Slack vs Microsoft Teams

Microsoft’s documentation says Microsoft Copilot Chat (formerly Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat) “is available at no extra cost for eligible users who sign in with a Microsoft Entra work or school account and have a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription.” It is available in Teams, and outside Outlook it is “primarily web grounded.” Microsoft also lists AI features in Teams that need no extra license.

The full Microsoft Copilot license remains a paid add-on: $30.00 per user per month billed yearly, or $31.50 billed monthly on an annual commitment. Microsoft calls it “the foundation for many AI tool sets in Teams, like Copilot in Teams, Facilitator, and Channel Agent,” and without it, Copilot’s responses are grounded only in public web data.

Agents add a third cost line. For users without a Copilot license, agent use in Copilot Chat is billed pay-as-you-go through Azure at $0.01 per message, or through prepaid packs of 25,000 Copilot Credits at $200 a month. Licensed users build and use internal agents at no additional cost.

So the broad statement “AI requires a Copilot add-on” is too coarse for a 2026 decision. Slack’s underlying point, that work-grounded AI inside Teams costs extra, holds.

On April 1, 2024, Microsoft stopped selling its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Enterprise suites with Teams to net new subscribers outside the EEA and Switzerland; those customers bought a suite without Teams plus Teams Enterprise. Microsoft’s licensing notice for changes effective November 1, 2025 reverses that: “Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Enterprise suites that include Teams are once again available to all customers, new and existing,” alongside suites without Teams. Independent reporting ties the change to Microsoft’s commitments in the EU competition case.

Slack’s comparison page describes November 1, 2025 as the date Teams became “a separate purchase from Office 365/Microsoft 365 suites.” Its $8.55 price for standalone Teams Enterprise matches Microsoft’s. Its description of the Enterprise-suite change does not match Microsoft’s documentation. The sentence sits in the page’s FAQ, next to a table dated December 2025; we do not know how it was written, only that the documentation says otherwise. Licensing for other plan families (Business, Frontline, regional variants) is outside this finding.

For this buyer, the useful number is the delta. Microsoft’s November 2025 notice priced Office 365 E3 at $23.00 per user per month with Teams and $14.45 without. Suite prices rose on July 1, 2026; Microsoft says that increase does not apply to standalone Teams. Comparing “Slack price vs Teams price” without knowing which Microsoft licenses the company already owns is incomplete.

Slack’s comparison says “Native AI is available on all paid plans and is embedded consistently across all features.” Slack’s help center is more specific: conversation and thread summaries and huddle notes are on all paid plans; recaps, translations, AI search, and the Slackbot personal agent need Business+; enterprise search across connected apps needs Enterprise+. The separate Slack AI add-on is no longer sold.

The comparison worth making is by capability, and by which system holds the context. The table below shows where each capability sits today. It does not say which works better; that needs a trial with this company’s data.