Top 10 Skype Alternatives for Business

2025. Microsoft discontinues Skype



Skype's official X-Twitter account announced that the messenger will shut down in May 2025, encouraging users to switch to Microsoft Teams. Skype was launched in 2003. Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion and since then, the company has been gradually abandoning its own communications products, such as Windows Live Messenger. In 2015 Skype was integrate into Windows 10, but the integration was unsuccessful. In 2017, Microsoft introduced Teams - an enterprise communications platform based on Skype technology, to compete with services like Slack. Since then the company has been pushing Teams hard, which became evident with the release of Windows 11, where Teams, not Skype, received deep integration into the operation system.


2024. Google Chat gets AI features



Google is adding features based on the Gemini AI model to its Workspace business service. These features will be integrated into existing Workspace accounts and are also available as a paid add-on for $10 per user per month. Google Chat, the team messaging app, has also received AI features. These include a chat summary feature that automatically captures meeting notes, and a "Translate for Me" tool that can automatically translate into 69 different languages. This is especially useful when communicating with employees from different parts of the company.


2021. Zadarma implemented integration with Microsoft Teams



Zadarma telephony service has introduced official and free integration with the popular Microsoft Teams platform. Microsoft Teams offers a comprehensive suite of tools, including chat, video conferencing, and the ability to create notes and attachments. One of the system's key advantages is that participants can be divided into departments and groups, and meetings and calls can be held with the click of a button. The integration will combine Zadarma telephony with the convenience of Teams into a single ecosystem, meaning you can call clients directly from the MS Teams interface, configure call routing for your organization in Teams, customize voice menus and additional features in MS Teams, receive recordings of your calls by email or listen to them in the Zadarma interface, transcribe all conversations into text, and analyze calls using 50+ parameters.

2021. Microsoft is shutting down Skype for Business



Microsoft has shut down the online version of its corporate instant messaging app, Skype for Business (formerly Lync). It has been replaced by Microsoft Teams. The shutdown of the corporate version won't affect regular Skype for now, but Microsoft released a completely free consumer version of Teams back in April 2021. There's also a server (on-premises) version, Skype for Business Server, a unified communications system that continues to be used by many companies. It's already known that Microsoft will stop supporting/updating it in 2025, although there have been no announcements yet about a server version of Teams.


2019. Microsoft is intimidating Slack. But Slack isn't afraid.



Recently, Microsoft announced that the audience of its enterprise messaging app Microsoft Teams has reached 13 million daily users, which is 3 million more than Slack. They even drew a graph that should scare Slack with this trend. But Slack founder Stewart Butterfield said that there is no reason to worry as long as Slack is more user-friendly. He acknowledges that Teams' active user growth may continue to increase due to the growth of paid subscriptions to Office 365, of which the enterprise messaging app is a part. But, he says, Microsoft has also previously tried to compete with Google search by leveraging the large Windows audience, and it has failed.


2011. GoToMeeting Adds Video Conferencing. Ditching Skype?



In March of this year, even before Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it was announced that GoToMeeting would be integrated into Skype to provide web conferencing capabilities (collaboration on applications, documents, online presentations, etc.). This would have been a logical partnership, as GoToMeeting and Skype are often used together for online meetings. But then Microsoft acquired Skype, and apparently plans changed. After all, Microsoft and Citrix (the owner of GoToMeeting) are more competitors than friends. Either way, yesterday GoToMeeting launched a new version of its service with its own video conferencing tool called HDFaces. Moreover, HDFaces could not only replace Skype for GoToMeeting users but also compete with Skype in the global corporate video conferencing market.