Every business faces important choices when it comes to video conferencing products, but the variety of options can feel overwhelming. You know that to stay competitive, you need a video conferencing solution that optimizes your business. To streamline your decision-making process, let’s compare two prominent offerings in the video conferencing market: Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a video conferencing solution that creates a shared workspace by combining chat, meetings, file sharing and business apps. Microsoft Teams functions for every kind of business or organization, with features such as:
- Online Meetings — Host web conferences, teleconferences and video meetings. Make use of features like scheduling assistance, note taking, desktop sharing, file uploading and chat messaging.
- Live Broadcasts — Go live with Microsoft Teams’ live events to reach a wide audience. Host all-hands meetings, webinars and presentations with up to 10,000 attendees internal or external to your organization.
- Meeting Spaces — Join all your meeting spaces in a single touch with Microsoft Teams Rooms from our partners Logitech, Crestron, Polycom, Lenovo, HP and Yealink.
- Cloud Video Interoperability — Seamlessly connect H.323-compatible video conferencing devices to Microsoft Teams meetings with BlueJeans, Pexip and Polycom.
- Audio Conferencing— Join meetings from a phone or use Microsoft Teams to dial anyone directly. Meetings include a dial-in number spanning more than cities globally, making it easier for mobile users and those without a reliable internet connection.
Microsoft Teams is free to download, with partial functionality and no commitments. For a more robust experience, Teams is available as part of Office 365 Business Premium for $12.50 per user, per month, or Office 365 Enterprise E3 for $20 per user, per month, which unlocks the full range of features.
What is Zoom?
Zoom is a powerful, cloud-based video conferencing product designed for easy-to-use webinars, remote meetings, video and teleconferencing. Dropbox, Match and Ticketmaster all choose Zoom for its quality screen-sharing and video tools, not to mention affordable pricing.
Zoom’s collection of features streamlines remote communications with a well-organized visual interface, active-voice detection and simple mouse-over controls. Zoom online meetings and conferences are efficient and smooth.
With a variety of a la carte extras including improved storage, toll-free dialing and webinars and integrations with numerous services and apps (including but not limited to Slack, HipChat, Salesforce, Blackboard, Google Chrome, Microsoft Outlook and Dropbox), Zoom is ready to work for your business with one of its four plans:
- Zoom Basic is free to use. Basic hosts a maximum of 100 participants and offers unlimited one-on-one and group meetings for up to 40 minutes.
- Zoom Pro, at $14 per host, per month, is ideal for smaller teams. Zoom Pro has all the features of the basic plan, plus an admin control feature and custom personal meeting ID. Zoom Pro accommodates meetings of any length up to 100 participants, and offers 1 GB of either MP4 or M4A cloud recording capacity. Pro boasts Skype for business interoperability, a user management system, REST API and an assigned scheduler.
- Zoom Business is for both small and medium businesses and runs $19.99 per month, per host. It supports a minimum of 10 hosts and comes with all the features of the Pro plan. Zoom Business comes with workplace-focused features such as phone support, optional vanity URL, single sign-on, custom emails and company branding. Other features of the Zoom Business plan include an admin dashboard, on-premise deployment options, managed domains and LTI integration.
- Zoom Enterprise, also $19.99 per month per host, is ideal for large companies with a minimum of 100 hosts. Enterprise includes all the features of the Business plan, and can accommodate up to 200 participants. Zoom Enterprise offers unlimited cloud storage and a devoted customer success manager, as well as executive business reviews and bundle discounts on additional features.
- Optional Add-ons: Zoom offers the following a la carte add-ons:
- Extra cloud recording storage for about $40 per month
- 323/SIP Room Connector starting at $49 per month
- Join by Zoom Rooms starting at $49 per month
- Call Me starting at $100 per month
- Video Webinars starting at $40 per month
Both Microsoft Teams and Zoom offer a range of features and functions for your business communications. Choosing the best one doesn’t need to be difficult. DGI can help your business choose the video conferencing software to take your productivity to the next level.
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