Slack is losing to Teams and Discord

Slack is redesigning its interface, but is it too late?

Slack announced its biggest redesign last week , and looking at the screenshots, the new design looks more like Discord.

Slack called the new design a “small tweak”, but it’s not rolled out to all users yet and it looks brand new in screenshots. There is nothing “small” about it.

But isn’t it too late for messenger?

Since 2018, Slack mobile app downloads have grown 66% quarterly. Discord downloads are up 120%. You might think that even if the percentage of growth is higher, then the absolute numbers may be different, because “Discord is only for gamers.”

But according to App Intelligence data from AppFigures, in the second quarter of this year, Discord received 21.8 million new downloads, while Slack only got 3 million. Yes, that’s seven times more. Between 2018 and July of this year, Slack received 56 million downloads and Discord 507 million.

It’s safe to say that Discord isn’t just for gamers anymore, and that’s a big problem for Slack. A problem that a new design might solve, but probably won’t.

However, Slack has an even bigger problem than Discord – Microsoft Teams. Back in 2019, Microsoft Teams overtook Slack in terms of user count, Team downloads are up 3.385% since 2018 and the company estimates it leads the pack with 24.4 million downloads in the second quarter.

And if you think “Teams, Slack and Discord are different things!”, then you are not mistaken, but users still have preferences, and these preferences seem to be mutually exclusive.