Access the Market Study: Is Lark Ready to Compete with the Leading Productivity Vendors?

Overview:

A Hands-on experience evaluation of Lark’s digital collaboration suite.

Lark is an enterprise collaboration and communications platform provided by Lark Technologies, a Singapore-based subsidiary of the Chinese technology conglomerate ByteDance. ByteDance is best known globally for the short-form video app TikTok (and its China-only “twin” Douyin) which was the most downloaded app globally for 2021. ByteDance also has offerings in social media, gaming, and AI services and a reported $58 billion in revenue in 2021, up 70% from 2020[i].

In 2018 ByteDance adopted Lark’s twin product Feishu, as its internal communications and collaboration tool. In 2019 they released Lark to markets outside China. In March of 2020 Lark added a suite of productivity tools like Google’s Workspace offering to the product and in April of that same year, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic Lark began offering its lowest-paid offering for free.

At the time of this writing, Lark is officially offered in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, though the site is available everywhere and users can sign up for free accounts anywhere.

While awareness of Lark is relatively low at this point, the app is notable in several ways. First, it is a collaboration platform from a business whose parent company has an estimated 1.9 billion monthly active users (MAU)[ii] across its products. Second, their parent company is building a powerful AI platform to service all its products – and its strength in AI will be a major driver of successful enterprise communications applications going forward. And third, Lark, with the backing of ByteDance, is one of the few companies with the scale and resources to compete in the Productivity-First segment of the online meetings market

In Q1 of 2022, The Futurum Group conducted an experience evaluation of Lark’s collaboration suite. In this evaluation, we cover workflows for users as well as analysis of key features of the platform. The Futurum Intelligence Evaluation Lab used the free version of Lark as it was the only version available outside of select countries in Southeast Asia. One of the major questions we had for this evaluation was how this new entrant would stack up against two of the dominant productivity-first offerings from Microsoft and Google in the online meetings market.

[i] “TikTok owner ByteDance’s revenue growth slowed to 70% in 2021”. The Economic Times.

[ii] “TikTok Owner ByteDance’s Annual Revenue Jumps to $34.3 Billion”. The Wall Street Journal.

Table of Contents:

• Executive Summary
  • Summary of Findings
• Offering Overview
  • Service Tiers
  • Platforms
• Account Creation
  • Managing Multiple Accounts
    • What We’d Like to See
• Installation
• Lark Offering
  • Administration
    • What We’d Like to See
  • Lark Productivity Applications
    • Docs and Sheets
    • Bitables
    • What We’d Like to See
  • Email/Calendaring
  • Messaging
    • What We’d Like to See
  • Meetings
    • Meeting Experience
    • Video Quality
    • Audio Quality
    • Content Sharing
    • System Resources in a Meeting
    • What We’d Like to See
• Summary Analysis
  • What We Like
  • Areas for Improvement
• About Us
  • About the Author
  • About The Futurum Group
• Notices
  • Copyright Notice
  • License Notice
  • Limitation of Liability Notice

Questions?

To purchase this product or for more information, please contact Futurum Intelligence Client Services – [email protected] or (508)-254-7252