Every now and then I find people asking about limitation of Microsoft Teams. In this post I’ve listed all the known limitations of Microsoft Teams.
Limits
What is the maximum number of teams that can be created in an Office 365 tenant?
The default maximum number of teams that an Office 365 tenant can have is currently 500,000. Note that this number also includes any archived teams.
If you however hit the 500,000 Teams you might want to reconsider your house keeping policies.
How many owners can there be for a team in Microsoft Teams?
A team can have 100 owners. Most organisations would want to limit the owners of a team to a lot less than 100 anyway. So this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. If you end up with a need for more than 100 owners then you should really consider how many people really take ownership of your teams?
How many teams can a user create?
A user can create 250 teams. This is one of those limitations that I could imagine you could hit. Not every user in your organisation will hit this limit, but you will find that some roles in your organisation may require more than 250 teams to be created by one person over time. Consider a sales person who create a separate team for each client as the documents are shared with the external users (the client). Now a sales person can only have 250 clients before running into problems. Note that the limit for global administrators is higher, but then you wouldn’t want your sales people to have global admin rights!
How many teams can a global administrator create?
A global admin can create 500,000 teams. With the global number of teams limited to 500,000 as well there isn’t really a limitation on the number of teams an admin can create.
What is the maximum number of teams in a tenant?
The number of teams a Microsoft 365 tenant can have is 500,000.
What is the maximum number of members you can add to a team?
A team owner can add 5000 members to a team. This same limit also exists for org-wide teams. Once you exceed the 5000 people in your organisation you will find that you cannot create an org wide team!
What is the maximum number of private channels in a team?
The maximum number of private channels is 30. This limit might seem a bit silly. However if you need that many private channels in a single team then you should consider creating multiple teams that have the right members specified.
What is the maximum number of members a user can add to a chat?
There can be 100 members in a private chat, including the user who created the chat.
What is the maximum number of people in a meeting?
The maximum number of people in a meeting is 250. If you need a larger group of people to attend your meeting then you might want to consider using Teams live events as you can then host 10,000 attendees at a maximum of 4 hours.
How many Teams live event scan I organise at the same time?
There is a limit of 15 events within a single Microsoft 365 tenant. For most situations should should be ok, but I could imagine with many events being organised online that this limitation might have to increase.
What is the maximum number of channels that a team can have?
A team can have 200 channels. This includes deleted channels!
How many teams can a user be part of?
The maximum number of teams that a user can be part of is 1,000. Wow, can you just imagine keeping up with alerts coming from 1,000 teams?
What is the maximum number of org wide teams?
The maximum number of org wide teams is 5. One of the golden rules that I often apply is: Create a team only if the group of people in the team is different from any other team. Why create multiple org-wide teams?
There may of course be a good reason to separate content by teams? Just imagine creating a separate team for HR documents that you may want to share with everybody and the social stuff that you may want to share with people.
What is the maximum size of posts in conversations?
There is a maximum of 28 KB per post. This includes images, text and everything else that you may post. When you email a channel this limit goes down to 24 KB while the number of attachments cannot exceed 20 and each attachment needs to be smaller than 10 MB. You email can also not have more than 50 images included in it.
What are the limitations on names?
The following characters cannot be used in names of channels:
~ # % & * { } + / \ : < > ? | ' " ..Do you remember SharePoint being the back end for Teams’ channels. You will know that the above characters have always been a cause for trouble.
There are more limitations however. You can also not call your channels any of the following words:
- forms
- CON
- CONIN$
- CONOUT$
- PRN
- AUX
- NUL
- COM1 toCOM9
- LPT1 to LPT9
- desktop.ini
- _vti_
Can I present any PowerPoint file?
There is a limit of 2 GB. If your PowerPoint exceeds 2 GB then you will find issues when you present. This is something that could be painful when you repared a large presentation.
Related articles
Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Teams – Admin Help
Limits and specifications for Microsoft Teams
What is the maximum number of tabs that you can create in a single channel?
Hi Karen,
As far as I’m aware there is no limit on the number of that that you can create in a single channel. When the Tabs don’t fit you will get “X more” drop downs to appear. I could however imagine that if that drop down gets overloaded that the user experience doesn’t become any better
Thanks,
Pieter
Is there a limit to how many teams a particular user can join? I wonder if it’s also 250 (the same number you quoted for team creation).
Hi Jim,
I must say that I haven’t tried joining 250 teams, but as far as I know there isn’t a limit on the number of teams that you can join.
How many teams can a user create?
A user can create 250 teams.
Does this mean exactly what it says? If I create 250 teams, I can create no more? Even if I have left those teams?
Hi Patrick,
Yes it means exactly that. I have never understood the sense of this limitation.
Is there a limit of the number of characters that a filename (including path) that a file have?
There isn’t really a limit for Teams, however you will have the limits set within SharePoint Online as your files will be stored there. The following article give you more details on these limits.
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2017/05/10/microsoft-expands-sharepoint-online-url-path-lengths.aspx
This blog entry needs to be updated in several ways – from the max. size of chat groups to the max. size of teams. Also, the number of guests is limited to 5x a tenant’s user licenses.
Thanks John, All limitations have been updated now.
What is the maximum team creation limitation a SharePoint Admin Role on the tenant can create? Is it the same as the user? [that would seem odd] or the same as a Global Admin?
yes, that is the same number. I totally agree that it is odd.
I don’t know if this was asked already or not, but I’m interested in how many guest with NO O365 account, can attend to a teams meeting? (for example using the browser version)
I would expect that the 250 people in a meeting limitation is the first limit that you would hit.
What’s the maximum number of Contact groups (not Teams) that can be created in MS Teams?