Question 1

How does Microsoft Teams compare to Slack, Google Chat and Mattermost?

Accepted Answer

It is the only one of the four that most buyers never actually buy, because it arrives inside a Microsoft 365 subscription they already hold. Slack sells chat on its own with a published per person price. Google Chat has no price of its own and exists only inside Workspace. Mattermost publishes nothing and quotes every tier. Teams is the only one here that both folds itself into a suite and sells the same suite without itself.

Question 2

Can I just buy Microsoft Teams online?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Teams Essentials is four dollars a person a month paid yearly and you can buy it directly. Most companies never do, because they already hold a Microsoft 365 plan with Teams inside it. If what you want is a chat tool rather than a managed service, buying direct is the sensible move and we would tell you so.

Question 3

What does Microsoft Teams actually cost?

Accepted Answer

On its own, Teams Essentials is four dollars a person a month paid yearly. Inside a suite it is harder to see. Microsoft 365 Business Basic is seven and the same plan sold without Teams is five dollars forty, so the chat is a dollar sixty. Business Standard with Copilot is twenty three fifty and twenty thirty without, so there it is three dollars twenty. Every one of those figures is the annual rate.

Question 4

What does one Teams licence actually cover?

Accepted Answer

Chat, calls and video for one person, plus whatever else the plan carries. Essentials adds ten gigabytes of storage per user, meetings running up to thirty hours and up to three hundred participants. It does not include the Office apps or a business email domain, which is what Business Basic at seven dollars adds.

Question 5

What is not on the published price list?

Accepted Answer

The governance. How many teams you should have, who may create one, which outside companies may reach in as guests, what is sitting in the SharePoint site behind each team, how long messages need to be kept, and what happens to a departing person's history. None of that appears on a pricing page, and none of it is answered by holding the licence.

Question 6

Teams is already paid for. Why would I pay you three hundred a month?

Accepted Answer

You should not pay us for the software, and if Teams sits inside your subscription then the software is already free to you. You pay us because somebody has to design the structure, decide who may create a team and invite a guest, provision people and remove them, wire chat into Desk and CRM, and still be doing all of it a year from now. If you already have that person, keep Teams.

Question 7

At what point does Teams stop being the cheaper answer?

Accepted Answer

On the licence alone, almost never, and we are not going to invent a crossover we do not have. Standalone Teams Essentials at four dollars passes our three hundred at about seventy five people. As a suite increment at a dollar sixty it does not pass it until roughly a hundred and eighty seven, and Microsoft 365 Business caps at three hundred users anyway. The case for us is the work, not the licence.

Question 8

Is Teams metered on people, messages or storage?

Accepted Answer

People, like almost everything else here. Storage moves with the plan, at ten gigabytes per user on Essentials and a terabyte on the Business plans. Those Business plans also stop at three hundred users, so growth eventually moves you onto a different set of products rather than simply adding seats to this one.

Question 9

Is Microsoft Teams a better product than Zoho Cliq?

Accepted Answer

For meetings and telephony, comfortably, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Three hundred participants, meetings running up to thirty hours, transcripts, live captions and a real phone system behind it are more than Cliq offers. Cliq wins on one thing, which is that it already sits next to Desk, CRM, Projects and People. If meetings are the requirement, Teams is the better buy.

Question 10

Does Zoho Cliq connect to the rest of Zoho?

Accepted Answer

That is the reason to choose it. Cliq sits alongside Desk, CRM, Projects and People, so a conversation becomes a ticket, a note on the customer record and a line on a report with nothing wired in between. Teams does the same thing into SharePoint and Outlook, which is the identical argument made by a larger vendor. The honest question is which suite your business actually runs on.

Question 11

What exactly do you do for three hundred a month?

Accepted Answer

We design the team and channel structure and the naming, set the private and public split, write the guest and external access rules, provision people and remove them when they leave, configure up to five bots or integrations, connect Cliq to Zoho Desk, CRM and Projects, run the migration off whatever you are on now, and produce the monthly access reporting. Support for your team is unlimited and included. The figure covers up to a hundred users in one organisation.

Question 12

Who holds the Zoho Cliq licence, you or us?

Accepted Answer

You do. You buy Cliq direct from Zoho and we manage it, which is how all of our Zoho work runs with one exception. Managed Zoho Assist is that exception, because there we carry the subscription ourselves. On Cliq the licence, the data and the account all stay in your name, so leaving means we hand back the keys rather than move a subscription.

Question 13

Can you move us off Microsoft Teams?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and the migration is mostly an audit. The teams people actually use, the ones nobody has posted in for a year, the guests still holding access, the site and mailbox sitting behind each team, and the history you are obliged to keep all get listed before anything moves. The files usually matter more than the messages, and that is the part most migrations underestimate.

Question 14

Is there a minimum term?

Accepted Answer

No. Three hundred a month, month to month, thirty days notice. Every Microsoft price on display is an annual subscription that renews automatically. The comparison is not only what you pay, it is how long you are committed to a decision that may turn out to be the wrong one.

Question 15

What if we are only five people?

Accepted Answer

Then use whatever you already hold and keep your three hundred dollars. Five people who all sit in one room do not have a governance problem, and that includes here. Come back when the second team starts, or when the first person leaves and nobody is sure which teams and sites they could still reach.

Question 16

What happens if we outgrow Zoho?

Accepted Answer

Some do. Once the work being discussed is manufacturing, field service or project delivery at scale, the honest answer is ERPNext rather than another Zoho app, and we run that too.

A Microsoft Teams Alternative for Companies That Never Actually Chose It

Nobody signed off on Teams, so nobody owns it

Every team creates a group, a SharePoint site and a mailbox behind it

Removing somebody takes longer than the admin screen suggests

Cascadia

Without Cascadia

Somebody designs the team and channel structure before every project spawns another site nobody has listed

Somebody writes down who may create a team, who may invite a guest from another company, and what may leave through a shared channel

A monthly pass over members, guests, external access and connected apps, checked against who joined, who left and what got connected

A price that stays put when you hire ten people, and that does not reprice when you pass three hundred users

The same named person on every call, who designed your structure and remembers why each rule is there

One messaging standard across the whole company, rather than chat in one place and the customer record in another

A single monthly figure per organisation, rather than a benefit folded into a subscription nobody reads

Message, ticket, deal and project sitting in one suite instead of stitched together with integrations

An honest no on the first call if the Microsoft licence you already hold really is the whole answer

A monthly read of who is in the workspace and who outside it can reach in, written for you rather than exported and assembled by whoever has the time

Where Microsoft Teams fits

Where a licence you already own stops being the interesting question

Where Microsoft Teams is strong

What three hundred a month buys when the licence was never the expensive part

What the first sixty days look like when the team sprawl stops being your problem

Nothing moves until we have read how your people actually talk

We count the teams, the guests and the outside companies before anything moves

The structure and the permissions get built around your business rather than left on defaults

You run a full month on it, including one real project and one real departure

Don't Take Our Word For It

A company with two hundred teams and no list of them

A company holding Cliq inside a Zoho subscription and paying for Microsoft 365 as well

Dollars a month per organisation, printed here, with your Cliq licence staying yours

Dollars per person, per guest or per team

Weeks, usually, before your people are on the new setup without us in it

Microsoft Teams alternative and managed Zoho Cliq FAQs

Ask Us Anything