Google Meet vs Zoom

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.

Zoom

Capacity is published per plan — 100, 100 and 300 participants, webinars at 500, and an add-on path to 5,000 — and breakout rooms are documented down to roles, preassignment and help requests, which is what I want to see rather than promises. Waiting rooms and a mandatory minimum security option are enforced even at the API level, and live streaming is stated. What I found no public information on is adaptive quality under load, hardware room-system support, or diagnostics an admin can read after a bad call.

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.

Zoom

The documented mechanism is TLS 1.2 with 256-bit AES-GCM, per-meeting passcodes, waiting rooms and authenticated-only join, and the API overwrites requests that try to strip every security option — a forced minimum is good engineering. But the captured browser matrix marks end-to-end encryption as not supported across all browsers, and I found no public information on an end-to-end option for meetings, key handling, or a plain statement of what Zoom can see of meeting media; the privacy pages do show account owners and Zoom accessing chat and email content.

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.

Zoom

Browser joining is the strongest thing here: the web client feature set is the baseline, live transcription and translation are listed across all captured browsers, and 720p send on mobile browsers is specified by OS version down to iOS 16.4 and Android Chrome 112. However, component view is not supported on mobile or tablet browsers at all, and I found no public information on telephone dial-in, keyboard or screen-reader testing, or documented behaviour on poor connections.

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.

Zoom

There is a recording notification in the terms, a delete-after-a-specified-number-of-days setting, host start/pause/stop control, and a bring-your-own-storage option that puts the files in the customer's own S3 bucket — that last one a works council can live with. I found no public information on the storage region for Zoom-held recordings, a consent prompt, an audit trail of recording access, or independent switches for transcription and analytics.

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.

Zoom

The developer surface is broad: calendar APIs with ACL management, meeting create and update APIs, embeddable web SDKs, recording and transcript webhooks, OpenAPI downloads, client libraries, plus SSO and managed domains from the Business tier. I found no public information on SCIM provisioning, hardware room-system support, or any self-hosted or private-cloud deployment — everything captured runs in Zoom's cloud.

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.

Zoom

The contracting entity is Zoom Communications, Inc. of San Jose with the Data Protection Officer at the same address, enforcement sits with the Federal Trade Commission, and transfers to Europe rely on standard contractual clauses and the Data Privacy Framework — a US arrangement end to end. The captured pages leave media and metadata residency unstated and name no subprocessors beyond a generic mention of third-party providers, so we found no public information a European buyer could verify against.

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.

Zoom

Per-host prices are public with billing period and VAT treatment stated — €13.33 and €17.49 per user per month billed annually excluding VAT, a free tier with its 40-minute and 100-participant limits, 10 GB cloud storage per licence, and a large-meeting add-on from €46.50 for 500 participants. But that add-on is priced only from a floor, I found no public information on dial-in rates or the subscription term length, and the captured pages give different signals on AI cost — a no-extra-cost claim on the homepage beside per-feature charges in the developer documentation.