Microsoft Teams review

Last updated: Mar 26, 2020

Quick verdict: Microsoft Teams incorporates a very powerful and complex suite of tools built around existing Microsoft products, although its complexity can also be something of a drawback.

Supports wide range of devices
Works well with Microsoft products
Free and paid tiers available
Very configurable for all kinds of business use

Interface is powerful but can be confusing
Works best if you're already wedded to Office 365

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Microsoft's take on business collaboration and videoconferencing software is, to the shock of absolutely nobody, built around its existing Office 365 suite of products and services. If you're a heavy business user of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and all of Microsoft's other well-regarded office productivity tools, it's a great way to make the most of them in a collaborative way. However, like many of those tools, there's a mix of both powerful features and product complexity that's not going to appeal to everyone.

Design

Free and paid options
Clean interface
Can get quite complex

Microsoft provides Teams on a range of different pricing plans, depending on both your needs and usage. If you're just after actual video calling through Microsoft, it'll shift you straight to Skype, for a start, but that's not a package that supports the kinds of collaborative features most business users will want or desire.
You can access Microsoft Teams for free with just a Microsoft account. So if you've got an Outlook email address (or kept up an old-school Hotmail one from back in the day) then you can sign in to and set up Microsoft Teams that way. However, that's an option that's only available if you don't have an Office 365 subscription tied to that email account. That's because Teams was and is part of the business suite of Office 365, with tiered pricing depending on your needs.
At the free tier you can have up to 300 users in your organisation, but they'll have to live with just 10GB of shared storage between them. While you can manage video group calls, there's no facility to record them for later training or review purposes. The free tier also lacks administrative tools for managing your users and their application use, as well as usage reporting for Office 365 services.
If you do want or need the more complex side of Microsoft Teams, you'll need a business or education licence for Office 365 in place. Microsoft does provide consumer-level Office 365 subscriptions, but Teams is explicitly not part of the Office 365 package in the consumer space. Again, Microsoft probably figures you'd be happy enough with Skype's simpler video and voice tools.
Because it's part of the business version of Microsoft Office 365, there really isn't distinct pricing for just Microsoft Teams. Office 365 Business Essentials, the cheapest business tier of Office 365 that includes Teams runs at $6.90 per month per user with an annual commitment, while Business Premium will set you back $17.20 per user per month. Finally, the enterprise-grade version of Office 365, Office 365 E3 costs $29 per user per month. That tier is the only one that punches the number of individuals up from 300 on the Essentials or Premium tier. Although it does so quite a lot, because it supports an unlimited number of users.
Microsoft provides Team apps for all major desktop operating systems, as well as mobile and tablet devices and via straight web delivery in situations where you don't want to or can't install software. However it doesn't fully support every browser when trying to use the web interface; predictably Edge and Chrome are fine, but Apple's Safari browser, for example isn't fully supported. You may have to heavily tweak cookie and tracking features in more privacy-conscious browsers such as Brave.
The core Teams interface will be immediately familiar to anyone who's used tools such as Slack, with a left side column for each Team you create. The UI is quite good in this initial set-up process in terms of guiding you through creating private and public teams, although it may take some time to wrap your head around the way that Microsoft compartmentalises just about everything in Teams. You might think that a Team would be like a Slack channel and you'd start chatting there, but instead they're containers for actual channels that sit under this kind of hierarchical structure.
Likewise, each channel within a group can host not only chat but separate default tabs for file sharing and wiki creation. Those are just the defaults. It's entirely feasible to integrate every single Microsoft Office app and a huge variety of third-party productivity platforms including CRM, training, development, calendars and much more as their own tabs.
It's a very powerful approach to providing every possible need, but like Microsoft's Office apps, it also means that you may have to click or tap around quite a lot in order to get to precisely where you need to be.
Much of that depends to an extent on how you set up Microsoft Teams and quite how many teams, channels, chats tabs and individuals you have to manage. Microsoft's clearly gunning for Slack and its ilk with Teams and the clean Office-like interface here is a plus in familiarity terms, but also a bit of a minus if you're more used to Slack's streamlined chat-centric approach.

Performance

Can easily deliver good quality video to all participants
Predictably can be hobbled by wobbly broadband

Set-up for new members and guests can be a little challenging, especially if they're using an external email address. Microsoft's guidelines state that external email addresses should be able to be added as guests, but every time I tried on a sample Teams set-up, those guests were then still pushed towards a Microsoft account email login without fail.
Even then, Microsoft's login process can involve multiple actual sign-in attempts for new members of a team. On the one hand that does ensure a good level of security for larger enterprises because it's harder to fake your way into a Team. On the other hand it's downright annoying when you have new members who may not be au fait with the process. They're going to continually think that they're doing something wrong.
The large-scale appeal for Microsoft Teams comes from its integration with the rest of the Office 365 suite, which already supports many levels of content sharing and collaboration without necessarily needing teams per se. It's also very much built around pushing most businesses but the very smallest towards an Office 365 business subscription, because the limitations on the free product as a collaborative document tool are pretty stark, with just 10GB of shared space across your entire organisation. Then again, it's entirely free, so that's not the worst balancing act really.
The scale to which you can integrate other Office apps is extremely wide and essentially outside the scope of this review, but it's quite easy to see what can be done with Teams and all of Microsoft's other Office 365 products in a strong collaborative way. It's the key appeal point for Teams, because if your business is built on Microsoft products, then it makes a lot of sense to integrate them tightly into team chat and videoconferencing strategy.
Like similar applications there's plenty of scope for both straight business-related (or more flippant) text chat between members of your team, as well as hosted video calling. Free Teams users are limited to video or voice calls only with no recording function and you also don't get the ability to schedule meetings. Those are features that Microsoft reserves for its premium paying customers, although again it wouldn't take too much work to organise scheduling through a different app to remind users you were setting up a video meeting.
Like any other videoconferencing software, the quality of your video chat will very much depend on the quality of the connections between all parties and the complexities of what you want to share; if you're reviewing a video file you hope to send to multiple parties online – and especially in the current COVID-19 coronavirus context where broadband services are seeing much more daily stress than they're used to – then you may struggle, whereas one-to-one chats may be somewhat smoother; that was certainly my experience testing out Teams for this review.
There's always going to be some variance depending on networks, but on a day where one guest had performed multiple Zoom meetings as well as a Teams meeting, the video quality on Teams had higher levels of noise and grain than the Zoom chats over the same connections.
There's also some small feature differences in video chats depending on whether you're using the web or standalone app versions of Teams, including the ability to quite smoothly blur out your background. That could be quite a useful feature in the current climate if you're working from home on your kitchen table, but you'll need to install the Teams app to make it happen.

Verdict

Very good video and audio conferencing tools for just about every usage scenario

Should you buy it?

Microsoft Teams is very much a tool for the Microsoft faithful. If you're already using the inbuilt collaboration features of Office 365 it's a bit of a no-brainer, because for businesses, it's built right into your existing Office 365 subscription at no extra cost.

It's an extremely powerful collaboration platform in its own right, but that does bring with it a level of complexity that may be challenging for novices with a learning curve – both in setting up Teams and then working within an existing Teams structure – that may take more time and training to fully comprehend.

Pricing and availability

Price: Free/$6.90/$17.20/$29 (Price per month per host, yearly commitment for business Office 365 plans)
Where to buy: Microsoft

Where to buy

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Alex Kidman

A multi-award winning journalist, Alex has written about consumer technology for over 20 years. He has written and edited for virtually every Australian tech publication including Gizmodo, CNET, PC Magazine, Kotaku and more. He has also been the Editor of Gizmodo Australia, PC Mag Australia, CNET.com.au and the Tech and Telco section at Finder. Alex has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New England and a serious passion for retro gaming.

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Microsoft Teams review