Microsoft Teams vs Google Chat: Which is a better fit?

Rick: My name is Rick. I'm the executive director of Marketing and Technology for Chapel Hill Academy. I give Microsoft Teams a rating of 5 out of 5. Before Microsoft Teams, we didn't really have any sort of management software. We would just do things manually over email using on-device storage and using the phone to call people. We didn't really have an instant chat way to communicate with people instantly, or unified file storage or project management option. We chose Microsoft Teams because of its compatibility with the whole Microsoft ecosystem. We had been using Microsoft tools and apps previously, the Office Suite, OneDrive, or SkyDrive even before that, Outlook, et cetera. So it just seemed nice to have a unified experience and not have too many different systems that ended up being siloed, but something that's a unifying platform. Overall, it was a good experience getting started with Microsoft Teams. I will say as we continue to onboard new staff from time to time, it is a little bit of a learning curve, but Microsoft does provide some phenomenal resources to help get people started through their Microsoft Learn program and also through online videos that guide people to getting familiar with how to use Microsoft Teams. I would recommend for anyone considering Microsoft Teams, first of all, it's great. Definitely do it. But I think the key is just when you get started and onboarding, is to make sure you equip yourself with the proper training and understanding and organization of the platform, and then also carry that on to your team or staff so that everyone has a pleasant experience as they continue to grow and learn how to leverage and maximize teams to be more efficient.

Steve: Hi, this is Steve, and I'm vice president of marketing at my organization. We have used Google Hangouts for a long time, and I give it a five star rating. For more reviews like this, click the link below. The reason we chose Google Hangouts is other products make you download apps, and it just got cumbersome and confusing for some of the people. So for us to use it, it was just much simpler and easier to use for all involved. The reason we chose Google Hangouts is it's tied into Gmail and that makes it much more seamless. Therefore, we just send a calendar invite to people through our Gmail calendar, and they click a link and the meeting launches. That way, they don't have to download anything, and we can get into our meeting. Using Google Hangouts was very easy. With this, we never had to use customer support or talk to anybody else. We just sent a calendar invite to those we wanted to be part of the meeting. They clicked the link, the application launched, and we were able to start our meeting. So it was very seamless and easy to get up and running, which was very important to us. The reason we liked Google Hangouts is because if you have a Gmail account, it makes it so much seamless and easy to get a meeting together and very quickly. I would recommend it for that reason alone, because it was just easy to do through Gmail and have your meeting and be efficient, and time is important to all of us these days.