New data from Kruze Consulting finds 60% of funded startups paid for Slack, while only 12% paid for the Office software bundle that includes Teams
Nearly 60 percent of funded startups pay for Slack — much higher than the rate for Microsoft Teams. — Slack is still king at startups. Tweets: @recode and @supreetsays Tweets: @recode : The share of large organizations using Slack next quarter has declined to 33 percent while competitor Microsoft Teams has increased to 65 percent. They say Slack may be a better product, but not so much better that it warrants paying extra. https://www.vox.com/... Supreet / @supreetsays : This doesn't surprise me. Slack pricing is simple, effective and affordable. Office, on the other hand, is expensive, clumsy and the bundles are not thoughtfully created. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after a survey of 900 IT firms showed Teams' market share jumping from 3% to 21% while Slack's grew more slowly (the 2018 market-share survey), this Kruze Consulting data flips the lens from enterprises to funded startups — Slack's home turf — and finds it dominant there: 60% pay for Slack against just 12% for the Office bundle that includes Teams.
That split matters because the enterprise picture runs the other way: an ETR survey of ~580 IT decision makers found 59% using or planning to adopt Teams versus 35% for Slack. The two datasets together frame Slack's strategic bind — beloved where buyers choose tools directly, losing ground where Microsoft bundles Teams into Office — which later fed into reports that Salesforce held acquisition talks for Slack.
First-order effects
- Funded startups are actively choosing to pay for Slack even though Teams ships inside the Office bundle most already run — meaning Slack's paid penetration in its core segment rests on product preference, not on Teams being absent.
- Microsoft's bundle strategy is absorbing the cost of Teams at these accounts: only 12% treat the Office suite as a paid collaboration decision, so Slack competes against software Microsoft gives away as part of a larger purchase.
Second-order effects
- Because Slack cannot match free-with-bundle economics head-on, pressure builds toward consolidation paths — the same dynamic behind the reported Salesforce talks — rather than a standalone growth story.
- Pricing becomes the battleground the tweet in the piece points to: Slack's simple per-seat model versus Office's expensive, bundled licensing forces buyers to decide whether collaboration justifies a separate line item.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — startups start on Slack, enterprises standardize on bundled Teams — standalone work chat trends toward becoming either part of a larger suite or an acquisition target, with independent players squeezed between distribution advantages they lack.
- Longer term, the seat-based pricing both products rely on faces erosion if suites keep devaluing individual tools by giving them away inside bundles — pushing collaboration vendors toward proving willingness-to-pay per product or exiting independently.
The trend: Workplace chat is splitting into a two-tier market — bottom-up paid adoption at startups versus top-down bundled dominance at enterprises — a divergence that pushes independent tools toward consolidation.