Microsoft Teams - Difference between Chats and Teams
What is the difference between Chats and Teams?
Chats vs Teams
What is the difference between Chats and Teams?
- Teams allow you to talk amongst your department or a specific group that, in general, may have a variety of conversations.
- The Teams function allows users to create channels within Teams, which are basically smaller conversations with a distinct focus.
- In the example shown below, there are two teams: CALS Department Team and Windows Upgrade Team. In this example, the CALS Department Team is the team created for some general department. The Windows Upgrade Team is a team that is made up of members belonging to that same general department, but that are working on a project that requires separate communication and multiple channels of communication.
- The CALS Department Team channel has channels for department wide updates, lunch orders, and discussion about the department-wide May project.
- The Windows Upgrade Team has channels for a progress report chat about which computers have been upgraded and a channel for asking questions about the difference between certain functions of Windows 7 and Windows 10

Chats are
typically for one-on-one or less-important group messages.
If you wanted to ask
one person or a specific group of people a question, you would create a chat.
In general, more short-term or day-to-day conversations should go through the
chat/group function rather than the team function.