Slack vs. Microsoft Teams: Which Free Tier Gives Small Businesses More?

For a small business not ready to pay for team chat, Slack and Microsoft Teams both offer free tiers — but they’re generous in different places.

Message history

This is the single biggest difference. Slack’s free plan only keeps searchable message history for 90 days — older messages are permanently deleted, even if you upgrade later to recover them. Microsoft Teams’ free tier keeps unlimited chat history with no rolling deletion. If your team relies on being able to search old conversations, this alone may decide it.

Meetings and storage

Teams Free includes group video meetings up to 60 minutes and 5GB of cloud storage per user. Slack’s free tier supports 1-on-1 video calls but not group video, and provides 5GB of storage shared across the whole workspace rather than per user — a meaningful difference once you have more than a couple of people.

Integrations

Slack’s ecosystem is deeper: its free plan supports a basic number of app integrations, and its paid tiers unlock one of the largest third-party app marketplaces of any workplace chat tool. If your workflow depends on connecting a lot of other SaaS tools into chat, Slack still has the edge here even on the free tier.

Which should you pick?

• Choose Microsoft Teams Free if you want unlimited history, group video meetings, and you’re already using Microsoft 365 tools.
• Choose Slack Free if integrations with other apps matter more than long-term message history, and you mainly need 1-on-1 calls.

Both companies adjust free-tier limits periodically — confirm current storage and meeting caps on each vendor’s site before standardizing your team on one.