Microsoft Teams vs. Zoom

Microsoft Teams vs Zoom: Which is the Best Video Conferencing Platform for Your Business?

Video conferencing has become the new normal for remote work and communication, with Microsoft Teams and Zoom emerging as two of the leading video conferencing platforms in the market. With so many similarities, choosing between the two can be challenging. In this article, we compare the two platforms and help you decide which is best for your business.

Before we dive into the comparison, let's first look at the benefits of video conferencing.

Top Benefits of Video Conferencing:

Streamlined communication.
Improved team collaboration and productivity.
Faster responses.
Ability to connect from remote workspaces.
Ability to host large global meetings.
Recording of meetings for those unable to attend
Great platform for online events.
Seeing other people's body language during meetings.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a comprehensive communication platform included in Microsoft 365. Along with video conferencing capabilities, Teams also includes chat and voice calling functionality and allows teams to share and edit files in real-time through a shared virtual workspace. Teams are highly integrated with other Microsoft products, including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, making it a true collaboration platform.

What is Zoom?

Zoom is a communication platform that includes audio and video conferencing, chat functionality, video webinars, and more. Zoom also offers an entire marketplace of application integrations, including MailChimp, Zendesk, Marketo, and even Microsoft Teams for additional extensibility. Although Zoom has been around since 2011, it saw significant growth in 2020, increasing from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to over 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020.

Consider your audience?

The first step in deciding between Microsoft Teams and Zoom is to consider your audience. If your focus is on meetings among colleagues in an organization that already uses Microsoft products, especially Office 365, then Microsoft Teams is the obvious choice. However, if you need to hold meetings with people external to your organization, Zoom may be the better option as it is more widely known.

User Interface 
New users may find Teams more complicated to use than Zoom since it is part of Microsoft’s much larger universe of productivity, collaboration, and communication tools. There is an initial learning curve because of the many ways Teams integrates with other Office apps. That said, the integrations are intuitive, and their usefulness outweighs the required learning. The Zoom video conference controls are similarly simple and user-friendly.

Both Microsoft Teams and Zoom share many of the same features, such as screen and app sharing, whiteboards, chat functions, voice calling, customized backgrounds, breakout rooms, and meeting recordings. However, Teams has recently increased its maximum meeting capacity to 300 people, whereas Zoom allows up to 1,000 participants for paid plans.

Pricing:

Both Teams and Zoom offer free and paid versions, with Microsoft offering different pricing tiers for Teams, some of which come with varying degrees of access to other Office 365 apps. The main differences between free and paid versions include meeting duration limits, participant capacity, file storage, and access to Microsoft apps.

Zoom's free plan allows for group meetings of up to 40 minutes and one-to-one sessions of up to 30 hours, while Microsoft Teams' free plan allows for meetings of up to 60 minutes. Paid plans for Zoom offer meetings lasting up to 30 hours and a capacity of up to 1,000 participants, while Microsoft Teams caps meeting duration at 24 hours and allows for a maximum of 300 participants. File storage varies by provider plan, with Zoom's top plan offering unlimited file storage, while Microsoft Teams caps storage at 1 TB per organization and 10 GB per license.

The Verdict:

In conclusion, both Microsoft Teams and Zoom are both highly intuitive, very comparable platforms, which can be useful in different situations.

Microsoft Teams also offers many other benefits beyond just video conferencing including:

Teams and Channels
File storage within SharePoint Integration
Audio Conferencing
Security and Privacy

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