The Tool Everyone Has But Nobody Loves

Microsoft Teams is one of the most widely deployed collaboration platforms in the world. It ships bundled with Microsoft 365, which means millions of organizations use it by default — not necessarily because they chose it, but because it was simply there. And therein lies one of the most honest things you can say about Teams: it is a product people tolerate, not one they enjoy.

Ask any team that relies on it daily, and you will hear a familiar set of complaints. Slowness. Confusion. Notifications that make no sense. A UI that seems designed to frustrate. Microsoft Teams has become the enterprise software equivalent of a waiting room — functional enough to sit in, but nobody's first choice.

So why exactly is Microsoft Teams so bad? Let's break it down.

1. It Is Painfully Slow

Perhaps the single most common complaint about Teams is how slow it is. Launching the app can take anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds on a normal business laptop. Switching between chats and channels often involves a noticeable lag. Loading a file or opening a meeting can feel like traveling back to the dial-up era.

This is not a minor inconvenience — it is a productivity killer. When a tool that is supposed to help you work faster actually slows you down every time you open it, something has gone fundamentally wrong. Teams consumes significant CPU and RAM even when running in the background, and on older hardware it can bring an entire machine to its knees.

Microsoft released a "New Teams" client in 2023 promising major performance improvements. For some users it helped. For many others, the gains were marginal, and stability issues followed close behind.

2. The User Interface Is a Maze

Teams has one of the most confusing user interfaces of any mainstream communication tool. The distinction between Teams, Channels, Chats, and Meeting Chats is not intuitive — and it leads to conversations being siloed in ways that users cannot easily navigate or search.

New users routinely struggle to understand where a conversation lives. Did someone reply in the channel, or in a thread, or in a private chat? Was the file shared in the channel files tab or attached to a message? The mental overhead required to manage information inside Teams is disproportionate to what the tool actually does.

Even experienced users find themselves clicking through multiple menus to perform simple actions. The settings panel is buried, notifications are hard to customize, and the mobile app — while improved — still lags behind competitors in usability.

3. Notifications Are Chaos

Teams' notification system is notoriously unreliable and inconsistent. Messages get missed. Mentions don't always trigger alerts. Notifications arrive for conversations nobody participated in, while important direct messages slip through without a sound.

The activity feed — meant to serve as a catch-all for everything that needs attention — becomes overwhelming in active organizations. There is no clean way to prioritize what matters, and muting channels often causes users to miss genuinely important updates.

Many professionals have resorted to keeping Teams open in a browser tab alongside the desktop app just to make sure they don't miss something. That is not a workflow — that is a workaround for a broken notification architecture.

4. Meetings Are Mediocre

Teams meetings work — but barely above the baseline of "good enough." Video quality is acceptable in ideal conditions, but degrades quickly on average internet connections. The meeting interface is cluttered, and features like breakout rooms, polls, and collaborative whiteboards feel like afterthoughts bolted onto the platform rather than native capabilities.

Background noise suppression, which competitors like Zoom handle well out of the box, has historically been inconsistent in Teams. Recording meetings stores files in SharePoint or OneDrive in ways that confuse users, and finding a recorded meeting days later can become a scavenger hunt.

For organizations that rely heavily on webinars or large-scale video events, Teams' capabilities are underwhelming compared to purpose-built platforms.

5. The SharePoint and OneDrive Integration Is More Burden Than Benefit

Microsoft pitches Teams as the hub for its entire ecosystem — files live in SharePoint, recordings go to OneDrive, calendars sync with Outlook, and so on. In theory, this integration sounds powerful. In practice, it creates a tangled web of permissions, broken links, and confused file structures that IT departments spend enormous time managing.

Files shared in Teams channels can become inaccessible when someone leaves the organization, when a team is archived, or when SharePoint permissions change unexpectedly. Version history gets complicated across platforms. And for users who are not Microsoft 365 power users, navigating where their content actually lives becomes genuinely baffling.

6. It Tries to Do Everything and Excels at Nothing

Teams is a chat tool, a video conferencing platform, a file storage system, a task manager, a wiki, a whiteboard, and an app marketplace — all at once. The ambition is understandable: Microsoft wants it to be the single pane of glass for enterprise work.

But the result is a product that feels stretched thin across too many use cases. The chat is not as clean as Slack. The video meetings are not as smooth as Zoom. The file management is not as simple as Google Drive. The task management is not as capable as dedicated tools like Asana or Notion. Teams occupies a frustrating middle ground where it covers everything at a surface level but masters nothing.

7. It's Bundled, Not Chosen

Perhaps the most damning thing about Teams is that its widespread adoption is largely the result of licensing strategy, not product excellence. It comes included with Microsoft 365, so organizations adopt it because switching costs are low and procurement is easy — not because it solves problems better than alternatives.

This means Microsoft has faced less competitive pressure to truly improve the product. When you have a captive audience, the urgency to fix slow load times, a confusing UI, and unreliable notifications is simply lower. Users suffer, but the revenue keeps flowing.

So What Should You Use Instead?

If your organization is reconsidering its commitment to Microsoft Teams — or simply wants a platform that was built with communication quality and security in mind from day one — TrueConf is one of the strongest alternatives available today.

Why TrueConf Stands Out

On-Premise Deployment. Unlike Teams, which routes everything through Microsoft's cloud, TrueConf can be deployed entirely on your organization's own servers. This is a game-changer for businesses in regulated industries — healthcare, finance, legal, government — where data sovereignty is non-negotiable. Your communications stay within your infrastructure, period.

Genuinely Fast and Lightweight. TrueConf's client applications are noticeably lighter than Teams. They launch quickly, consume fewer system resources, and perform reliably even on modest hardware. For organizations with diverse device fleets — including older machines — this matters enormously.

Clear, Purposeful Interface. TrueConf was designed as an enterprise video conferencing and communication platform first, without trying to be a file system, a project manager, and an app store simultaneously. The result is an interface that users can navigate without a training course.

High-Quality Video Conferencing. TrueConf supports HD and 4K video, offers robust noise suppression, and maintains call quality even on limited bandwidth. Its video engine is a core competency, not an add-on feature layered over a chat application.

End-to-End Security. With AES encryption, support for industry compliance standards, and the option for fully air-gapped deployment, TrueConf takes security seriously at the architectural level — not as a marketing checkbox.

No Forced Ecosystem Lock-In. You do not need to restructure your entire IT environment around TrueConf. It integrates with existing directory services like Active Directory and LDAP, works across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and browser-based clients, and does not demand that you adopt a sprawling suite of bundled products just to use it effectively.

Scalable Licensing Without Surprises. TrueConf's pricing model is transparent and scales predictably. There are no hidden costs that emerge when you try to use features that were mysteriously locked behind a higher tier.

The Bottom Line

Microsoft Teams is not a terrible product — it is an overstuffed, underperforming one. It was not built from a vision of what great communication software looks like; it was assembled from Microsoft's existing products and stitched together under one roof. The result reflects that origin: heavy, confusing, and reliable only in the sense that it reliably frustrates.

For organizations that adopted Teams because it came with their Microsoft 365 subscription, the real question worth asking is: what would we choose if we were choosing freely?

For many teams — especially those that prioritize performance, security, and user experience — the answer is not Teams. Platforms like TrueConf show that enterprise communication software does not have to be painful to use, and that control over your own data should never be a premium feature.

Sometimes the tool that costs you nothing upfront ends up costing you the most in productivity, frustration, and missed connections. Microsoft Teams, for millions of users, is exactly that tool.