An In-Depth Microsoft Teams Review for Businesses in 2024

This Microsoft Teams review fully explores everything there is to know about this popular business communication app. Read what we’ve found in our testing and analysis and see how it compares to similar products on the market before deciding if it’s the best solution for your business.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Microsoft Teams Pricing
2. Microsoft Team's Features
3. Microsoft Teams Integrations
4. Is Microsoft Teams Safe?
5. Microsoft Teams Customer Reviews
6. What is Microsoft Teams Good for?
7. Microsoft Teams Vs Top Competitors
8. Verdict - Is Microsoft Teams Worth it?
9. How We Test VoIP Services
10. How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider
11. FAQs
12. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Microsoft Teams Pricing
2. Microsoft Team's Features
3. Microsoft Teams Integrations
Show Full Guide
4. Is Microsoft Teams Safe?
5. Microsoft Teams Customer Reviews
6. What is Microsoft Teams Good for?
7. Microsoft Teams Vs Top Competitors
8. Verdict - Is Microsoft Teams Worth it?
9. How We Test VoIP Services
10. How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider
11. FAQs
12. References

Microsoft Teams Pricing

Microsoft Teams offers two products, one for video calling and one for audio calling. Here’s a quick comparison of the plans on offer:

Microsoft Teams Essentials – $4/user/m

This base plan is far cheaper than those of other communication systems. It comes with 30 hours of group meetings with 300 participants, plus 10GB of cloud storage with unlimited chat, too.

There’s not much else when compared to even the best small business VoIP systems, but one additional feature worth noting is that you get live captions (in English) for all your meetings.

Microsoft 365 Business Basic – $6/user/m

This plan offers web and mobile versions of 7 other Microsoft products beyond Teams. This includes OneDrive, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

You get everything included in the Essentials plan – the only difference being that, here, the live captions can be generated in 30 languages, and the cloud storage is expanded to 1 TB per user.

Microsoft 365 Business Standard – $10.62/user/m

With this subscription, you get desktop versions of 10 Microsoft apps, including Teams, Microsoft Publisher, and Access. You also get the desktop version of the apps included in the Basic plan.

Beyond this, you get webinar hosting, attendee registration and reporting, and client appointment management. However, these are all limited to video and don’t include audio calls or VoIP functions.

Teams Essentials and Teams Phone Bundles

Teams Phone is a separate product which is a cloud phone system. You can purchase bundled plans for both Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams Phone. Here are your options:

Other Microsoft Plans

Microsoft offers two other plans worth noting:

1. Microsoft Teams Phone Standard — $8/user/m — You can get this plan separately if you don’t need the Teams Essentials plan.
2. VoIP for international calling — There’s no price for this plan, but it comes with both domestic and international minutes

Microsoft Team’s Features

We’ve given Microsoft Teams a good test run to see how it compares to other leading VoIP services we’ve used. Here are the key features we found worth adding to our Microsoft Teams review.

Webinar Functions

There’s certainly much to love about Microsoft Teams’s extensive webinar capabilities, we found this was especially true in terms of the extent of customization and control it offers.

For starters, you can personalize registration details using different themes and configurations. You can assign up to 10 co-organizers and assign specific tasks to each to help manage the whole event.

Another thing we liked about Teams is that it allows you to highlight the webinar speakers by adding credentials, company, title, LinkedIn profile, social media account, and bio.

You can also send automated confirmation and cancellation emails to drive webinar participation and engagement.

Copilot In Teams

We found Copilot, Microsoft Teams’ AI assistant, incredibly handy. For example, you can have it summarize a meeting for you that’ll take a matter of seconds.

You’ll have a summary of the speakers, the points made, and any actionable items from it. Similarly, you can ask it to create a table outlining the decided responsibilities and deadlines for the same.

It’s like having your own personal assistant — to keep notes, gather data, or compile things to simplify your work. This makes sharing meeting notes and similar, that much easier, too.

VoIP Functions

Microsoft Teams has great VoIP features. You can make a phone call using Teams Phone to anyone in the world, and the built-in AI comes in real handy while routing calls based on location or time.

For instance, after business hours, you can redirect the calls to voicemail or a different priority line. You can also record calls for future reference and set up greeting and on-hold messages.

This all might seem trivial at first, but features like these go a long way in providing a solid customer experience. That said, video calling is undoubtedly Microsoft Teams’ USP.

The visuals are crystal-clear, and the calls are pretty stable as well. What’s more is that you can add up to 300 participants at once, depending on the plan you choose.

Team Management Functions

We found that managing a team is really easy on Microsoft Teams. Firstly, not everyone has to download the app. Those just looking to view items or attend a meeting can do so through direct links.

Plus, you can add people from outside your organization as guests for free. There’s even built-in chat to collaborate both visually and through text, so you can share links and similar without leaving.

If you have a huge team, you can also assign unique team roles. For instance, your Teams Communication Administrator can be responsible for managing the calling and meeting features.

Other guests and attendees, on the contrary, won’t have the option to start or end a meeting or even record it, giving you the desired amount of control over the proceedings.

Microsoft Teams Integrations

As you’d expect, Microsoft Teams integrates well with other Microsoft apps like Outlook, OneNote, and the like, making it a great choice for businesses already using Microsoft products.

This doesn’t mean that you’ll struggle with third-party integrations – Teams supports a ton of them, too. For example, Polly is a popular integration to create surveys, polls, and quizzes in Teams.

Management tools like Trello and Monday.com also integrate well with the platform. Beyond these, you get AttendanceBot, GitHub, YouTube, Miro, Power BI, and WiKi, amongst numerous others.

Believe it or not, this gives Microsoft Teams an edge over some dedicated VoIP apps like Phone.com, which only offers 4 native integrations, and Vonage, which offers 24, 10 of which are paid.

Is Microsoft Teams Safe?

It also requires all its servers to use certificates, OAUTH, and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption so that all your data on Teams is secure. It doesn’t end there, either.

Microsoft Teams has also taken strict measures against popular security threats like phishing attempts, identity spoofing, malware attacks, and so on.

Microsoft Teams Customer Reviews

Microsoft Teams has scored some excellent reviews online. It has an average rating of 8/10 on TrustRadius with 5,780 reviews, with 62.69% of reviewers rating it more than 9.

95% of users believe that Teams delivers good value for the price it charges, and many love its peer-to-peer communication capabilities, especially for large teams that need collaboration.

All team members can be accessed via chat, audio, or video call, and many love how the platform gels with other Microsoft products like Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

On G2, Teams has received 4.5/5 ratings from 14,520 reviews, with 9,000+ 5-star reviews. Many like the ease of use of the platform, and you’ll find ample reviews saying how easy it is to share screens.

Sharing documents and other files is also as simple as dragging and dropping. However, as with every software solution, there are some drawbacks you’ll find.

One complaint you’ll see is regarding external communication. Managers have faced problems where external stakeholders don’t get invites. To fix this, you need to create an Outlook event.

Beyond this, you’ll see the odd complaint that Teams slows their system at times, where the app crashes, closes itself or doesn’t let other apps work as usual. However, this is rare in the big picture.

What is Microsoft Teams Good for?

You can also record these videos in case your team needs to go over the details shared during the session later on. What’s more, all these recorded meetings come with transcripts.

If it’s a regular thing, like a morning meeting, you can automate it so that every day, at the same time, the meeting will start regardless of whether you are there to initiate it or not.

On the Business Standard plan, you also get attendee registration and reporting tools that you can use to take attendance and gauge participation level.

That said, as you’d find in our RingCentral review and others we’ve reviewed, it’s not the best VoIP solution if you’re after features like call analytics, an auto-attendant, voicemail transcription, and similar.

Microsoft Teams Vs Top Competitors

There are many competent platforms on the market. Here’s a quick overview of how Microsoft Teams compares with the other top Internet phone services:

Teams Vs Ooma

Ooma, as we discussed in great detail in our full Ooma review, is more focused on audio calls. With over 50 calling features, it’s our go-to recommendation for businesses after a unified VoIP service.

So, Ooma is focused more on customer handling and team management, whereas Microsoft Teams, although you get some handy features on the VoIP-specific plans, is more team-focused.

That said, which is best depends on your specific needs. Microsoft Teams comes with many pricing options, whereas Ooma is a good investment for unified internal and external communications.

Teams Vs Zoom

Zoom is best for large businesses, as it’s more expensive than Microsoft Teams, and it offers unlimited storage compared to Teams’ 1TB capacity, plus 400+ more integrations.

Beyond this, the meeting limit on the free plan is 60 minutes for Teams and only 40 minutes for Zoom. That said, the differences otherwise are minimal, particularly when it comes to features.

Both offer voice calling, video calling, meeting recordings, user analytics, and cloud storage, among others.

Teams Vs Slack

Slack, as most know, is the go-to app for secure team messaging. It’s like Discord for businesses. That said, there’s also a call functionality, although it’s limited in comparison to Teams.

Microsoft Teams also has a chat feature with an interface as simple as Slack’s, but instead of all the channels on the left-side menu, you get a long list of contacts, channels, and groups all clubbed together.

Overall, Teams is best for a good mix of both audio and text communication. Meetings can be recorded and transcribed, and outsiders can join through a link without signing up.

Verdict – Is Microsoft Teams Worth it?

This depends. It’s worth it to centralize all communication through multiple channels such as chat, calling, and video conferencing, and it’s a good choice if your team uses other Microsoft products.

There’s also no doubt that the subscription prices offer incredible value for money, but if you’re after a fully-fledged business VoIP system, then we recommend checking out Ooma.

How We Test VoIP Services

Our team of experts has 13+ years in testing leading tech products – both hardware and software. As buyers first, we ensure we have hands-on experience with the tools we review and recommend.

Having tested numerous others on the market, we’ve got a clear benchmark to test each service against. This helps us pinpoint any unique USPs and where we feel it falls a bit short.

From testing the audio and video quality to messing around on the interface and with the most noteworthy features, we ensure we spend enough time with the products to give helpful reviews.

We also analyze other user reviews to ensure we offer a complete overview of what you can expect — both good and bad, with top alternatives if you find that this product isn’t the best one for you.

How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider

Before you choose, here are some key factors to take into account to ensure that it’s the best move for your particular needs:

FAQs