Can Facebook Workplace Compete Against Microsoft Teams, Google G Suite, and Slack?

There are some big players vying to be your companies choice for enterprise and business related collaboration services.

The big players are Microsoft Teams, Google G Suite, and Slack.

Slack offers a free option that can be used by anyone to create a team channel and use it for collaboration. They also offer an entry level subscription at $6.67 per user, if you bill it annually, and that lifts many of the limitations of their free tier.

Microsoft Teams is integrated with Office 365 and is only available to commercial subscribers of the service so that means no free option.

Google G Suite is also a subscription based service that starts out at $5 per user, per month however, they do not offer any free version of their product.

All of them have a variety of services that can be integrated into their offerings and I suspect that most subscribers will adopt the team collaboration option that is part of their existing subscriptions. That means Google users to G Suite and Office 365 subscribers to Microsoft Teams.

Of course, Slack's free model likely helps drive small to medium sized companies to upgrade to a paid subscription to remove limitations that are part of the free tier.

Now we have to consider what role Facebook's Workplace will now play in this key marketplace.

During the social media companies recent F8 developers conference they announced several enhancements to Workplace one of which will now include integration with Microsoft's Office suite including OneDrive cloud storage.

In addition to the Office integration, they will also offer a free tier like Slack does to entice organizations to try out their offering and hopefully get hooked. That in turn could result in upgrades to their subscription options but the premium offering will expire on 30 September and then users will have to convert to a subscription. There is a free standard offering that does not expire which provides a subset of the services features for companies who can work within the limits of what is available for free.

That is the other spot that Workplace could be very competitive against its rivals in this space. Subscriptions for the first 1,000 people costs $3 each, $2 per user for the next 9,000 seats, and then $1 per person after that level has been reached.

Since Microsoft Teams is integrated with Office 365 there is no way I can see for them to offer a free trial/level of access but Google could feasibly offer a subset of its own G Suite's features to let users try out the service.

More to be seen here for sure so check out the gallery to see what Facebook Workplace looks like on mobile and desktop devices.

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But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.

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