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Originally Posted On: https://clariti.app/blog/best-microsoft-teams-alternative-for-small-businesses/

Microsoft Teams’ communications app’s daily active user base has jumped by 26% to 145 million from 115 million in October 2020. Along with Microsoft Teams, a host of other tools like Slack, Zoom, Cisco Webex, Snapchat etc have also seen steep spike in their user base. But the main reason behind the spectacular growth of Microsoft Teams is that it is being offered as a free add-on to Office 365. For small businesses, that are already burdened with lot of other paid-apps, Microsoft Teams became a natural choice.

So, the big question is: “Has Microsoft Teams really helped small businesses to improve their productivity?” One year into the pandemic, there have been many reports that employees are drowning in a sea of instant message pings, notifications and video calls. According to a study by Research from the University of California and Humboldt University in Berlin, employees lose up to 23 minutes on a task every time they are interrupted.

Though these tools were touted as lifesavers for small businesses during the forced lockdown, unfortunately using them left the employees with very little time to perform the actual job they were paid to do. Many employees felt constantly distracted and even burned out. As a result of this, many companies are moving away from group messaging and video culture.

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Major issue with Microsoft Teams and Group messaging software

Though Microsoft Teams, Slack and other messaging tools bring all communications like group chat, audio and video calling in one place, the related communications are not connected. Which means your conversations will remain disconnected though you use a single app. If you want to search for a presentation or a message from your colleague, you will have to search multiple channels to get the information. According to an American Management Association survey, 83% of executives think their companies have information silos and it has an adverse impact on their business.

For example, if you receive an email in Outlook and chat about it with your colleagues using group chat in Teams, after a few months if you want to refer to some information from that email, you will have to use your memory to locate the email to find the information. This is extremely inefficient and stressful.

Other issues faced by small businesses

• Instant messaging tools like Microsoft Teams promised to reduce emails by replacing them with chat for team communications. While it succeeded in reducing the number of emails, Team users found themselves bombarded with needless chat notifications and stuck in endless group chats.
• Small businesses may find it very difficult to afford team collaboration software like Microsoft Teams because it is expensive to own.
• Microsoft Teams supports lot of integrations. But small businesses will have to pay extra for all the integrations.
• If everybody in the team is not tech savvy, small businesses will need dedicated resources to help with all the integrations.
• Also, small businesses will have to train their employees to make use of all the features of the software.
• Since team members mostly use high level channels and not specific topics for discussions, context gets lost and information gets buried.
• In order to avoid the stress that group chat creates, many team members resort to direct chat, which creates information silos and knowledge opacity.

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Moreover, these tools only focus on chats and they don’t give much importance to other forms of communication like emails, online documents and social media among others. There is no way to bring active conversations from all these other forms in chat channels. Due to these shortcomings, productivity suffers for small businesses.

If you’re a business looking for an alternative to Microsoft Teams, there are many apps out there. But the challenging part is finding the right software that’ll work for you.

Clariti is a worthy alternative for Microsoft Teams

Connects related communication

Clariti not only brings all the information in one place, but it also connects all the related information in TopicFolder. TopicFolder eliminates the need to search for information and makes it very easy to see the big picture. So unlike Microsoft Teams, Clariti makes it easy and natural to organize all the information. It helps you to avoid silos and see the big picture.

Integrated features

Clariti was built with small businesses in mind. Clariti is ideal for small businesses that would like to boost team collaboration. The free app allows you to drive business productivity by staying organized using TopicFolders. The app is the best alternative to Microsoft Teams, thanks to the integration of email, chat, audio calls, to-do lists, calendar, built-in document folder, feeds, viewers, search, security and safety protocols, and cloud storage integration features under one roof. It is the perfect tool to choose when you want to promote team messaging and replace the delays caused by emails.

Retains context

Clariti combines all collaboration tools including email, chat, calls, documents on cloud storage, and to-do in one app and links all related information in a TopicFolder. For every context, a new thread is created and all the relevant information is linked and stored automatically. TopicFolder not only makes communication faster, it also eliminates the need to search for any information and the stress that comes with it.

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Ties emails and chats

Instead of replacing emails with chats like most other instant messaging tools, Clariti has combined email with chat for team communications. While Clariti doesn’t discourage people from using emails, it has made it unnecessary when communicating with other Clariti users. When you receive an email in Clariti, you can start chatting from the same email with other Clariti participants. This reduces email forwards and time wasted in copy pasting contents in chats. Besides Clariti maintains the connection between the original email and subsequent chat thereby making it easy to reference the context of the discussion at any time. So, in Clariti, both email and chat can co-exist without conflict or redundancy.

Free software

Small businesses may find it extremely convenient to own and use Clariti. Clariti is free and easy to use and it doesn’t require any training. However, you need to pay for certain premium features.

You can use Microsoft Teams if you want to just chat, share files, make audio, video calls or schedule meetings. But you cannot expect the number of emails to reduce or save time from searching for information, as all your conversations will still remain disconnected, and you will still miss the big picture.

On the other hand, Clariti is a unified communication system that focuses on productivity. It helps you organize all your communication like email, chat, cloud storage, social feeds in one place so that you can quickly find any information you want in just a few seconds, concentrate on your core job by reducing unnecessary emails, multi-task like a pro and never miss the big picture.