Why You Should Use a Team + Channel Instead of a Large Group Chat

Understanding the 250-User Chat Limit

• Microsoft Teams imposes a hard cap of 250 people in a group chat. (Microsoft Q&A)
• This is a design limit and cannot be increased for standard one-to-one or group chats. (Microsoft Q&A)
• If you need to communicate with more than 250 users, a group chat won’t cut it.

The Alternative: Use a Microsoft Teams Team + Channel

• Rather than a chat, you should create a Team (or use an existing one). According to Microsoft, a Team can support up to 25,000 members. (Microsoft Learn)
• Within that Team you create a standard (public) channel, which everyone in the Team can access and post in.
• By doing this, you get around the 250-person chat limit, because you’re not relying on a “chat” at all — you're using a Team conversation inside a channel.

How to Set This Up: Step-by-Step Walkthrough

Here’s a walk-through guide you can use to implement this:

1. Decide / Create the Team

   • Choose a name that makes sense (e.g., “Customer Delivery”, “All Staff”).

   • Create the Team in Microsoft Teams (or pick an existing Team if you have one that’s appropriate) from New Team:
     
     

     
     
     Then give it a name as below, ensure you keep it private:
     
     
     

2. Create a Standard Channel

   • In the Team, click “Add channel” → give it a suitable or whatever is appropriate, try not to change this later on this is done from the name menu as before:
     
     

     

   • Then you will ensure you link it to the team you created earlier:
     
     

     
     
     Make sure to select “Standard” (not Private) — this makes the channel visible to all Team members.

3. Bulk-Add Members to the Team

   • Use Azure AD (Entra) to add users in bulk to the Team’s Microsoft 365 group, as previously outlined as below, here are the two groups but which one......
     
     

     
     
     

   • If you click on the group then at the bottom of the group option look for the Team group link as below, you will find the correct group:
     

     

     
     Once users are added to the Team, they automatically get access to all standard channels, including your new channel, to add them in bulk choose the as below:
     
     

     

     
     You will finally need to give Entra a CSV file, you can download the template and then add the required users to the CSV file and upload the CSV files, then all those users will be added to the teams group.
     
     

     

4. Communicate the Change to Users

   • Tell your users: “Instead of creating a big group chat, please use the channel in our Team.”

   • Provide a link to the channel so they know where to go.

   • Explain why: better for large-scale communication, easier to manage, and avoids the 250-user chat limit.

5. Archive or Delete Old Group Chat

   • If you previously had a large group chat (or multiple) that people were using, decide whether to archive or delete it.

Conclusion

If you have more than ~250 users who need to communicate in a persistent way, don’t use a Teams “chat” — use a Team with a standard channel.

This is because of the 250-member limit in chat, and using a Team + channel gives you a much more scalable, manageable, and sustainable communication mechanism.