Lark

Lark is a program that teams in companies use to work together. A single app contains chat, video conferencing, a shared calendar, text documents, and spreadsheets. So you don’t have to jump back and forth between five different programs. Lark is developed by ByteDance, the Chinese conglomerate behind TikTok. In China, the same software runs under the name Feishu; outside China, it’s called Lark. It is used mainly by companies, not by private individuals.

The battle for the digital workplace

Office collaboration software is a huge market. Microsoft earns billions with Teams and Office, Google with Workspace, and Slack now belongs to the conglomerate Salesforce. Lark is ByteDance’s attempt to compete in this business. For the company, this is strategically important: advertising revenue from TikTok depends on politics and moods, whereas corporate subscriptions are more predictable.

For customers, the appeal lies mainly in the price and the bundling. Anyone who otherwise pays for Slack for chat, Zoom for video conferencing, and Notion for documents pays for three subscriptions. Lark offers all of that for one price and is free in its basic version for small teams. This strategy is called bundling: you give away individual parts in order to sell the overall package.

There is, however, a political problem. Because ByteDance is a Chinese company, some governments and firms distrust the software. The concern is that business data could end up in China. In the US and India, this has led to discussions and, in some cases, bans. For European companies, this is a real factor in the decision-making process.

Everything in one app instead of five

Technically, Lark is a cloud application. This means the data is not stored on your own computer but on the provider’s servers. You access it via a browser or an app. The advantage is that everyone involved always sees the same up-to-date version. If two people are typing in a document at the same time, each sees the other’s changes instantly.

The real trick is the interlocking of the different areas. A message in chat can be turned into a task with two clicks. A document can be opened directly within the chat window, without switching apps. Appointments from the calendar automatically appear as a video conference link. These transitions are why users often refer to Lark as an operating system for the office.

On top of that come AI features that ByteDance has been building in for several years. A language model summarizes long chat histories, writes up minutes from video conferences, and translates messages in real time. Language models are programs that have learned how language is structured from vast amounts of text. They are useful for such tasks, but not error-free: summaries can distort details, which is why important minutes should be reviewed by a person.

Who actually uses Lark

In Germany, you rarely encounter Lark. The market here is dominated by Microsoft Teams, which comes bundled with Office in many companies anyway. Anyone who does encounter Lark is usually working with Asian business partners or is employed at a company with a Chinese parent firm.

In Asia, things look different. Feishu is one of the big three office apps in China, alongside DingTalk from Alibaba and WeChat Work from Tencent. In Singapore, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia too, Lark has won many customers, including well-known startups and airlines.

In business news, Lark usually comes up in two contexts. First, when it’s about ByteDance’s attempt to become less dependent on TikTok. Second, when governments restrict Chinese software on work devices. A common misconception, incidentally, is to think of Lark and Feishu as two different products. It is the same software with separate servers and a different range of features.