Lydo Connect vs Slack Connect and Microsoft Teams: shared channels across companies

Sooner or later your team has to work with another company — a client, a vendor, an agency, a franchise partner. You don’t want to invite them into your whole workspace, and you don’t want to live in theirs. You want one shared room, secured, where both sides can talk.

Slack and Microsoft both built answers to this. Slack Connect shares a channel between two workspaces. Microsoft Teams does it with shared channels and B2B direct connect. Both work — and both carry the weight of the platform they grew out of.

Lydo Connect is the lighter version of the same idea: link two Spaces with a secured shared channel that’s first-class in both sidebars — no guest accounts, no tenant-trust project, and priced per Space rather than per seat.

At a glance

| | Lydo Connect | Slack Connect | Teams shared channels | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | What’s shared | One secured channel between two Spaces | A channel between two workspaces | A channel between two tenants | | First-class in both sidebars | Yes | Partly — shared channels can feel second-class | Yes (B2B direct connect) | | Guest accounts | None | None for Connect channels | None (B2B direct connect) | | Setup | Two admins approve a connection | Invite → accept → both admins approve | Cross-tenant trust configured in Microsoft Entra | | Who joins | Each side curates its own people | Each side adds its own people | Each side adds its own people | | Pricing model | Per Space (flat) | Per user/seat | Per user, via Microsoft 365 | | Encryption | MLS-encrypted shared channels on the rollout track | Not end-to-end encrypted | Not end-to-end encrypted |

Competitor capabilities and pricing change often — check Slack’s and Microsoft’s sites before buying.

The friction nobody mentions

Slack Connect is genuinely useful, but a shared channel can still feel like a guest in your workspace, and the model is wrapped in per-seat pricing on both sides. Teams’ B2B direct connect is slick once it’s running — your people use home credentials, no guest account — but “once it’s running” means an IT admin on both sides configuring cross-tenant trust in Microsoft Entra. That’s fine for two big companies with IT departments. It’s a wall for a restaurant group working with a produce supplier.

How Lydo Connect works

Two Space admins agree to connect. From then on, either side can open a secured shared channel and invite its own people into it — not the whole Space, just the channel. It shows up as a normal channel in both Spaces’ sidebars, clearly badged as connected, so nobody mistakes it for an internal room. Each side controls who joins and what it shares, and when the work is done, either side can disconnect.

Because Lydo is one app and one identity, there’s no tenant to switch and no guest seat to provision. And because Lydo is priced per Space, adding a partner channel doesn’t add to a per-seat bill.

Security: shared, not exposed

Neither Slack Connect channels nor Teams shared channels are end-to-end encrypted. Lydo’s Confidential Mode and MLS-encrypted Spaces are on the rollout track, and shared channels are designed to ride the same encryption path — so “work with another company” doesn’t have to mean “trust a third platform with the plaintext.”

Membership is the other half of security: an org member never lands in a shared channel by default, the Space gatekeeps its own roster, and a partner only ever sees the one channel you connected — never the rest of your Space.

Who it’s for

If you’re two enterprises already standardized on the same stack, Slack Connect or Teams shared channels are a reasonable default. If you’re a business that works across companies — agencies and clients, brands and suppliers, franchises and HQ, contractors and crews — and you don’t want a per-seat bill or an IT project to do it, Lydo Connect is built for you.

It’s part of the broader Organizations story: run your own Spaces under one org, and connect outward to everyone else’s.