extra cost and hassle of having to fold in an additional communications vendor. You can move through your workday with ease all within the same collaboration application.

The power of a best-of-breed communications application

Microsoft Teams offers a chat solution that’s also part of a unified communications system, but it’s not exactly apples to apples with Zoom Team Chat. The difference between the two boils down to experience — the two share similar capabilities, but there’s a disparity in delivery. A few reasons why that is:

1. Organization all in one place

Zoom Team Chat is built right into the same lightweight and agile Zoom client that you use for other Zoom products. So the chat solution, as well as other Zoom modalities, are contained in a single, easy-to-use application designed to help you remain productive and organized. Whether you’re using Zoom Team Chat folders or the remind me feature, which helps you follow up on a message at a later time, you have everything you need in one place so you can stay on top of your tasks. Microsoft Teams currently doesn’t offer those two features.

2. Familiar and consistent experience
The Microsoft Teams chat experience can lack consistency. Although Teams supports threads in channel chat messages, it does not support threads in 1:1 chats or group chats. For 1:1, group chats, and meeting chats in Microsoft Teams, you can reply to a message and quote it, but it’s not a true thread — it’s not the same experience everywhere. Zoom Team Chat, however, fully supports threaded conversations on channels, 1:1, and in meeting chat, which helps you and others organize the conversation.

3. Agile innovation

Speed of innovation is essential for a meaningful customer experience — it equips you with the tools you need to elevate and improve the way you work. With one application to update, Zoom can get features into your hands as quickly as possible. Whether it’s sharing an email to a chat or continuous meeting chat (more on both below), our latest chat innovations are made available to customers all within the latest version of the application they know and trust. That’s not always the case for Teams, given Microsoft’s feature release cycle approach where new features are pushed independently of the client version. That could mean a new feature can be rolled out to certain users, but not all of them. 

4. Integrations and extendibility
Every business is different, so it’s important to have the ability to tailor your communications to your organization’s needs. Zoom Team Chat is designed to give you that choice through strategic app integrations that help extend the chat communication modality. For example, you can use Microsoft Office or Google Workspace with Zoom Team Chat, creating and sharing documents without leaving the client. While Microsoft Teams supports this functionality natively with their own office suite, they are limited to sharing for other providers like Google.

Zoom Team Chat comes with countless native features designed to enhance your instant messaging experience. From customizable settings designed to enable flexible work to advanced and innovative AI features that expedite workflows, Zoom Team Chat equips you with the tools you need to reimagine how you get stuff done. A few of those innovations include: 

Team Chat compose with Zoom AI Companion (free trial for customers in select plans*): If you need to get up to speed on chats and provide a timely response, you can use the Team Chat compose feature to draft a message for you based on conversational context. You can change the message tone and length to customize suggested responses.

Zoom AI Companion meeting summary (free trial for customers in select plans*): When you’ve wrapped up a meeting, you can generate a summary of the call and next steps and share it via a continuous meeting chat (more on that below) and email, so those who didn’t attend will no longer have to sit through lengthy recordings. Bonus: you don’t even need to record the call to get the meeting summary. 

Continuous meeting chat: Never lose track of meeting conversations again. With continuous meeting chat, you can collaborate before a meeting and continue after the fact through a meeting chat that’s accessible within Zoom Team Chat. You can notify colleagues you’re running late with the ability to send chats without being in the meeting, or even respond to action items and follow up in Team Chat after a meeting.

Share email to chat channel: Having your communications in different places makes it hard to stay on top of conversations. With the ability to share your emails to Team Chat, you can have all your conversations in a centralized place to improve team alignment and organization. Note: this feature requires access to the desktop Zoom Mail Client.

Whether you want to share information in a pinch or send a few messages before you hop on a call, Zoom Team Chat helps you foster meaningful connections with less friction. As the glue to our collaboration platform, Zoom Team Chat keeps all your communications connected, consolidating everything you need for your work day in one place.

Any customer, whether they have a free or paid account, can use Zoom Team Chat for free in the Zoom client. If you want to learn more about our messaging solution, you can also request a demo or visit this page.

*Meeting summary and Team Chat compose with Zoom AI Companion are currently available in English only to Zoom Workplace packages (Enterprise Plus, Enterprise, Business Plus, Business, Pro) and select Zoom legacy bundles (Enterprise Named Host, Enterprise Active Host, Zoom Meetings Enterprise, Zoom Meetings Business, Zoom Meetings Pro) — as free trials for a limited time. Select verticals and geos may be excluded. 

Free trial features may be discontinued or modified at any time and may be subject to usage limits, regional or license restrictions, and other terms and conditions.