In recent years, more and more international comparative higher education studies have been conducted in internationally and geographically spread project teams and comparative higher education has become a fundamentally collaborative effort. Accordingly, researchers in such projects have to cope with the methodological complexity of international comparative research as well as with a particular socio-cultural complexity that stems from its team character. But social dimension of comparative and international collaborative teams has so far not been examined and is still mostly a black box. This article delineates the intertwined methodological and social challenges of international comparative team research and presents empirical results of a rating of such challenges among higher education researchers. Higher education researchers see the social dimension almost as challenging as the methodological dimension of collaborative comparative research. The conclusion points out that a reflection of the increasingly international collaborative character of comparative research is necessary for the advancement of comparative higher education research that is conducted in international teams.