We Compared Google Meet and Zoom — Here's Our Verdict

Our verdict: Google Meet is better for companies that are deeply integrated with Google Workspace and need an easy integration with other Google tools, while Zoom is better for organizations that want more advanced features, setup optionsб and flexibility.

Both Google Meet and Zoom offer advanced features like breakout rooms, whiteboards, chat, and live captions. But Google Meet’s setup process is simpler and slightly more user-friendly, while Zoom offers more collaboration tools and third-party integrations.

• Verdict
• Summary
• What is Google Meet?
• What is Zoom Meeting?
• Feature Comparison
• Pricing and Plans
• Pros and Cons
• Alternatives

Google Meet vs. Zoom: Summary

In the table below, we compare Google Meet and Zoom across 8 critical metrics.

We Recommend Google Meet if You Need:

• Easy meeting setup: Google Meet’s interface makes it easy to initiate and share instant meetings, or set them up for later

• Cost-effective video meetings: It offers a wide suite of useful collaborative tools–like whiteboards, chat, and captions–at a cost-effective rate

• Collaborative whiteboards: Meet integrates seamlessly with Google Jamboard, enabling up to 100 participants to ideate and draw during meetings or asynchronously

We Recommend Zoom if You Need:

• Advanced collaboration features: Zoom Meeting includes advanced collaborative tools like waiting rooms, live captions that translate into multiple languages, and interactive avatars
• Education or performance use cases: Zoom offers integrated apps and advanced audio options that cater to teachers, musicians, and other performers
• Live streaming: Zoom Meeting includes live streaming and webinars on all plans except the free one, while Google Meet only includes live streams on the Enterprise plan

What is Google Meet?

Google Meet is Google’s video conferencing platform, capable of supporting up to 500 participants for 24 hours. Included with Google Workspace, the video meeting platform includes a variety of collaborative tools like digital whiteboards, polling, real-time captions, breakout rooms, and live streaming.

Users can call into Google Meet’s HD-video conferences from a local or international number, or join from any device–computer or mobile.

What is Zoom Meeting?

Zoom Meeting is Zoom’s video conferencing solution, which supports up to 300 attendees for 30-hour meetings. Part of the Zoom One app, Zoom Meeting includes collaborative functionality like co-annotation, multi-party screen-sharing, waiting rooms, filters, spotlighting, live streaming, and captions with translations.

Schedule and invite users from within the Zoom One app. Participants can join directly from the invite link from desktop or mobile, without needing to download anything.

Google Meet vs. Zoom: Feature Comparison

Below, we compare Google Meet vs. Zoom across key video-meeting features.

• Accessibility and limits
• Scheduling and setup
• Collaboration tools
• Meeting management and host controls
• Digital whiteboard
• Live streaming and webinars
• Reporting
• Integrations

Accessibility and Limits

Summary: Zoom supports a longer meeting duration than Google Meet, but Google holds more participants. Users can join either platform from a mobile or desktop, or dial in from a phone.

Shared Features

• Any-device accessibility: Participants and invitees can access Google or Zoom meetings from a web browser like Google Chrome, desktop, or mobile devices like iOS or Android
• No app required: Join meetings on either app simply by clicking a link or visiting the app’s website. Download the Google Meet or Zoom app but can also access meetings without downloading anything.
• Meeting call-in: Call into a meeting from a local or international number, for audio-only access
• Free version: Both providers offer a free version that anyone can use to host meetings. Zoom’s free version has a 40-minute time limit but supports 100 participants, while Google Meet’s free version supports 100 participants for up to one hour.

Differences

• Time limit: Google Meet has a 24-hour time limit, while Zoom has a 30-hour time limit
• Participant capacity: Each plan has a distinct participant capacity, but Google Meet generally holds more. Zoom supports 100 participants on Basic, 100 on Pro, 300 on Business and Business Plus, and 500 on Enterprise. Google Meet supports 100 on Starter, 150 on Standard, 500 in Business Plus, and 1000 on Enterprise.

Scheduling and Setup

Summary: Google Meet provides a quicker and more convenient way to start instant meetings, while Zoom offers more detailed scheduling options and integrations. Overall, both providers offer a simplified scheduling process that integrates with popular calendars and generates easily accessible meeting links.

Shared Features

• Instantaneous video meetings: Within the Zoom or Google Meet app, users can initiate and join ad-hoc video meetings. Zoom users can schedule instant meetings in the Schedule tab, and Google Meet users can simply click the New Meeting button.
• Meeting scheduling: Both platforms enable you to schedule future video meetings with custom details–title, date and time, attendees, description, and notifications.
• Invite links: Once you schedule a video call on either platform, the software generates a unique invite code that you can email or text to any invitee, for them to join the meeting instantly
• Calendaring: Both platforms schedule future group meetings in each participant’s calendar apps, including the join link and automatic notifications beforehand. Both apps sync with popular calendar apps like Google Calendars and Microsoft Outlook

Differences

• Setup customization options: While Google Meet offers just basic scheduling tools, Zoom offers more advanced customization options during meeting setup–time zones, custom passcodes, waiting room on or off, participant video restrictions, audio options, and muting participants upon entry.
• Instant meeting setup: Google Meet’s home screen generates ad hoc invite links instantaneously with one click. While Zoom’s process is still very easy, it requires you to spend a few more clicks toggling through setup options.

Collaboration Tools

Summary: Zoom and Google Meet both include dozens of collaboration and engagement tools like breakout rooms, polls, file sharing, and chat. However, Zoom offers a few extra advanced features like co-annotation, custom avatars, and rich message formatting in chat.

Shared Features

• Breakout rooms: Split the larger team meeting into smaller sub-groups, enabling more privacy and encouraging more discussion. Meeting hosts can choose the number of groups and assign participants manually or randomly.
• Hand raising: Participants can raise their hand during a discussion, which displays a hand symbol on their screen and pings the speaker
• Emoji reactions: Respond to chat messages with an emoji, or send an emoji via video to the whole group in a similar style to hand raising
• Chat with file sharing: Each meeting has a running chat box on the right-hand side, where users can send files and documents. Participate in a meeting-wide chat or send direct messages to individual participants
• Screen sharing and multi-share: One or multiple participants can share their screen with the whole group, choosing a particular window or sharing the whole screen
• Polls and quizzes: Hosts can create short-answer or multiple-choice questions before or during virtual meetings, delivering them to participants live. Record responses, which is useful for team feedback or as a teacher’s assessment
• Filters: Users can select camera filters and digital characters, which move in real-time along with the actual participant’s video

Differences

• Co-annotation: Zoom Meetings uniquely include co-annotation, which allows participants to draw and annotate their shared screen while presenting to the group
• Custom avatars: Zoom meeting participants can customize their own avatars–digital characters that mimic the user’s actual movements
• Rich formatting in chat: Zoom chat supports rich formatting. Users can blog, italicize, or underline their text. Adjust text size and color, send links, or use a bulleted list.
• Emoji selection: While both Zoom and Google Meet support emoji responses, Zoom enables participants to choose from a much wider variety of emojis. Zoom supports over 100 emojis while Google Meet supports around a dozen.

Meeting Management and Host Controls

Summary: Both Zoom and Google Meet include several meeting-management tools, including meeting recording, video locking and muting, and live captions with translations into different languages. However, Zoom offers a wider array of translated languages and a useful waiting room feature.

Shared Features

• Live captions: AI automatically translates meeting audio in real time, providing a running transcript that users can turn on and off. Even live streams can have captions, on either platform.

• Caption translation: On Enterprise plans, translate captions into multiple languages in real time. The video conferencing software can translate captions spoken in non-English languages into other non-English languages.

• Lock video and audio: Hosts can lock the screens and audio levels for participants in the meeting, preventing them from adjusting these

• Mute participants and turn off video: Hosts can mute and unmute any participant, or turn their video on or off

• Co-hosts: Hosts can appoint co-hosts, who can share all hosting duties during and before meetings

• Recording: Record meetings manually or automatically. Download and store recordings on your device, or store them in the cloud. Each plan offers a preset limit for cloud storage.

• Attendance tracking: Hosts can view reports with information about who attended each meeting and the duration of their attendance. The system tracks attendance for meetings and live streams.
• Manage who can join meetings: Hosts can block certain groups from entering the meeting, such as anonymous users. Use the waiting room to filter unwanted attendees, or manually remove participants from a meeting.

Differences

• Waiting room: Zoom meetings have the option for a waiting room–a holding area for new participants joining the meeting until the host manually lets them in. Hosts can turn this feature on or off.
• Pin or spotlight: multiple people: Zoom hosts can pin or spotlight multiple meeting participants so that their screens occupy primary display visibility even if they’re not speaking
• Translated caption languages: Google Meet translates captions into French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Zoom translates captions into 21 languages.

Display, Video, and Audio

Summary: Both Zoom and Google Meet support HD audio and HD video up to 1080p, along with customizable tile displays and background noise cancellation. Zoom has a slight advantage with high sample rate audio settings for musical performances.

Shared Features

• Layout and view options: Both solutions support multiple types of video layouts. Auto displays 9 participant tiles. Tiled displays up to 49 participants on screen at once. Spotlight fills the whole screen with the active speaker. A sidebar displays the speaker as the main image, with thumbnails on the side for additional participants.
• HD video and audio: Both Google Meet and Zoom support HD audio and HD video, with the option for 720p or 1080p video resolution
• Noise cancellation: Video automatically accentuates the speaker’s voice and reduces echo, ambient noise, and other unwanted background noise like typing or dogs barking
• Virtual backgrounds: Blur your background, select a picture, or choose a present virtual background. The image automatically covers your video background and displays behind the speaker.
• Appearance touch-up: A setting that allows users to adjust lighting and fix skin blemishes, improving appearance

Differences

• Original sound for musicians: Zoom offers professional audio settings with an extra high sample rate, for sound-intensive use cases like musical performances

Digital Whiteboard

Summary: Google and Zoom both offer virtual whiteboard tools for teams to sketch and collaborate in real time. Google Jamboards supports 50 users with easy email invites, and it utilizes image-recognition technology. Zoom whiteboards support 100 users and integrate seamlessly with chat.

Shared Features

• Text box: Type into a text box, customizing font and size
• Insert images: Copy and paste images
• Resize text and images: Use your fingers or mouse to manually move and resize images on your board
• Sticky notes: Create, organize, and move sticky notes for ideation
• Drawing and highlighting: Use various sizes of pens and markers to draw or highlight
• Colors: Draw, type, and highlight in a color of your choosing, with the option to customize colors
• Templates: Begin your whiteboard by choosing from a range of templates organized and pre-designed for different purposes–brainstorming, meetings, venn diagrams, and more
• Asynchronous: Zoom and Google users can edit whiteboards asynchronously, even when not in a live meeting

Differences

• Collaborator capacity: Zoom whiteboards support 100 simultaneous users, while Google jams only support 50
• Sharing in chat: Zoom One users can easily share whiteboards in team chat, while Google users can invite other participants to join a Jamboard via email
• Image recognition technology: Google jamboards utilize image-recognition technology that detects the image you’re trying to draw–such as a tiger, a book, or a hand–and neatens the drawing

Live Streaming and Webinars

Summary: Both Zoom and Google Meet support interactive webinars and live streaming across popular third-party platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. Zoom offers streaming on all plans except the free version, while Google Meet reserves it for the Enterprise plan.

Shared Features

• Multiple platforms: Use either platform to live-stream video meetings across multiple popular platforms–Twitch, Facebook, YouTube, Workplace, or a custom site

• Q&A: Embed bidirectional Q&As where the host can pose questions to the audience, and the audience can respond or ask questions of their own. Live stream moderators can filter audience messages before they reach the larger group.

• Reports and attendance tracking: Both video conferencing tools track audience attendance. While they don’t record attendees’ names, they do track the size of your audience throughout the meeting.

• Meeting features and host controls: Retain full access to host controls and meeting features like polls, screen sharing, and virtual backgrounds. Audience participants–even those viewing the live stream–can participate in a chat.
• Scheduling: Create events and generate shareable links to book your live stream or webinar on Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook

Differences

• Pricing tier availability: Zoom offers live streams on all plans except for the free version. On the other hand, Google Meet only offers live streaming with the Enterprise plan.

Reporting

Summary: Google Meet and Zoom Meeting both offer usage reports and attendance tracking. However, Zoom makes reports slightly more accessible by offering them on all paid plans while Google Meet only includes them on the two highest-tier plans.

Shared Features

• Attendance tracking and usage reports: Google Meet and Zoom log attendance at all meetings, providing a record for each meeting along with its minutes, time and date, and a full list of attendees. Hosts can view and search these logs afterward.
• Live stream reports: Both solutions track webinar history, including the total number of attendees who joined each live stream

Differences

• Pricing tier availability: Zoom includes reporting and attendance tracking on all plans except the free one, while Google Meet only includes it on the Business Plus and Enterprise plans

Integrations

Summary: Zoom Meetings offers over 1000 integrations, including 50 in-meeting integrations that maximize engagement. While Google Meet integrates with Google Workspace apps and supports SDKs for their webinars, Google’s integration offering pales in comparison with Zoom’s.

Shared Integrations

• Live stream SDK: Both Zoom Meeting and Google Meet offer software development kits (SDKs) that enable you to embed live streams into a custom domain, website, or app
• Calendar integrations: Both meeting platforms integrate with popular calendar apps–like Google Calendar and Outlook

Differences

• App offerings: Google Meet does not support any built-in apps, requiring Zapier to connect with apps like Slack, Zoho, Asana, Microsoft Teams, and more. Zoom supports over 1000 integrations, including in-meeting software and connections to CRM and messaging tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, and many more.
• Live-meeting integrations: Zoom offers 50 live in-meeting integrations, including engaging polling and games apps like Kahoot and Mentimeter.

Google Meet vs. Zoom: Pricing and Plans

Summary: Both Zoom and Google Meet are included in larger software packages– Zoom One and Google Workspace. Zoom One and Workspace cost between $6 and $25 monthly per user, but both offer free versions. Google Meet is generally cheaper but offers fewer features on each plan than does Zoom Meeting.

Google Meet Pricing

Google Meet offers a free version and four paid versions, which are each embedded into a larger Google Workspace subscription. Each Google Workspace pricing plan adds advanced features not only for Meet, but Google Drive, Gmail, Google Docs and Sheets, Jamboard, Chat, and more.

Google Meet plans:

• Free: Supports 24-hour one-on-one meetings and one-hour meetings for up to 100 participants. Includes host controls, screen sharing, chat, emoji reactions, and virtual backgrounds.
• Business Starter ($6 monthly per user): Supports 100 participants with a 24-hour time limit, US and international dial-in numbers, and digital whiteboarding with Jamboard.
• Business Standard ($12 monthly): Supports 150 participants and adds noise cancellation, polling and Q&A, moderation controls, hand raising, and breakout rooms.
• Business Plus ($18 monthly): Supports 500 participants and adds attendance tracking
• Enterprise: Supports 1000 participants and adds live streaming

Zoom Pricing

Zoom Meetings come as part of the Zoom One bundle, which also includes chat, calendaring, and Zoom Phone on the Business Plus plan. Like Google Meet, Zoom Meetings offers a free version, which supports up to 100 participants for a 40-minute meeting.

Zoom Meeting plans:

• Basic (free): 40-minute meetings for up to 100 participants, team chat, 3 basic whiteboards, host controls, automated captions, screen sharing, virtual backgrounds co-annotation, waiting room, and breakout rooms.
• Pro ($15.99 monthly per user): Expands to a 30-hour meeting time limit and adds polling, streaming, reporting, and advanced sound for musicians
• Business ($19.99 monthly): Expands to 300-participant capacity, adds recording transcripts and admin portal

• Business Plus ($25 monthly): Adds translated captions and 5 TB extra storage
• Enterprise (custom pricing): Supports up to 500 or 1000 meeting participants, with unlimited storage

Pros and Cons Comparison

Alternatives to Google Meet And Zoom

Still can’t decide between Google Meet vs Zoom?

One of the below Meet and Zoom alternatives may be a better fit.