Microsoft announced Tuesday that Teams, its workplace messaging and collaboration app, has hit 20 million daily active users — again one-upping its rival Slack.
Microsoft says it saw more than a 50% increase in usage of its Teams platform since July, when it announced that it had 13 million daily active users. Microsoft bundles Teams in with its Office 365 productivity suite for business, which analysts have said is a major advantage that could make it more difficult for Slack to compete.
In comparison, Slack announced in October that it has 12 million daily active users, at the same time highlighting that that users spend over nine hours a day connected to the service, and 90 minutes a day actively using the app — showing, in the company's view, that users actually enjoy using the app to get work done.
"As we've said before, you can't transform a workplace if people aren't actually using your product," a Slack spokesperson said in a statement. "Slack continues to see unmatched engagement on our platform with 5+ billion weekly actions, including 1+ billion mobile actions. Among our paid customers, users spend more than 9 hours per workday connected to our service, including spending about 90 minutes per workday actively using Slack."
The competition between the two has proven contentious: On-stage at a recent talk, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said that Microsoft has been "surprisingly unsportsmanlike" as a business rival, and leans on the popularity of Office 365 to push Teams over the top.
Besides messaging, Teams customers have participated in over 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 200 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in the service, Microsoft said. Last week, Microsoft and Salesforce also announced an integration for Teams with Salesforce's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products.
