Google Meet vs Wire

Google Meet

Published capacity I can actually plan against — 100/150/500/1000 participants per plan, 24-hour meetings, in-domain streaming at Enterprise, and a hardware add-on for rooms. But the evidence is silent on moderation controls, waiting rooms, breakouts, behaviour on a bad connection, and any diagnostics an admin can read after a call fails — and I judge a product by its worst meeting, not the capacity slide.

Wire

Published capacity exists — video conferences up to 150 participants, with chat groups up to 2,000 under MLS — but that is where the published meeting story ends. We found no public information on screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation controls, behaviour on a constrained connection, or diagnostics an administrator can read after a bad call. When the board meeting stutters I have nothing published to hold the vendor to.

Google Meet

The vendor's own captured pages document no encryption mechanism for meetings whatsoever — not transport, not key handling, not E2E — while the privacy policy instead documents voice/audio collection and AI training on user interactions. The only access evidence is Enterprise context-aware access via Cloud Identity Premium; no lobby, no per-meeting policy, and no statement of who can technically see media.

Wire

End-to-end encryption covers text, voice, video and files by default, built on MLS with TreeKEM, forward secrecy and post-compromise security, with the code 100 per cent open source and independently audited. The vendor states plainly it has no access to encryption keys and uses no backdoors, device fingerprints and ID Shield verify participants, and guest links are password-gated with admin-side restriction. This is the rare product where the cryptography is a published engineering standard rather than a marketing word.

Google Meet

For a product of this scale, the evidence says nothing about browser joining, guest access without an account, dial-in, captions, or any accessibility statement — the closest item is a separately sold Voice telephony add-on that is not meeting dial-in. When the question is whether everyone can get in, total silence is the answer; I cannot even confirm a guest joins without an account.

Wire

Guests can join by password-protected link without an account, and an account runs on up to 8 devices. We found no public information on joining from a browser, telephone dial-in, live captions, keyboard or screen-reader support, an accessibility statement, or low-bandwidth behaviour — so I cannot tell the regional manager on a train what their meeting will look like.

Google Meet

Recording arrives at Standard, Vault can retain and archive at Plus, and Enterprise names data regions plus an Assured Controls add-on — but nothing states who may record, whether participants are told, where Meet recordings are stored, or who accessed them. Attendance tracking appears at Plus with no documented off-switch, which is exactly what a works council will ask me to disable and I cannot evidence that I can.

Wire

We found no public information on meeting recording at all — who may record, whether participants are told, where recordings are stored, or how long they live. The surrounding data hygiene is real and published: logs held at most 90 days, usage data deleted after 365 days, encrypted messages deleted after delivery, and an admin console that can restrict file sharing and guest links. But for the works council question of switching recording and analytics off, I have nothing published to answer with.

Google Meet

Identity plumbing is real — Secure LDAP at Plus, Cloud Identity Premium and context-aware access at Enterprise — and room hardware exists as a separately sold add-on. But there is no documented API, no SCIM, webhooks or SDK, and it is cloud-only with no deployment alternative at any price or tier.

Wire

SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, and a genuine on-premises deployment with MLS protection stated across both cloud and on-premises versions — that deployment freedom is exactly what I want. The SDK ships with documentation, sample apps and webhooks, though it runs on the JVM today with TypeScript on the roadmap, and the marketplace is dated as coming in late 2025, so parts are promised rather than shipped. We found no public information on calendar integration or hardware room-system support, which is where a board's meeting calendar actually lives.

Google Meet

Provenance puts the vendor in Mountain View, and Google Ireland Limited appears only as the EEA controller — UK users get Google LLC in California. Subprocessors are named only as 'affiliates and other trusted businesses', media routing and data residency are unstated, and the pipeline scored this 0; nothing on these pages moves me far off that.

Wire

Servers sit in Germany and Ireland, the subprocessor list is published with locations, and the one US processor — Stripe for payments — is named together with standard contractual clauses and adequacy safeguards. But the contracting entity is Wire Swiss GmbH in Zug, outside the EU with Wire Germany GmbH designated only as Article 27 representative, and the captured pages give different levels of detail on hosting: the privacy policy's subprocessor list attributes EU hosting to AWS while the security pages give only the provider's certifications without naming it, leaving Cloud Act exposure through that provider unresolvable from public pages.

Google Meet

Per-user prices, billing period, the 16% annual-commitment maths, capacity per plan, meeting length, storage allowances and even promo limits are public — a small-tier invoice is computable. But Enterprise is 'Let's talk', add-ons are sold separately without prices, and dial-in rates and VAT treatment are absent, so the buyer at the size that matters most cannot compute their invoice.

Wire

Per-person prices are public with the billing period stated — €7.45 per person/month with annual payment, €8.94 per person/month with monthly payment, for teams up to 100 people, with video conferences capped at 150 participants and chat limits given per tier. Enterprise above 100 people is custom pricing, and we found no public information on VAT treatment or minimum term. A small buyer can roughly compute the bill; an enterprise buyer is back in a sales conversation.