What to Look for in a Skype for Business Alternative
On Oct. 15, 2025, Microsoft will stop providing support for Skype for Business.
If your organization still uses Skype for Business to collaborate, you need to immediately start thinking about moving to a new collaboration platform. Otherwise, you risk communication disruptions, frustrating your employees, and exposing your organization to additional security vulnerabilities, among other risks.
As you begin looking for a Skype for Business alternative, use the opportunity to uplevel your collaboration strategy by choosing a solution designed to help your team increase focus and work more productively every day. With that in mind, let’s examine five must-have features the ideal Skype for Business replacement will have.
1. Robust collaboration tools
When searching for a Skype for Business replacement, look for a feature-rich solution that goes beyond basic messaging. This solution should offer functionality like threaded conversations, emoji support, audio calling, screen sharing, and file sharing within group and private channels.
To make the most of the opportunity, don’t just replace Skype for Business with any old collaboration tool; use the moment to equip your team with more powerful tools. Beyond regular collaboration features, you may want to consider advanced functionality like playbooks for task automation, integrated video conferencing, and the platform’s extensibility.
To ensure your users are productive on the go, look for a platform that offers desktop, mobile, and web apps, allowing folks to collaborate seamlessly across devices from wherever they are. While you’re at it, consider an option that enables you to future-proof your collaboration strategy by deploying artificial intelligence safely and securely.
2. Security and compliance
In today’s age of high-profile data breaches, security and compliance need to be a top consideration when exploring Skype for Business alternatives. To protect mission-critical work, look for a platform that offers data encryption, both in transit and at rest. The ideal solution will also support robust authentication measures, including multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO), to prevent unauthorized access.
If you operate in a highly regulated space — like critical infrastructure, financial services, or government — ensure the platform you ultimately choose complies with all relevant regulations (e.g., GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, and ISO 27001). To keep bad actors at bay, look for a platform that gives you granular control over user permissions and enables you to monitor all activity, which increases accountability and gives you an audit trail.
Since security is a never-ending target, you’ll also want to choose a solution that offers regular security updates and takes a transparent approach to disclosing and addressing vulnerabilities. By prioritizing security and compliance when you replace Skype for Business, you can protect your business’s most sensitive data.
3. Integration capabilities
To avoid manually moving data from one platform to the next, it’s important to look for an adaptable Skype alternative that seamlessly connects with your existing tools, including CRMs, calendars, productivity suites, and proprietary software. By doing so, you can customize the platform however you see fit, making it that much easier to support your unique requirements.
At the same time, look for a collaboration platform that offers built-in automation features that connect the tools your team uses every day while eliminating repetitive tasks. By choosing a platform that integrates with other systems well, you can ensure that your team works inside of a shared collaboration space, improving productivity while keeping dreaded context switching to a minimum. Plus, prioritizing integration helps you future-proof your collaboration needs because you can continue customizing the tool as your business evolves.
4. Scalability
For growing organizations, scalability is a critical factor in choosing a Skype for Business alternative. Since the last thing you want to do is choose a platform only to have to move to yet another one in a couple of years, it’s important to look for a solution that can accommodate your current team and also seamlessly scale to support more users as your business grows.
As you narrow down your options, look for a solution that offers tiered subscriptions, the ability to add and remove users quickly, and the ability to maintain high performance during peak traffic periods.
Here at Mattermost, we’re laser-focused on scalability. In fact, we recently demonstrated that our platform can scale to accommodate 100,000 concurrent users. If you’re considering Skype replacement, make sure the platform you ultimately choose can keep pace with your business’ growth; that way, you won’t have to switch platforms again.
5. User-friendly design
You might pick the most secure, feature-rich platform the world has ever seen. But if your employees have a hard time figuring out how to use it productively, what good is it?
To ensure your investment in a new collaboration platform pays off, choose a solution with a user-friendly design and intuitive interface. This will minimize the learning curve for users of all technical skill levels.
Before finalizing your decision, make sure your Skype for Business replacement is easy to navigate and offers comprehensive documentation and product training resources, along with responsive customer support and an active user community, so users can troubleshoot problems on their own. The right solution will also be highly configurable on a per-user basis so that each employee can adjust it in whatever way best supports their work.
By picking a user-friendly solution, your organization can boost adoption rates while increasing team productivity immediately—accelerating time to value.
Mattermost: The ideal Skype for Business alternative
With an easy-to-learn, familiar interface and feature-rich design, Mattermost is the ideal Skype for Business replacement for organizations looking to enhance their modern communication and collaboration capabilities. Built on an open source foundation and offering full API access, Mattermost integrates with any of your existing tools and workflows your team uses every day, increasing operational efficiency and helping your team work more effectively.
Designed for organizations operating in the strictest environments — including critical infrastructure, defense, and intelligence — Mattermost ships with advanced security and compliance features that help you meet the highest standards for secure collaboration.
Highly scalable, Mattermost supports organizations as they grow, delivering a reliable, secure, and customizable solution for seamless collaboration. To learn more about why your organization should replace Skype for Business with Mattermost, talk to an expert today.
