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Microsoft Teams vs Symphony
March 11, 2025 | Author: Adam Levine
55★
Microsoft Teams is the chat-based workspace in Office 365 that integrates all the people, content, and tools your team needs to be more engaged and effective. Supports video meetings with up to 1,000 participants.
3★
Jumpstart team productivity. Everything you do is protected by Symphony’s unique end-to-end security. Enhance your messages with rich editing, images, tables and files. Hashtags, cashtags and mentions - never miss an important message with personalized filters. Secure access to your conversations on your desktop or on your iPhone.
Microsoft Teams and Symphony are, at their core, very similar creatures. Both allow people to send messages, share files and pretend to be paying attention during video calls. They integrate with all sorts of apps, encrypt conversations so that only the right (or wrong) people can read them and come in both desktop and mobile forms, ensuring you can be interrupted from anywhere on the planet. They are, in short, the sort of tools that make modern work life both possible and insufferable in equal measure.
Teams, being a product of Microsoft, is the sort of platform that shows up whether you asked for it or not. It launched in 2017 as a friendly way to herd office workers into one convenient communication space, while also ensuring they never leave the warm embrace of Microsoft 365. It does everything from basic chat to large-scale webinars, making it equally useful for a quick memo exchange and a full-blown corporate extravaganza. If you like automation, custom apps and an endless array of integrations, you’re in luck—Teams will let you automate yourself into a quiet, well-oiled oblivion.
Symphony, on the other hand, was born in 2014 with a different purpose: to make finance people feel important while keeping their conversations secure enough to withstand regulatory scrutiny. Unlike Teams, which tries to be everything for everyone, Symphony is laser-focused on the high-stakes world of banks, hedge funds and traders who need to discuss vital, world-changing things like interest rates, mergers and where to have lunch. It comes equipped with compliance tools that prevent traders from saying things they shouldn’t, market data integration and just enough external connectivity to stay useful without breaking financial regulations. If Teams is a loud, bustling corporate meeting, Symphony is a hushed, high-security boardroom with a very expensive coffee machine.
See also: Top 10 Team Messaging platforms
Teams, being a product of Microsoft, is the sort of platform that shows up whether you asked for it or not. It launched in 2017 as a friendly way to herd office workers into one convenient communication space, while also ensuring they never leave the warm embrace of Microsoft 365. It does everything from basic chat to large-scale webinars, making it equally useful for a quick memo exchange and a full-blown corporate extravaganza. If you like automation, custom apps and an endless array of integrations, you’re in luck—Teams will let you automate yourself into a quiet, well-oiled oblivion.
Symphony, on the other hand, was born in 2014 with a different purpose: to make finance people feel important while keeping their conversations secure enough to withstand regulatory scrutiny. Unlike Teams, which tries to be everything for everyone, Symphony is laser-focused on the high-stakes world of banks, hedge funds and traders who need to discuss vital, world-changing things like interest rates, mergers and where to have lunch. It comes equipped with compliance tools that prevent traders from saying things they shouldn’t, market data integration and just enough external connectivity to stay useful without breaking financial regulations. If Teams is a loud, bustling corporate meeting, Symphony is a hushed, high-security boardroom with a very expensive coffee machine.
See also: Top 10 Team Messaging platforms
