Google Meet vs Zoom

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.

Zoom

Breakout rooms are documented in real depth — five distinct roles, preassignment, timers, broadcast, help requests — and capacities are published per tier, from 100 and 300 participants up to an add-on reaching 5,000, with webinars at 500. Waiting rooms, passcodes and authenticated-only joining are enforced, with a waiting room switched on automatically when nothing else is set. We found no public information on adaptive bitrate, on what the call does on a constrained connection beyond a stated requirement of quality network connections for 1080p, or on diagnostics an admin could read after a bad call.

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.

Zoom

Transport security is documented as TLS 1.2 with 256-bit AES-GCM, and meeting entry is gated by a passcode, the waiting room, or authenticated-only joining, with the waiting room enabled automatically when no security option is provided. The privacy statement is candid that account owners can read message content unless Advanced Chat Encryption is on, which is at least a plain statement about vendor-side visibility. We found no public information on end-to-end encryption for meetings beyond browser support tables that mark it with a cross in every browser listed, and no documentation of key handling.

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.

Zoom

Live transcription and live translation are marked supported in every browser in the support tables, so a deaf colleague can genuinely follow the meeting, and browser joining is claimed at full feature parity with the web client, including Chromebooks. Remote control is marked with a cross in all browsers and component view is desktop-only, which narrows who can fully run a session from the browser. We found no public information on telephone dial-in, keyboard operation, screen-reader testing, or any published accessibility conformance report — and an accessibility posture without a report is marketing, not accessibility.

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.

Zoom

Participants are notified when recording is enabled, hosts can start, pause and stop, retention can be set to delete cloud recordings after a stated number of days, and Bring Your Own Storage puts the files in the customer's own S3 bucket with Zoom holding only metadata — a real answer to where a recording lives. Transcripts and AI summaries arrive as their own files with their own endpoints. We found no public information on the storage region for Zoom-held cloud recordings, on encryption of recordings at rest, on access logging, or on organisation-wide switches for attendance and analytics features.

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.

Zoom

The API surface is serious: documented meeting create and update endpoints, calendar APIs with access-control roles, OpenAPI and Postman downloads, recording and transcript webhooks, OAuth sample tooling, and embeddable web SDKs, with SSO and managed domains arriving at the Business tier. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning, on room-system support, or on any self-hosted or private-cloud deployment, so the vendor's cloud is the only evidenced mode of running it.

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.

Zoom

The contracting entity is Zoom Communications, Inc. of San Jose, and the captured pages give no information on where media or metadata are processed; the only subprocessor statement is a generic reference to third-party service providers. Cross-border transfers are covered by the Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses, which legitimise exports rather than establish EU processing. Weighted heavily as this buyer weighs it, a non-EU entity with unstated media routing and unnamed subprocessors sits at the bottom of the scale.

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.

Zoom

Headline prices are public with billing period and VAT treatment stated — "€13.33 /user per month" and "€17.49 /user per month", both "billed annually" and excluding VAT — alongside capacity limits and 10 GB cloud storage per user. But the large-meeting add-on is quoted only "From €46.50 for 500 participants per month", cloud recording and AI summary each incur a separate charge under a credit-plan subscription whose pricing sits on a separate page, and we found no public information on dial-in rates or storage overage. The annual invoice for a real host count is not computable from these pages alone.