While workplace messaging app Slack’s blockbuster IPO last month claimed all the attention from the tech community, as if it was the king of cloud-based enterprise solutions, the real winner (for now) in the burgeoning workspace management sector is actually a somewhat “last-generation” name: Microsoft (MSFT).
On Thursday, Microsoft revealed for the first time that its Slack rival product, Microsoft Teams, had reached a daily active user count of more than 13 million. That’s a solid chunk above Slack’s 10 million daily active users which the startup disclosed earlier this year.
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Microsoft said Teams now has more than 19 million weekly active users from its 500,000 business clients. For comparison, Slack had more than 600,000 clients as of January this year, the company said in its IPO filing document in April. Slack didn’t disclose weekly or monthly user count and doesn’t have an updated count of its daily users yet, Observer has learned.
Slack’s client base (as of the IPO filing) consists of about 500,000 organizations on its free subscription plan and 95,000 paid customers, including 65 companies in the Fortune 100 ranking.
Still, the group messaging app is primarily popular among startups and small organizations, which explains why it has more customers but fewer daily users than Microsoft Team.
Most of the companies using Slack also favor Google G Suite for day-to-day office tasks, while those relying on Microsoft Office products are mostly Teams users by default because Microsoft bundles Teams with its Office 365 subscriptions for all business clients.
Microsoft also outrightly bans its own employees from using Slack, Geekwire reported last month. Use of Amazon Web Services and Google Docs, both of which Microsoft has competing products for, is also strongly discouraged.
Launched in December 2016, Microsoft Teams is nearly three years younger than Slack. But its rapid growth shown in the user count could be a real threat to Slack, which is now under public pressure to scale and be profitable.
For its current quarter ending July 31, Slack is expecting a revenue between $139 million and $141 million, a 50 percent jump from a year ago but significantly lower than the 82 percent growth rate achieved in the last quarter.
