Security, offline and access rules that differ between Microsoft Teams and Slack. Rows where both tools are the same (4) are left out; the full side-by-side is on each tool’s page: Microsoft Teams, Slack.
Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, IT, Japan, NO, PL, QA, South Korea, South Africa, SE, Switzerland, UAE, UK, Americas, APAC, EMEAsource
US, Germany, France, SE, Switzerland, Japan, India, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, UK, Canada, BrazilBusiness+source
Encryption
TLS 1.2+ with AES-256 in transit; BitLocker plus per-file encryption at rest; optional end-to-end encryption and Customer Keysource
Encrypted at rest and in transit by default; optional customer-managed keys via Slack EKMsource
YesMicrosoft Entra ID P1 (included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium)source
Not published
Device & session controls
YesMicrosoft Entra Conditional Access policies apply to Teams sign-ins (device compliance, location); Intune mobile application management; Conditional Access requires Entra ID P1.source
YesFreeBlock desktop/mobile file downloads (desktop downloads can be limited to allowed IP ranges) and mobile message copying on all plans; session duration controls; EMM-managed mobile device requirement on Enterprise Grid/Enterprise+.source
Office & room hardware
Microsoft Teams Rooms turn meeting spaces from huddle areas to large conference rooms into one-touch-join Teams rooms, sold as Windows and Android devices from partners.source
Set up single sign-on in Slack on Business+ before you invite the team, so accounts are created through your identity provider rather than by hand.
If you restrict Microsoft Teams to office or VPN IP addresses today, check how you will enforce the same rule in Slack; we found no IP allowlisting documented.
Checked September 19, 2026 against each vendor’s own trust center, help docs and app pages. Hover or tap “source” to see the exact wording we relied on. “Not published” means we could not find the vendor saying it on its own site; it doesn’t mean the feature is missing. Plan names are the lowest plan the vendor says includes the feature. Security · Offline · Remote vs office · Download the data
TEAM COMMUNICATION · MIGRATION GUIDE
Switching from Microsoft Teams to Slack
Teams-to-Slack is the harder direction of this pair: Slack has no equivalent native importer for Teams content, so this migration is largely a manual export-and-rebuild process.
Quick verdict: Worth it for teams that specifically want Slack’s threading, third-party app ecosystem, or cross-company Slack Connect channels, but plan for a genuinely manual project since there’s no official migration tool to lean on.
Why teams switch from Microsoft Teams to Slack
Preferring Slack’s app ecosystem and threading model
Product and engineering teams often prefer Slack’s more flexible threading and its larger catalog of developer-focused integrations.
Cross-company collaboration via Slack Connect
Companies that regularly collaborate with external partners or clients in shared channels find Slack Connect more mature than Teams’ guest-access model.
Decoupling chat from a Microsoft-only stack
Organizations moving away from an all-Microsoft toolset, or running a mixed Google/Microsoft environment, often prefer a chat tool that isn’t tied to either ecosystem.
Estimate the real hidden cost of moving from Microsoft Teams to Slack, not just the subscription price.
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Estimated migration time
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Data friction rating
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Total hidden switching cost
Data mapping & cleaning labor—
Migration / cleaning tooling fees—
Team retraining overhead—
Switching friction buffer (10%)—
Assumes a blended $45/hr internal labor rate with no native importer available, so sequences/records are rebuilt largely by hand. Adjust the sliders to match your team.
How to migrate your data
With no official migration tool in this direction, treat this as a manual export-and-rebuild project.
Step
What happens
1Export what Teams data you can
Use Microsoft’s compliance/eDiscovery export tools (where licensed) to pull channel message history, since there’s no consumer-friendly one-click export.
2Recreate channel structure in Slack
Manually rebuild your Teams-and-channels hierarchy as Slack channels, deciding how to flatten Teams’ nested structure into Slack’s flatter model.
3Migrate files separately
Teams files actually live in SharePoint/OneDrive rather than in Teams itself, so plan a separate file migration alongside the chat move.
4Rebuild integrations as Slack apps
Recreate any Teams bots, connectors, or Power Automate flows as their Slack app or Workflow Builder equivalents.
5Reapply channel membership and permissions
Manually add members and configure channel privacy settings in Slack to match who had access in the corresponding Teams channels.
6Run a parallel period before retiring Teams chat
Keep Teams available for reference during a transition window, especially if you’re keeping Teams for calling while moving only chat to Slack.
What Slack’s importer doesn’t handle: There is no native Teams-to-Slack importer; message history, threads, and files all require manual export and reconstruction, and Teams files live in SharePoint/OneDrive rather than in Teams chat itself.
Pricing during the transition
Here’s how Microsoft Teams and Slack plans stack up, from free tier to the mid-market plan most switching teams land on.
Plan
Microsoft Teams
Slack
Free plan
Teams Free: $0 — chat, calling, and basic meetings for individuals/small groups
Free: $0 — 90-day searchable message history limit
Entry paid tier
Teams Essentials: $4/user/month, paid yearly (annual subscription)
If Teams is bundled into your Microsoft 365 subscription, you may end up paying for both Teams (for calling/meetings) and Slack (for chat) unless you fully decouple from Microsoft 365 messaging.
Feature-parity checklist
Slack offers more flexible threading and a bigger third-party app ecosystem; Teams keeps chat unified with Microsoft 365 calling and files.
Feature
Microsoft Teams
Slack equivalent
Chat + calling + meetings in one app
Full chat, calling, and meetings in one app
Chat-focused, calling/meetings via Slack Huddles are lighter-weight
Threading model
Threaded replies in channels
Flexible threaded replies within channels
Third-party app/bot ecosystem
Growing but smaller marketplace, strong on Microsoft 365 apps
Very large third-party app marketplace
External guest/vendor chat
External access via Teams guest accounts, more setup involved
Is there any official Teams-to-Slack migration tool?
No, Slack does not offer a native importer for Teams content, so this direction relies on manual exports and rebuilding channel structure by hand, or a third-party migration vendor.
Can we export our full Teams chat history?
Only with the right Microsoft 365 compliance/eDiscovery licensing, and even then the export format isn’t designed to be re-imported into Slack; it’s for archival and legal purposes.
What happens to files shared in Teams channels?
They actually live in SharePoint document libraries linked to each team, so migrating them to Slack (which would mean moving them to a separate cloud storage tool) is a distinct project from the chat migration.
Should we keep Teams for meetings even if we move chat to Slack?
Many companies do exactly that: keep Teams for calendar-integrated meetings and calling while running day-to-day chat on Slack, though it does mean managing two tools.
How risky is losing Teams chat history?
It depends on your compliance requirements; if message retention matters legally, export and archive Teams data through Microsoft Purview before decommissioning any licenses.
Canonical data for the tools on this page
Every pricing fact, rating, AI billing model and switching guide we hold on each tool, on one page, with the date each figure was last verified.
Prices on this page were recorded from each vendor’s own pricing page on the date shown at the top of the page. Vendors change pricing often — check the live source before you buy.
Verified prices costed for your team size, a check against your must-have requirements, the questions to settle before you sign, and a source for every figure. Print it, or paste it into an email to whoever approves the spend.
Built for the leader who owns the selection, answers for the spend, drives the rollout, and lives with the results. HelpCompare covers the whole decision, not just the first step.
Engineer by training, operator by experience, marketer by choice. Bill spent eight and a half years as an engineer at HP, was COO of Auctiva (the number one third-party selling platform on eBay, past 200,000 users) and ran Google’s $70M/year search syndication partnership at Alot.com. Then he spent 13 years building his own web properties with his own money at stake. He has bought, trialled, integrated and cancelled more SaaS tools than he can count, and started HelpCompare because the real cost of switching tools is the part nobody covers.
“I’ve sat on both sides of the table: the agency recommending the tool and the client paying for it.”
Researched and fact-checked by the HelpCompare team. Pricing on this page was last verified on September 16, 2026. No paid sponsorships, no affiliate commissions.
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