You are probably not paying for Teams separately

This is the first thing to establish, because it changes the sums.

Teams Essentials is $4 a user a month paid yearly as a standalone product. But Teams also comes inside Microsoft 365 Business Basic at $7 and Business Standard at around $10, alongside Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and the Office apps.

So if you already pay for Microsoft 365, dropping Teams saves you nothing. You would still pay the same for the suite and then add a second bill for chat. That makes the case for switching a question about fit rather than cost, and it is worth being honest with yourself about which one is driving it.

Where the money does move is the opposite direction: organisations paying for Microsoft 365 and a separate chat tool. That is the common waste in this category.

Microsoft Teams alternatives compared

Cheapest paid tier and what the free tier really allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 14 September 2026.

What people are actually asking

The related searches around Teams are unusually specific, and each one points at a different product.

“Open source.” Nextcloud Talk and Wire. Both let you inspect the code and, in Nextcloud’s case, run the whole thing yourself.

“European alternative.” Wire is European and encrypted. Self-hosted Nextcloud Talk on EU infrastructure answers the same question more completely, because you choose the server.

“Linux alternative.” A genuine, long-running complaint. Microsoft’s Linux support for Teams has been through a desktop client, then a withdrawal of it, then a web app. Nextcloud Talk and Wire both ship proper Linux desktop clients.

“Alternative to Teams chat.” Note the wording: people want to keep the meetings and replace the messaging. Twist, Chanty and Flock all fit that, because nothing stops you running one for chat and keeping Teams for calls.

Is Teams being discontinued? And what happened to Skype?

Two questions that come up together, so worth separating.

Teams is not being discontinued. It is Microsoft’s strategic collaboration product, and Microsoft’s own admin documentation shows a product being actively expanded rather than wound down.

What did end is Skype. Microsoft retired consumer Skype and pointed users to Teams, which is why the two names keep appearing in the same search. If you arrived here because Skype stopped working, Teams free is the direct replacement, and so is any of the tools above.

The older confusion is the Teams Classic to new Teams transition, plus the unbundling of Teams from Microsoft 365 in some regions after European competition scrutiny. Neither is a discontinuation.

What you actually lose by leaving

Be clear-eyed about this before a migration, because two of these are hard to replace.

Calendar and meeting integration. Teams and Outlook share one calendar. Booking a meeting, seeing who is free and joining from the invite is one flow. No alternative here matches that unless you also leave Outlook.

Files and co-editing. A document in a Teams channel lives in SharePoint and opens for simultaneous editing. Nextcloud Talk reproduces this properly because Nextcloud has its own documents. The chat-only tools do not.

Phone system and compliance. If Teams is your phone system, or your retention and eDiscovery policies run through Purview, treat this as an infrastructure project rather than a tool swap.

If none of those apply, and Teams is just where your team types at each other, the switch is genuinely easy.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 14 September 2026, not copied from another round-up. Where a plan is annual-only at the advertised rate, we say so.

For team chat we treat three things as decisive rather than as footnotes: how far back the free plan lets you search, whether there is a real Linux and mobile client, and whether the tool can be hosted where your data is required to sit. Feature lists come last, because every product here handles channels and calls.

We read current Reddit threads for each tool, so the complaints here are from this year. No vendor pays for a place on this list.