on Slack, Google Meet/Chat, Discord, Office365 teams

Just for the context, github(owned by Microsoft) staff is switching to O365 Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, day-to-day operations stay on Slack.

TLDR

general

Jitsi is terrible.

For me, ranked:

  1. Zoom

  2. Google Meet

  3. Discord

  4. Slack

  5. Teams

    I used to work at LinkedIn (owned by microsoft) and about 2 years ago they announced engineering was switching from zoom/slack to teams. There was significant uproar and LinkedIn leadership ended up reversing the decision. To my knowledge LinkedIn engineering is still on zoom/slack.

on Discord

we use discord at work and the only bad thing is the screen sharing, many times we can get away with it but if we can’t we usually just jump on a free zoom call

slack

I use both slack and teams. Slack chat features are vastly superior, they work really well, we devs use only slack, but I prefer Teams for video conferences, it’s not that slack doesn’t work, but I found teams screen sharing or recording to be better. Also Teams is simpler for non dev people.

the best way to use Slack on any desktop/computer OS is: 1) login to Slack in a chrome browser tab and then --> Create Shortcut 2) uninstall Slack app

As far as the application itself, I find that Slack is much easier to use and has capabilities that have been very helpful. The Slack user interface was intuitive and I quickly got up to speed. For Teams, I use it when I need to (not all times at our company have slack) but everyone I know prefers slack. The slack ui is more intuitive and has features such as slacking to yourself which is useful for notetaking. Again, my opinion of Teams might change as I better learn the user interface.

Google Chat / Meet

Google Chat has improved a lot but it’s definitely not there yet from a savvy users standpoint.

I’ve seen it used with great success at smaller, non-technical companies though.

It's fascinating how good the Google Meet experience is in contrast to how bad Google Chat is. Chat seems like such a simpler problem, but it's still missing basic features like working search

My company forces us to use Google Chat. I would take Teams any day.

For video or text chat or both? Meet + Slack is my preferred solution. IMO Google Meet is the easiest to use video meeting software. Click link and the person is dropped in the meeting. Slack is the best text chat.

Zoom is fine.

Teams is a dumpster fire on my mac. I have a couple external meetings that are Teams and I have to remember start trying to get on 5-10 minutes early. Otherwise I won’t have time to force quit the client or restart my browser to make Teams work.

Google meet is the best experience in Linux as well. Joining a call through firefox or chrome on linux works flawlessly.

on Office 365 Teams

I’ve found Teams acceptable for video calls, including large-scale ones. Some of the Office integration is quite nice, e.g. PowerPoint Live. But what I really hate about it is the chat functionality. Very basic person-to-person DMs work ok, but it doesn’t scale up to larger groups. Some UI complaints:

  • When someone messages a group that you’re part of, you get a notification. This makes it hard to distinguish between someone trying to get ahold of you, and the background chatter in a group. Slack just has better defaults here: it’ll notify you for DMs, and use a more subtle message count for channel messages (unless someone @’s you’).

  • When someone calls you on Teams, it’s like they’re using a telephone from the 1990s. You could be in the middle of another meeting, and your computer will play a ringtone, because SOMEONE IS CALLING, URGENTLY!!! So you have to quickly excuse yourself from the current meeting and pick up the phone (and probably find out that it was nothing urgent anyway). Slack’s UI for huddles are a lot better here, and the smooth jazz is just a nice touch :)

  • If you set up a “team” within MS Teams, it’s supposed to set up a place where people from that team can collaborate. The UI for it is just awful though, and I’ve never seen teams stay engaged through this. Slack channels are just far more intuitive, and remove a lot of the friction from collaborating with your teammates.

There are more issues, e.g. Teams isn’t friendly to my laptop’s fan, and it keeps screwing up my bluetooth settings. Although I’m not sure if Apple is actually to blame for those ones.

Teams is just bland. That’s it really. We moved from Slack to Teams and we had a huge drop in inter-team communication to the point we moved back. For remote company it’s hugely important.

A lack of thread conversations was a huge issue too.

The only plus side was video conferencing was rock solid and office integration was good, as expected.

It’s so bad it makes Slack look lightweight. Which is a real accomplishment.

Coming from Slack, group threads is annoying. Teams gets extra hate because it's often forced upon engineers for cost-saving measures. Slack has a lot of nice features that help maintain a company's remote-work culture. Teams is just an organized collaboration tool. There's a huge difference.

At work we use Teams and I have zero complaints so far. We’ve been using it since either 2019 or 2020. It’s so much better than Zoom + Mattermost or, before that Skype for Business / Lync. shudder

Teams is bundled with office 365 so I’m gonna assume that’s why most companies use it. Which is why we use it at work. I’m not a fan either. Desktop app just seems slow as hell on my Mac.

Issues like unable to switch teams without re-authenticating? Slack can do this, Discord can do this, both of them completely seamlessly but Teams just can’t.

I’m fine with using Teams for the actual scheduled meeting video calls.
It isn’t amazing — but has been relatively reliable for me. The app takes up too much memory, but Slack video calls have had a lot of issues also (although Huddles has improved things a lot).
My contention with using teams would be for team text chat. No thank you, it is terrible. I’d rather use Slack or really any alternative.

When you copy a message in Teams, it “helpfully” adds a header so you end up pasting “[Tuesday 12:54] John Doe” into random form fields / your terminal / your browser location bar ten times a day I stopped editing text in Teams. I wrote text in an editor outside of Teams, then pasted it into Teams.

- it's wonky
- 1 on 1 calls not always share the screen and I need to hang up, refresh the browser and call again
- translation stopped working both ways. Once a text is translated it doesn't go back to its original language
- it's a mess if you make a lot of group calls with different people. You end up having trillions of opened chat. I ended up pinning the main ones to keep them at the top and ignore the rest.
- code snippets are just awful. They are a box inside of a box and you always need to click on expand to see the code.
- music when you are on hold can't be stopped which can make you crazy. I always hang up or mute the tab
- group video calls don't have an option to see everybody in the same screen. Now it's like divided in pages

And I could go on and on. Discord is thousands of times better than this.

For people who are not solely at one company - contractors/freelancers who perhaps need to support connectivity with multiple organizations - MS Teams is a huge hostile pita.

Bingo, that right there. Need to work with one team, but also quickly jump onto a meeting with another client… So bad. If you need to be available to two clients at the same time? No, that’s not going to work.

The UI is horrible, finding people is difficult at best. Chatting with someone and want to jump on a video call… well, that will take a few minutes to locate the right button. At least Google Chat just put a big old button right in your face so you can do a quick meeting. Google suite of product (Meet, Calendar and Chat) have their own issues, but it’s so easy to do meetings, and it just works every time. For six months a number of us at the office were unable to make audio work on the desktop Mac app, and Firefox wasn’t supported, so you needed Chrome to join a Teams meeting.

You can't really complain about the audio or video quality in Teams, they got that mostly figured out. It's just that the desktop app has a horrible UI. I mean so does Slack, given the option I'd use neither. 

I've used Teams, Zoom and Meet. Teams is, by far, the worst options. I cringe every time I have to use it, because it's random whether I or one of my colleagues will not waste minutes at the start of the meeting getting something to work, or just joining.

You see, MS has completely messed up the login for Teams. I have like 3 different MS accounts (Azure, Office365, etc). Some of my coworkers have many more than that, due to identities they use for contracts. I've tried Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc. I've tried incognito windows. Sometimes it just doesn't work.

Never had a single problem with Zoom or Meet, other than the default audio devices not being selected. That's easily fixed.