Microsoft Teams Review 2025: A Week Inside the Purple Machine

Before the Week Started

In March 2020, I was working from my kitchen table with a laptop balanced on a stack of cookbooks for better webcam angle. My company, like every company, was scrambling to figure out how 400 people were supposed to collaborate without ever being in the same room. Someone in IT sent an email: "We are moving to Microsoft Teams." No pilot program. No feedback period. No alternative. Just a link to download the app and a 45-minute training session that nobody attended.

That was nearly five years ago. Teams is still here. Slack lost the enterprise war, Zoom faded from its pandemic peak, and the purple icon sits on my taskbar like a permanent fixture of working life. Over 320 million people use Teams monthly now, making it the most widely deployed business communication tool on the planet. Most of them, I suspect, ended up here the same way I did -- not through choice, but through corporate mandate.

This is not necessarily a criticism. Lots of good tools become standards through institutional adoption rather than grassroots enthusiasm. But it shapes the question this review asks. It is not "Should you try Teams?" Most of you reading this already use it. The question is: after five years of evolution, rebuilds, and AI features, does Teams deserve its position? Or are we stuck with it out of inertia?

To find out, I spent a deliberate week paying close attention to every Teams interaction -- logging what worked, what did not, what surprised me, and what quietly annoyed me. Here is the diary.

Monday: Rediscovering the Basics

I start the week by looking at Teams with fresh eyes, which is harder than it sounds when you have used something for five years. The new Teams client, rebuilt on WebView2 and React, is noticeably faster than the Electron-based version I suffered through in 2020-2022. The app launches in about 4 seconds on my machine compared to the 15-20 seconds the old client took. Memory usage sits around 350 MB with several channels open, down from the 800+ MB the old version routinely consumed. These are not small improvements. The performance gap between old Teams and new Teams is the difference between a tool you tolerate and a tool you forget is even running.

The chat experience has matured. I send messages, format them with the rich text editor (bold, italics, code blocks, tables), and the rendering is quick. Threaded replies in channels work the way they should -- click a message, reply in a thread, and the conversation stays contained. I still find Slack's threading more intuitive, but the gap has narrowed. The search, though... I spend 8 minutes trying to find a file someone shared three weeks ago. I know the approximate date, the person who sent it, and the channel. I type various search terms and get results from different channels, other conversations, and even content from SharePoint sites I did not know I had access to. Eventually I find it by scrolling through the channel history manually. Search remains Teams' weakest feature relative to Slack's excellent implementation.

What catches my attention on Monday is the notification system. Or rather, the four different places where notification settings exist. There are global notification settings, per-channel notification preferences, per-chat notification options, and quiet hours configuration. I spend 20 minutes configuring these after realizing I have been missing messages from a channel I thought I was following. The flexibility is there, but the cognitive load of managing notifications across multiple layers is higher than it needs to be.

Tuesday: The Meeting Marathon

Five meetings today. This is where Teams earns its keep.

The video conferencing is genuinely good in 2025. Background blur is crisp, the virtual backgrounds do not create that weird halo around my hair anymore, and the noise suppression handles my neighbor's construction project without me having to mute constantly. Together Mode -- the feature that places all participants in a shared virtual auditorium -- still feels gimmicky, but some of my colleagues swear by it for brainstorming sessions, claiming it reduces the "talking to a grid of faces" fatigue.

The third meeting is a 45-minute project review, and I pay attention to the Copilot integration. Someone turned on the meeting transcription, and Copilot is generating a real-time summary. After the meeting ends, I check the recap: it captured the three main decisions we made, identified four action items with the correct assignees, and provided a searchable transcript. I compare the Copilot summary to my own handwritten notes. The AI missed one nuanced action item that was implied rather than stated directly, but it caught everything else. For recurring status meetings and project reviews, this feature alone saves 10-15 minutes of post-meeting documentation per meeting. Multiply that across an organization of hundreds of people, and the time savings are substantial.

The meeting that frustrates me is the one with an external client. Joining a Teams meeting as a guest from outside the organization requires navigating a clunky lobby experience. The client's camera does not work initially because of a browser permission issue in the web client. Compare this to Zoom, where an external person clicks a link, allows camera access, and they are in the meeting in under 10 seconds. For internal meetings, Teams is excellent. For meetings with people outside your organization, it is noticeably more friction than it needs to be.

Wednesday: The Microsoft 365 Web

Today I need to collaborate on a document with three colleagues. I drop a Word file into a Teams channel. The file lives in SharePoint automatically -- I did not create a SharePoint site or configure any permissions. Everyone in the channel can see it. Two of us open it simultaneously and start editing. Changes appear in real time. Comments in the document trigger notifications in Teams. The version history is tracked automatically.

This is where the Microsoft ecosystem lock-in shows its positive face. The integration between Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is not a bolt-on connection -- it is architectural. These products were designed to work together, and when they do, the workflow is genuinely smooth. I can co-author a spreadsheet from within Teams, reference a Power BI dashboard in a channel tab, and create a Planner board with tasks that sync to my Outlook calendar. No third-party integrations needed. No API configuration. It just works.

But -- and this is the lock-in's darker side -- it only works because our entire organization is on Microsoft 365. If we used Google Docs, the integration story would be mediocre at best. If we used Notion for documentation, it would exist as a tab in Teams but without the deep bi-directional sync that Office documents enjoy. Teams is not just a communication tool. It is the front door to the Microsoft ecosystem, and the more you use it, the harder it becomes to leave. That is by design, and it is worth being honest about.

Thursday: Apps, Bots, and Power Platform

I spend Thursday exploring the Teams app ecosystem. Over 2,000 third-party apps are available from the Teams store, including Trello, Asana, Salesforce, Jira, and ServiceNow. I install Trello as a tab in a project channel. The integration works but feels like an iframe more than a native experience -- you are essentially viewing Trello inside a Teams window. It functions, but it is not the deep integration that native Microsoft apps enjoy.

The Power Platform integration is more impressive. A colleague built a simple approval workflow using Power Automate that triggers when someone posts in a specific channel. The message gets routed to a manager for approval, and the response comes back as a reply in the original thread. No code required. The Power Apps tab lets teams create simple business applications -- an inventory tracker, a leave request form, an event signup sheet -- that live directly inside Teams. For organizations with "citizen developers" who want to automate small processes without bothering IT, this is genuinely powerful.

Copilot in chat has gotten better since I last paid attention. I ask it to summarize the last week of messages in a project channel, and it produces a reasonable summary with the main topics discussed and decisions made. I ask it to draft a message to a client about a project delay, and the draft is professional but needs editing to sound less generic. The AI features are useful -- I would rate them at about 7 out of 10 for practical value -- but they require a separate Copilot license at $30 per user per month, which is a substantial addition to the already complex Microsoft 365 licensing structure.

Friday: Stepping Back

The week ends with me trying to configure the Teams channels for a new project. This is where the organizational model shows its limitations for smaller teams. Teams uses a hierarchy: Organization > Team > Channel. Each Team has a General channel by default, and you create additional channels for specific topics. For large enterprises with clear departmental boundaries, this structure maps naturally. For a cross-functional project team of eight people who just need a place to talk, it feels like too much overhead. Do I create a new Team? A new channel in an existing Team? A group chat? The answer depends on factors that are not obvious to someone who just wants to communicate.

I also spend time on the mobile app, which is solid but not exciting. Chat and calls work well. Meetings are functional on mobile. But the navigation on a small screen -- switching between Activity, Chat, Teams, Calendar, and the "More" overflow menu -- feels cramped. Compared to the Slack mobile app, which is a genuinely pleasant mobile experience, Teams on a phone feels like a desktop app that was squeezed into a smaller container rather than redesigned for the medium.

The Pricing Puzzle

Microsoft does not sell Teams the way most software is sold. It comes bundled with Microsoft 365 plans, which makes "how much does Teams cost" a surprisingly complicated question.

If you just want Teams: the free version gives you chat, 60-minute group meetings for up to 100 people, and 5 GB of storage per user. It is functional for small teams but limited enough to push you toward paying. Teams Essentials at $4 per user per month extends meetings to 30 hours with 300 participants and adds 10 GB of storage. It is the cheapest paid option but feels like a stepping stone rather than a destination.

The real inflection point is Microsoft 365 Business Basic at $6 per user per month. For two dollars more than Teams Essentials, you get the full Teams experience plus web versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, Exchange email, and SharePoint. At this price, Teams is essentially free -- you are paying for the Office suite, and Teams comes along for the ride. This is the plan most small-to-medium businesses should evaluate against, and the value is hard to argue with.

Business Standard at $12.50 per user per month adds desktop Office apps, webinar capabilities, and Microsoft Loop. Business Premium at $22 per user per month adds advanced security and device management features aimed at organizations with serious compliance requirements.

And then there is the Copilot add-on at $30 per user per month. This is not per-company. It is per user. For a 50-person company, that is an additional $1,500 per month on top of your existing Microsoft 365 licensing. The AI features are impressive, but the per-user cost means most organizations will deploy it selectively to heavy meeting users rather than company-wide.

Pros and Cons

The Tired Acceptance