What you need to know
- Slack highlights engagement numbers and weekly actions in recent statements.
- Slack states that over 5 billion weekly actions occur on the platform.
- Slack competes with Microsoft Teams that recently hit 20 million daily active users.
Yesterday, Microsoft shared that Microsoft Teams has 20 million daily active users. Now, rival Slack points towards usage rate figures in statements to Thurrott.com.
Slack told Paul Thurrott, "As we've said before, you can't transform a workplace if people aren't actually using your product." They also added that "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." Slack's emphasis on weekly actions and usage rate indicate that Slack's focus is people using a service heavily rather than the total number of users.
Thurrot points out that Microsoft Teams had 27 million voice or video meetings in the last month and 220 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in Microsoft Teams last month. These figures indicate a low engagement rate, including about one monthly voice or video call per daily active user.
It's difficult to measure these services against each other without complete data to compare. At least for now, it seems that each company will focus on areas that show success and growth. The categories that Microsoft and Slack focus on likely won't line up as each company wants to focus on areas that they're leading.
