For many businesses, Microsoft Teams has been instrumental in making it through the pandemic. There’s a reason that its usage positively surged over the course of 2020, and a reason it’s still holding strong even today. Given how popular Microsoft’s collaboration platform has become, you might be asking yourself why you should switch to Unio.

How does Unio compare to Teams?

It’s a question we hear relatively often. On some level, it makes sense that people would ask. But it’s also not the right question.

Comparing Unio to Teams is like comparing apples to oranges. The truth is that the two platforms aren’t competitors, nor are they necessarily comparable. They serve entirely different needs and entirely different markets.

As such, instead of asking how Unio stacks up to Teams, you should ask which of the two best fits your needs — and that depends largely on what you’re looking to do.

Microsoft Teams is Made for Work

Microsoft Teams makes no secret of what it’s meant to be. It’s a platform designed to extend workflows beyond the walls of the traditional office. A tool created first and foremost with productivity in mind.

Collaborative editing is what Teams does best. Integration with Office 365 allows colleagues to effortlessly jump into Microsoft Word to brainstorm a blog post or Excel to figure out a marketing schedule. It also includes a wealth of features intended to make meetings more productive and less painless including shared schedules, seamless transitions between group chats and video conferences, transcripts, and support for up to 10,000 people in a single conference.

Businesses that rely on Teams typically share a few traits in common:

• They’re larger organizations with more traditional offices.
• They rely heavily on infrastructure such as PCs and laptops.
• They’ve invested in Microsoft’s other products.
• They follow a 9-to-5 schedule.
• They make extensive use of email for inter-office communication.

Unio is About Unity

Unio is designed to bring people together. To consolidate workplace communication onto a single platform, allowing businesses to retain their culture even in an era defined by distributed work. To keep everyone in the loop and foster solidarity by allowing everyone to communicate on their own terms.

One of Unio’s most unique features is its integrated newsfeed. In addition to letting your business keep all its company-wide announcements in a single hub, it also allows people to like, share, and comment on each update, both creating a sense of engagement and giving your people a voice. Perhaps most importantly, it breaks down communication silos — leadership is always visible, and people can effortlessly reach out to anyone in the organization with voice, video, and messaging.

Businesses that leverage Unio are generally:

• Smaller and focused on innovation rather than tradition.
• More agile and less married to desks and computers.
• Highly distributed, with employees that frequently travel or telecommute.
• Flexible in terms of scheduling.
• Not as reliant on email, though they may still leverage it.

You Can Choose Either — or Both

Unio and Teams are both very good at what they do. Teams is an excellent platform for workplace productivity. Unio is perfect for supporting a connected engaged workforce.

At the end of the day, the two platforms are more complementary than competitive, and there’s no need to choose between the two. If it’s a fit for your business, you can very easily deploy both. Microsoft Teams to keep people productive when they’re at their desks, and Unio to keep them in touch and in the loop when they’re on the go.

Still uncertain whether to use Unio, Teams, or both? Want to know a bit more about the differences between the two solutions? We’ve taken a closer look at what distinguishes one from the other in our datasheet, which you can download here.