Google Meet vs Wire

Google Meet

Capacity is published per plan — 100 to 1,000 participants, 24-hour meetings, in-domain streaming and a hardware add-on — but the evidence says nothing about screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation, waiting rooms, or behaviour on a bad connection. I cannot credit meeting controls I cannot read, so this sits between the low-limit and most-teams anchors.

Wire

Video conferences are stated up to 150 participants with instant meetings and file sharing, and guest links can carry passwords, but I found no public information on breakout rooms, host moderation such as mute-all, screen sharing as distinct from file sharing, or what happens to the call on a constrained connection. Workable at team scale, undemonstrated under load.

Google Meet

Neither the privacy policy nor the pricing page documents any encryption mechanism, key handling, lobby or host admission for meetings — not even a TLS statement. Undocumented is the anchor's own word for zero.

Wire

The strongest area by far: messages, calls, video and files are end-to-end encrypted by default under Messaging Layer Security with TreeKEM, forward secrecy and post-compromise security; the code is fully open source on GitHub and independently audited; participants verify each other through device fingerprints and ID Shield ties identities to the customer's own identity provider; and the vendor states plainly it has no access to encryption keys and uses no backdoors. Guests join through password-protected links that administrators can restrict.

Google Meet

No dial-in, no live captions, no keyboard or screen-reader testing, and no accessibility statement or conformance report anywhere; the only caption-adjacent fact is 'real-time speech translation' buried in an unpriced AI add-on. On this evidence a deaf colleague cannot run the meeting and a screen-reader user's experience is a guess.

Wire

The only reach item evidenced is guest access by password-protected link; I found no public information on browser joining without an install, telephone dial-in, live captions, keyboard operation, screen-reader testing, or a published accessibility conformance report. On this evidence a deaf colleague cannot follow a Wire meeting and a screen-reader user cannot run one — silence is a marketing page, not a conformance report.

Google Meet

Recording arrives as a Standard-plan feature with pooled storage, but who may record, whether participants are told, where recordings sit and how long they live are all unstated, and attendance tracking is sold as an upsold feature with no documented off-switch for a works council. Account-level deletion tools exist, but nothing recording-specific.

Wire

I found no public information on recordings at all — who may record, whether participants are told, where recordings are stored, how long they live — and nothing about recordings or transcripts appears in the admin console's policy list. General retention hygiene exists, with logs kept at most 90 days, encrypted messages deleted after delivery, and analytics self-hosted in the EU, but none of it speaks to the recording question a works council will ask.

Google Meet

The evidence evidences identity hooks (Secure LDAP, Cloud Identity Premium) and a Meet hardware add-on, but no calendar fact, no documented API, no SCIM or SDK, and no deployment option other than Google's cloud.

Wire

SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, an open-source SDK in JavaScript, TypeScript and on the JVM, webhooks through the GitHub sample app, first-party apps and a marketplace announced for late 2025 add up to a real platform, and a genuine on-premises deployment is supported with Messaging Layer Security applying across both cloud and on-premises. I found no public information on calendar integration for the major suites or room-system support, which meeting buyers reach for first.

Google Meet

The vendor is Google LLC of Mountain View; the policy names Google Ireland Ltd as EEA controller and only 'affiliates and trusted businesses' as subprocessors, while media routing and residency are unstated and data regions are an Enterprise upsell. Non-EU vendor, unstated regions, unnamed subprocessors is the zero anchor, softened one point for the Irish controller.

Wire

Servers sit in Germany and Ireland, the subprocessor list is published with AWS named for EU hosting and Stripe as the single USA-located entry, and transfer safeguards are documented; the security pages state server locations without naming the hosting provider, while the privacy policy's subprocessor list names AWS. The contracting entity is Wire Swiss GmbH in Zug rather than an EU entity, with Wire Germany GmbH appointed only as the GDPR Article 27 representative — close, but the anchor weight of that gap keeps this below the top band.

Google Meet

Three tiers carry public per-user prices with billing period, capacity limits and pooled storage allowances, so a buyer can compute much of the invoice for up to 300 users. But Enterprise is 'Let's talk', every add-on is 'sold separately' with no price, and dial-in rates and VAT treatment are absent — the anchors call that an unpriced hole, not a complete picture.

Wire

Per-person prices are public with the billing period stated — €7.45 per person/month on annual payment or €8.94 per person/month monthly for teams up to 100 people, with video capacity published at 150 participants — but Enterprise above 100 people is custom-priced only. I found no public information on dial-in rates, recording storage, VAT treatment or minimum term, so a small buyer can compute their invoice while a larger one cannot.