A Microsoft Teams Alternative for Companies That Never Actually Chose It

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 quotes every tier for each customer. Teams is the only one here that both folds itself into a suite and sells the same suite without itself.

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.

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.

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.

On the license alone, almost never. Standalone Teams Essentials is four dollars a person, a suite increment is a dollar sixty, and Microsoft 365 Business caps at three hundred users anyway. For a business that already holds it, Teams is the cheaper answer. The case for us is the work, not the license.

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.

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.

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.

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 your bots and 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 runs on your plan.

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 license, the data, and the account all stay in your name, so leaving means we hand back the keys rather than move a subscription.

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.

No. We bill month to month. Cancel any time and the service runs to the last business day of that month. 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.

Then use whatever you already hold. You do not need us. 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.

One published monthly plan covers the review, the structure design, the permissions, the migration, the integrations, and the ongoing tuning, with nobody counted per seat. Your Zoho Cliq license stays yours.