The Most Popular Cloud-Based Collaboration Platforms Today

How many times have you heard people complain about wasting hours in meetings that “should have been an email”? That was before the ongoing pandemic forced a large number of employees to work from their home office. Staying away from the office physically doesn’t mean, in turn, that workers escape meetings. While some of them are, indeed, turning into emails, others are conducted from home, using one of the many cloud-based collaboration platforms that have emerged in recent years.

What are the most-used cloud-based communication platforms today? Well, as you might expect, there are quite a few big names competing for this title.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft is one of the biggest names in the “office” market – and it has its fully-fledged, unified workstream collaboration and communications platform to go with it called “Teams”. You might argue that the Redmond giant may not have needed to build Teams, already having its Office 365 platform plus Skype. An inside look on Microsoft Teams will show you, in turn, that it has more to offer than the sum of its parts.

Where Skype for Business offers excellent video conferencing, voice, and text chat options, Teams have that and a lot more: tools for seamless collaboration, file search, and cloud backups.

Zoom

Zoom is a much younger company than Microsoft, and its offer is perhaps more attractive in the free tier: it offers meetings that can last for as long as 40 minutes with up to 100 participants. This makes it a tool of choice for some small businesses at the beginning of their road, and a great choice for educational purposes during the pandemic.

The service has come under scrutiny recently over privacy concerns – apparently, some of the shortcomings of its service allowed third parties to “gain surreptitious access to consumer webcams” which is a concern now that its usage has skyrocketed. Zoom has promised to address all concerns in regard to its security and privacy issues.

Slack

Slack has come into the spotlight when Microsoft considered buying it in 2016 – and then gave up on this idea to focus on the development of Teams instead. The two tools are surprisingly similar – there are still many basic differences between the two.

When it comes to video calls, Slack is not very bright right now – its 15-person conference call feature pales in the light of Teams’ 250. But when it comes to integrations, Slack clearly wins by the numbers: it has more than 800 apps to choose from, ranging from storage services like Google Drive and OneDrive, social networks like Twitter, project management tools, to-do lists, customer support tools, password managers, and even tools to initiate or join Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls.

Which one of the three is better? It would be hard to be objective about these tools – their feature sets are similar, their prices are, too, and everyone has personal experience with one or another. Which one have you tried, which one do you like best?