Microsoft Teams Review: Is It Right for Your Business?

This review is written from the perspective of a UK managed IT and security partner that deploys and runs Teams for businesses every day — not a marketing page. We cover what Teams does well, where it falls short, how it stacks up against Slack, Zoom and Google Workspace, and the one mistake that quietly wrecks most rollouts.

What is Microsoft Teams and who is it for?

Microsoft Teams is a unified collaboration platform combining persistent chat, video meetings, SharePoint-backed file storage and business telephony in a single interface. It suits any UK business from a 10-person SME to a government department, and is bundled into the Microsoft 365 plans most organisations already buy.

Teams became the default communication tool for a large share of UK businesses partly through organic adoption and partly because it ships inside Microsoft 365. If you run Word, Excel and Outlook, Teams is the collaboration layer that sits naturally on top of them. For a deeper look at locking it down, see our guide to Microsoft 365 security.

How much does Microsoft Teams cost in the UK?

Teams is included in paid Microsoft 365 business plans rather than sold as a standalone for most buyers. Microsoft's UK list prices are Business Basic at £4.60, Business Standard at £9.60 and Business Premium at £16.90 per user per month (ex VAT, annual commitment), according to Microsoft's official UK pricing.

The headline point: if you are on any of these plans, Teams is already paid for. The cost question is rarely the licence — it is whether the platform is configured and governed properly once deployed.

What does Microsoft Teams do well?

Teams earns its place on four fronts: deep Office integration, genuinely good meetings, SharePoint-backed file collaboration, and admin controls that let IT enforce sensible policy. For businesses living in Microsoft 365, it adds collaboration and calling without bringing a second vendor into the stack.

• Deep Microsoft 365 integration — open and co-edit a Word or Excel file inside a Teams tab; no second vendor, no extra contract.
• Meetings that work — recording, transcription, breakout rooms, background blur and lobby management all function reliably on typical UK business broadband.
• File collaboration — files live in SharePoint and OneDrive, so they are co-editable, searchable and backed by Microsoft's storage infrastructure.
• Security and compliance — on Business Premium and Enterprise plans, Teams inherits Microsoft's retention policies, eDiscovery and DLP tooling.
• Admin controls — the Teams Admin Centre gives IT granular control over features, policies and permissions at scale.

Where does Microsoft Teams fall short?

Teams' weaknesses are mostly about configuration discipline rather than missing features. The platform exposes a huge number of options, and its defaults are not always right for business use. Left unmanaged, it sprawls, over-notifies and runs heavy on older hardware.

• Complexity — external sharing, guest access and information barriers all need deliberate setup. Defaults can leave data more open than you intend.
• Channel and team sprawl — let everyone create teams freely and you reach dozens of abandoned, duplicated spaces inside 18 months.
• Notification overload — getting the signal-to-interruption balance right takes intentional policy, not the out-of-the-box settings.
• Heavy on old hardware — Teams is resource-intensive and noticeably drags older, low-RAM PCs.
• Mobile limits — the app covers the basics, but managing channels and settings on a phone is cumbersome.

Is Teams Phone worth it for UK businesses?

Teams Phone — replacing a traditional PBX with Teams calling — is viable for most UK businesses and delivers genuine cost savings when set up correctly. The catch is configuration: dial plans, calling plans or SIP trunks, and emergency calling location services all need an experienced hand. Done badly, it creates reliability faults that are hard to diagnose.

Emergency calling is the part teams most often get wrong. Microsoft requires dynamic emergency calling to be configured so a 999 call routes with an accurate location, as set out in Microsoft's Teams Phone documentation. If you are weighing up Teams as your phone system, our business VoIP and Microsoft Teams calling services cover the design and emergency-routing detail properly.

How does Microsoft Teams compare to Slack, Zoom and Google Workspace?

For Microsoft 365 businesses, Teams is usually the most cohesive and cost-effective option because chat, meetings, files and calling sit in one platform. Slack has a more refined messaging UX, Zoom owns the external-meeting experience, and Google Workspace is the natural fit only if you already live in Google.

A common pragmatic pattern: run Teams internally for chat, files and calling, and keep Zoom for external client meetings. It works, but it is two tools to manage and pay for.

Our verdict on Microsoft Teams

For most UK SMEs already on Microsoft 365, Teams is the right choice — the integration with Office, Exchange and SharePoint means the collaboration and calling tools are already paid for and just need deploying properly. The differentiator is execution: governance from day one, sensible external-sharing policy, and someone accountable when it breaks.

That is the whole argument for one provider, security-first, with Microsoft-certified engineers. Teams is only as safe and useful as its configuration, so locking down sharing and identity matters as much as the rollout itself — see our work on Microsoft Teams security and ongoing managed IT support.