Google Meet vs Zoom

Google Meet

Capacity is genuinely published — 100 to 1000 participants depending on plan, 24-hour meetings, noise cancellation from Standard, in-domain live streaming at Enterprise. But the evidence never mentions a screen share, a breakout room, a mute control or what happens when half my class joins on a weak mobile signal, and anchor five requires exactly those — so I stop just under it.

Zoom

Breakout rooms are documented in real depth — five distinct roles, pre-assignment, broadcast into rooms, help requests, timed close — and capacity is published per plan, from 100 participants up to a 5,000-participant add-on, with webinars at 500 and RTMP live streaming and live transcription in the browser. What holds it back for a class where half the room is on a phone: I found no public information on adaptive quality or behaviour on a weak connection, and none on per-participant moderation, layout control, or diagnostics after a bad call.

Google Meet

Judged on documented mechanism, and the evidence documents none: the privacy policy never states what is encrypted, against whom, or who holds keys. No fact names a lobby, a passcode or host-controlled admission either; the closest things are Enterprise DLP and context-aware access, which are directory rules, not meeting encryption — silence lands at the bottom.

Zoom

Transport security is concrete — TLS 1.2 with 256-bit AES-GCM — and admission is thought through: passcode, waiting room and authenticated-only joining, with the waiting room auto-enabled when no other security option is set and the requirement locked for smaller account types. The captured browser pages show end-to-end encryption as not supported in any listed browser, and I found no public information on encryption at rest, key handling, or a plain statement of what the vendor can see in meeting media.

Google Meet

Nothing on the evidence says a student can join from a browser without installing anything, join as a guest without an account, dial in by phone, or get live captions — the plan tables list participant counts and AI add-ons and stop there. The single reach-adjacent fact is 'real-time speech translation' sold as a paid add-on, which is not captions and not included. By the anchors, silence on all of this is the bottom, not the middle.

Zoom

The no-install story is the strong half: browser joining carries the same features as the web client, Chromebooks and Windows tablets behave like desktops, mobile browsers follow the supported OS versions, and live transcription and translation are ticked for every browser — nobody misses a caption. For the people on a phone in a dead spot, though, I found no public information on dial-in, on behaviour at low bandwidth, on guests joining without an account, or on any accessibility statement or screen-reader testing.

Google Meet

Recording arrives at Standard and attendance tracking at Plus, Vault gives admins retain/archive/search, and domain admins can restrict some settings — real tooling. But no fact says who may record, whether the room is told, where the recording is stored, or for how long it lives, and nothing says attendance tracking can be switched off for a works council. That is anchor three's shape: the feature exists, the governance is manual and unstated.

Zoom

Recording is host-controlled, a notification is promised when it starts, sessions can be set to delete automatically after a specified number of days, and Bring Your Own Storage can keep the files in your own bucket instead of the vendor's — the first two things a works council asks about are at least present. We found no public information on where vendor-stored recordings are kept, on encryption at rest for them, on who accessed them, or on a separate retention rule for transcripts.

Google Meet

Room hardware exists as a separately sold add-on, and Plus brings Secure LDAP, endpoint management and Vault — genuine stack presence. But the evidence documents no calendar integration, no SSO mechanism, no API, and no way to run the product anywhere but Google's cloud; anchor five needs the first three of those, so I sit just under it.

Zoom

The developer surface is real and well documented: meeting scheduling APIs, calendar APIs with an OpenAPI download and Postman collection, recording and transcript webhooks, and embeddable SDKs for web and mobile, with SSO and managed domains arriving on the Business plan. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning, hardware room-system support, or any self-hosted or private-cloud deployment, and the recording webhooks are noted as limited to universal credit accounts.

Google Meet

The pipeline computes 0/10 and I mostly agree: provenance is Google LLC in California, the UK controller is Google LLC in Mountain View, media routing and data residency are unknown, and the only named subprocessors are 'affiliates and other trusted businesses'. The slivers are Google Ireland Limited as controller for EEA users and 'enterprise data regions' locked behind the unpriced Enterprise tier — a crack of light, not a guarantee, and I weigh this heavily.

Zoom

The contracting entity is Zoom Communications, Inc. of San Jose, California, with the Federal Trade Commission named as the enforcer of its Data Privacy Framework commitments; nothing in the captured pages confirms EU residency for media or storage, and we found no public information naming the third-party service providers that carry the traffic. Standard contractual clauses, DPF certifications and an EU representative in Cork paper the transfers, but an EU representative is not EU hosting, and for a buyer who weighs this heavily that decides it.

Google Meet

Per-user euro prices, billing period, the 16% annual discount, participant caps and pooled storage allowances are public per plan — better than most. But Enterprise, the only tier with 1000 participants and streaming, is 'Let's talk', every add-on is 'sold separately' and unpriced, and dial-in and VAT treatment are unmentioned — a school with 301 teachers cannot compute its annual invoice from these pages.

Zoom

Per-host prices are public with billing period and VAT treatment stated — "€13.33 /user per month · billed annually‡· excludes VAT" on Pro, €17.49 on Business — alongside capacity limits and 10 GB cloud storage per user, and a large-meeting add-on "From €46.50 for 500 participants per month". I still could not compute a full annual invoice: dial-in rates, the cloud-recording storage plan and the separate charges for AI summaries and extra recording file options are not quantified on the captured pages.