Share Your Screen in Slack and Teams: Huddles vs Meetings
Screen sharing lives inside each tool's call feature: huddles in Slack, meetings in Teams. Both let you show a screen or a window, but the similarities end quickly. Slack keeps it simple with up to two sharers and a draw-on-screen pencil. Teams builds a full presenter toolkit with slide control, remote takeover and layout options. Here is what each help page documents.
Miles Crawford
The quick version
In a Slack huddle, click the share screen icon, pick a screen, window or application, optionally share system audio, and select Share; up to two people can share at once. In a Teams meeting, select Share in the meeting controls and present your entire screen or a window, then use the presenter toolbar at the top of your screen for audio, annotation, layouts and control.
Slack: screen sharing in a huddle
Up to two people in a huddle can share their screen at the same time. Shared screens appear in the huddle window, and anyone in the huddle can click one to expand it or click the pencil icon to draw on it, with drawing currently supported on the Slack desktop app for Mac and Windows. On desktop, the flow is share screen icon, select a screen, window or application, optionally Share system audio, then Share. On mobile, tap the three dots icon, then Share Screen. Huddles themselves run on the Slack desktop and mobile apps, in Google Chrome on Mac, Windows and Linux, and in Firefox on Mac and Windows.
Slack: plan limits that shape sharing
Screen sharing inherits the huddle's limits. On the free plan a huddle can have a maximum of two participants, so sharing is effectively one to one. On paid plans huddles scale to 50 participants, though only 25 can enable video at a time. Each huddle also gets a dedicated thread for notes alongside the video and multi-person sharing.
Teams: presenting in a meeting
Select Share in the meeting controls and present your entire screen or a window; participants briefly see a loading screen while the share starts, and a failed share offers options to restart the app or rejoin. Beyond screen and window sharing, you can live-share a PowerPoint file, Excel file or Whiteboard for real-time collaboration. On the web, screen sharing works in Google Chrome or the latest Microsoft Edge; Linux is not currently supported. You can also present from a companion device: join the meeting on a second device and tap Start presenting.
Teams: the presenter toolbar
While you present, moving your cursor to the top of the shared screen drops down the presenter toolbar, visible only to you. Its controls include camera and mic toggles, Share audio (turn on the Include sound toggle before sharing; all computer sound, including notifications, becomes audible), Optimize for video content, Annotate to lock the screen and draw over it, layouts like Standout, Side-by-side and Reporter when your camera is on, a compact meeting chat your audience cannot see, and Stop sharing. You can drag the toolbar anywhere and pin it in place.
Teams: giving and taking control
Give control lets someone else access and interact with your shared screen, with Take back to reclaim it; Microsoft warns to only give control to people you trust, since they can make selections and edits that affect your system. To drive someone else's share, select Request control and wait for approval, then Release control when done. Slide control is the gentler option for presentations: share control of PowerPoint slides with up to 20 people so co-presenters can advance for everyone. Slide control only works for presentations started from Teams for desktop, is not supported in Teams Rooms or for presentations shared from mobile, and people on a Mac can be given slide control but cannot start it. Note that if your role changes from presenter to attendee mid-presentation, screensharing stops.
Teams: Mac permissions and quirks
On a Mac, Teams needs permission to record your screen: allow the prompt the first time you share, or enable Microsoft Teams under Screen & System Audio Recording in Privacy & Security settings, then select Share again. Microsoft notes macOS Sequoia 15.2 shows new access prompts, suggests updating to macOS 26.4 or later and closing unused apps if sharing misbehaves, and flags a known issue with DisplayLink docking stations on macOS 14 and higher. An opt-in native macOS sharing experience exists under Settings, then General, then Screen sharing, but giving and taking control are not supported in it. Viewers can zoom shared content with the corner buttons, a trackpad pinch (not on Mac trackpads), keyboard shortcuts or Ctrl plus scroll, and can open shared content in a separate window from the desktop app.
Which one for what?
Our read: for quick pairing, Slack's model is hard to beat: two people sharing at once and drawing directly on each other's screens is the fastest design-review loop of the two. For presenting to a room, Teams is the obvious choice: presenter layouts, slide control for handoffs and system audio make it a real stage. One caution in both: Teams' Share audio streams every notification sound, so silence notifications before a demo, and Teams' Give control hands over real keyboard-and-mouse access.
What to be careful about
- Two sharers max in Slack. A third person must wait for a slot, per Slack.
- Drawing on screens needs the Slack desktop app. It is Mac and Windows only.
- Free-plan Slack huddles cap at two people. Sharing beyond a pair needs a paid plan.
- Teams on the web needs Chrome or Edge. Linux is not supported for sharing.
- Teams slide control has platform limits. Desktop-started presentations only, not Rooms or mobile, and Mac users can receive but not start it.
- Mac screen sharing needs a privacy permission. Grant Screen & System Audio Recording to Teams (and to your browser on Teams for web).
- Give control is real control. Microsoft warns to grant it only to people you trust.
Sources
Checked October 25, 2026. Features, steps and limits follow each product's own help articles. The guidance on when each shines is ours.