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- Hacker News
- The usability in Teams always feels bad to me, like it was designed and developed by someone trying to be fancy without being usable.. Text content in chats is in a strange light gray color, messages are collapsed by default so you have to expand them to read anything longer than a few words, then requiring a "title" for every message.. Slack just feels more natural to me, more thought-out..by awencasa
- I’m not quite sure, but the reasoning that some technology is frustrating users and therefore is not calculated in when optimizing cost per seat could apply to every software. In a large enough company there will be always people complaining about this and that. If you google you will also find people complaining about Slack.
I like Teams. Especially the Meeting feature. I like that I can join with multiple devices in a meeting. Sharing stuff in a meeting is also pretty cool and easy. I also like the integration into other products.
The only thing which could be better is performance - even the new WebView2 thing is not enough. But this is sadly common for most tools like this.
by SvenL - My company is using Teams. I chose it, and I do regret it but we're not using anything else from Microsoft and I've gradually reduced the surface to where we are just using it for messaging/large file storage, both of which it does fine actually.
My reasons:
- critical reason: it was half the price of anything else which was important when we were starting, less so now
- probably much less than half the price when factoring in storage allowances actually
- critical reason: it has built in translation without extra charge
- the only real alternative close to the price and with translation was Google workspace and I've had such bad experiences with Google that I'm still glad I didn't choose that
- inexperience: it was sold to me as a messaging and storage app that also came with a suite of other apps (which have ALL turned out to be useless) and I didn't know I was inheriting a heaving mutated behemoth built on the stinking undead corpses of SharePoint and AD.
So yeah, wish I'd had more info at the time. But at this point now that I've limited the surface we're using and it's all settled in, the only real problems we have are the tedious 2fa issues that crop up whenever a new person joins.
by esperent - There are plenty of serious businesses doing serious things, complex things, that use microsoft teams for chat. My work uses it, it kinda sucks, but honestly there's way more things to bikeshed than chat apps. You can send text messages and make video calls and do presentations in microsoft teams.by mlsu
- What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
by pluc - I documented a recent experience joining another company's Teams instance:
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To log into the Teams website on my Mac:
* Use Passwords to log into Okta.
* Use Okta Verify + Touch ID for MFA.
* Log into Teams with Okta.
* Install Microsoft Authenticator on my phone because Okta’s SSO isn’t enough for MS.
* Log into my work account in Microsoft Authenticator. (Bonus: typing an Okta password into some random app’s webview gives me the warm fuzzies!)
* Bounce to Okta Verify + Face ID on my phone for MFA.
* Scan the QR code on my Mac with my phone.
* Enter the 2 digit code shown on my Mac to double-plus authenticate with Microsoft Authenticator.
As punishment for doing all this correctly, finally have to use Teams.
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This is 100% accurate. Halfway through the hoopjumping, I realized it was ridiculous and started over from scratch so I could record each step of it.
I'm certain some step in there is necessary to support Outlook Express, and they can't clean up the process without annoying some bank paying for enterprise support of their Windows Server 2003 setup. These are the downsides of eternal backward compatibility.
by kstrauser - The last time I was part of a Teams environment (late 2025 or early 2026), search literally did not work.
I could see the keywords right there in the chat, enter them into the search bar, and get back 'no results found'.
(This was across at least a period of months too, not just an intermittent bug)
by mrkeen - I’ll touch on two areas that the article and many comments didn’t mention. We switched from Slack to Teams at a previous company.
- The loss of institutional knowledge was absolutely punishing and costly. Overnight, we lost access to an easily searchable knowledge base. A solution was available, but the search was awful and you had to know what you were looking for. While this isn’t really a fault of Teams and the vendor lock-in trap was unavoidable, the sheer monetary amount in wasted effort must have been massive. Additionally, many teams began to default to closed channels. Even future info was difficult or impossible to search.
- The loss of community was palpable. This was mid-pandemic and the formerly in-person work environment was all online. The Slack UI lends itself much more towards “casual” conversations in general chat rooms. It’s a bit difficult to put into words, but posting a funny link or a picture of your cat in Slack feels personable, while doing the same in Teams’ threaded UI feels one step away from writing an email. Even the reaction emojis were bland. It’s difficult to keep people engaged and sticking around if they don’t feel part of a team or community.