These three get compared as though they are the same category. They are not. Slack sells software to companies, Microsoft bundles chat into an office suite, and Discord sells cosmetics and upload limits to individuals. Discord has no business tier at all — nothing on its own site offers one. That is the first thing to know if a team is considering it.
What they cost
| Plan | List price | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Slack Free | $0 | — |
| Slack Pro | $8.75 monthly-billed / $7.25 annual | per user/mo |
| Slack Business+ | $18 monthly / $15 annual | per user/mo |
| Teams (free) | $0 — 60-min group meetings, 100 participants, 5GB/user | — |
| Teams Essentials | $4.00 | per user/mo, paid yearly |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | $7.00 (without Teams $5.40) | per user/mo, paid yearly |
| Microsoft 365 Business Premium | $22.00 (without Teams $18.79) | per user/mo, paid yearly |
| Discord Nitro Basic | $2.99 | per month |
| Discord Nitro | $9.99 | per month |
Slack is running a 50%-off-for-three-months promo, which shows Pro at $4.38. That is the promo, not the price. Budget $8.75 or $7.25.
Teams Essentials at $4 is the cheapest real chat platform on this list, and it is easy to miss because Microsoft buries it under the Microsoft 365 suites. It gives 30-hour meetings, 300 participants and 10GB of storage — no email, no Office apps, just Teams.
Slack’s free plan: the 90-day rule
This is the single most consequential limit in the comparison, and Slack’s own wording matters. You can view and search messages and files from the last 90 days. Older content is hidden — and, per Slack’s help centre, permanently deleted after one year.
Read that twice. It is not archived pending an upgrade. A free workspace that has been running for two years has already lost its first year. If your team uses Slack as an institutional memory — decisions, links, reasoning — the free plan is quietly destroying it.
Free also limits you to 1:1 huddles, 1:1 external DMs only (Slack Connect channels disconnect if you downgrade), and read-only canvases and lists.
One caution: Slack contradicts itself on the free app limit. Its help centre says up to 10 third-party or custom apps; its own pricing page says up to 3. We are flagging that rather than picking one — check which limit your workspace actually enforces before planning integrations around it.
The Teams unbundling, and why it saves you almost nothing
The European Commission accepted Microsoft’s commitments on 12 September 2025, and from 1 November 2025 Microsoft sells suites with and without Teams worldwide, not just in the EU, holding a fixed USD price delta for seven years.
Useful to know, less useful to act on at small-team scale. The actual saving: Business Premium is $22.00 with Teams and $18.79 without — $3.21 a user a month. Business Basic is $7.00 versus $5.40, a saving of $1.60. If your team is on Slack and you resent paying for Teams, the no-Teams SKUs exist. They will not change your budget.
Where Discord actually fits
Discord’s free tier has no message history limit, which makes it look superior to Slack Free on the one axis that matters most. Its paid tiers sell upload size — Nitro Basic raises attachments to 50MB, full Nitro to 500MB — plus cosmetics and server boosts.
What it does not sell is administration. There is no business tier, which means no centralised billing, no admin-managed accounts, no compliance export, no way to remove a departing employee’s access to a personal account they own. For a community, a study group or an open-source project, Discord is excellent and free. For a company with employment contracts and client data, the absence of an admin layer is disqualifying regardless of price.
What we would pick
- Small team, tight budget, want real admin control: Teams Essentials at $4. Nothing else comes close on price for a managed platform.
- You already pay for Microsoft 365: you already have Teams. Paying Slack on top is paying twice unless you have a specific reason.
- You want the best chat product and will pay for it: Slack Pro at $7.25 annual — but only if you pay. Free Slack deletes your history.
- Community, not company: Discord, free, and do not overthink it.
- Running a business on free Slack right now: export before your oldest messages pass the one-year mark.
If you are weighing the whole suite rather than just chat, see Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 — the prices are now identical.
Prices read from Slack, Microsoft and Discord’s own pricing pages in September 2026, with promotional rates noted separately from list prices. We could not verify current annual Discord Nitro pricing — Discord’s page shows monthly only.
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