Slack CEO says Microsoft Teams only has 20% adoption rate

Enterprise messaging platform Slack's CEO Stewart Butterfield has taken a dig at Microsoft Teams, saying it has just 20 per cent adoption rate among the users.

In an interview given to MarketWatch, Butterfield said: "If Microsoft is such a competitive threat to Slack as it says, we would not have grown in sales and $1 million customers.

"I mean, 44 million is an impressive number, but that is out of 200 million Office 365 customers. That's about a 20 per cent adoption rate," Butterfield said.

Last month, Teams reached 44 million daily active users (DAUs) -- an over 40 per cent jump from 20 million DAUs in November 2019 -- as people stayed home and worked.

Speaking about Slack's recent coronavirus-related user surge, Butterfield said that the week of March 9 "was the most productive in our company's history".

Slack recently launched a new app to integrate its rival Microsoft Teams video call features into its chat app.

Alongside the Microsoft Teams integration, Slack is also launching VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) phone integration with Zoom, Cisco Jabber, RingCentral and Dialpad productivity services.

Slack has seen nearly 350 per cent growth in calls made or received in its chat app over the past month, as enterprises and SMBs adopt remote working during the new coronavirus pandemic.

Microsoft registered a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in a single day on March 31 - 200 per cent increase from 900 million on March 16.

The number of weekly Teams mobile users grew more than 300 per cent from early February to March 31.