Google Meet vs Zoom

Google Meet

The capacity ladder is the one thing the evidence commits to per plan — 100, 150, 500, 1000 participants, 24-hour meetings on every tier, in-domain live streaming on Enterprise. Beyond that, nothing: no screen sharing, no breakout rooms, no host moderation, no word on behaviour when the connection degrades — capacity is claimed, the meeting's workings are not.

Zoom

Capacity is published per plan — 100 participants on Basic and Pro, 300 on Business, a paid add-on reaching 5,000, webinars at 500 — and breakout rooms are documented down to five roles, timers, preassignment and help requests, with waiting rooms, passcodes and authenticated-only joining enforced at the API level. What keeps this out of the top band: I found no public information on per-participant moderation detail, simulcast or adaptive bitrate under load, or what happens to the call on a constrained connection.

Google Meet

I read every line for the sentence that says which meetings are end-to-end encrypted, on which plan, and what stops working — it does not exist, and neither does a plain TLS or encryption-at-rest claim for Meet media. DLP, context-aware access and endpoint management on Enterprise are admin security, not meeting encryption; on this sheet encryption is undocumented.

Zoom

The sentence I always look for — which meetings, on which plan, get end-to-end encryption, with what turned off — does not exist in the captured pages; the browser support tables mark end-to-end encryption with a cross in every browser listed, and the only mechanism stated is TLS 1.2 with 256-bit AES-GCM. Access control is genuinely strong: per-meeting passcode, waiting room, authenticated-only joining, and the API overwrites any request that tries to disable all three. But the privacy statement only admits operator-side visibility for chat and email content, and I found no public information on at-rest encryption for meeting media or on key handling.

Google Meet

The evidence never says how a person actually joins a Meet: no browser joining, no guest links, no dial-in numbers, no captions, no accessibility statement — the entire reach question is silent. The only adjacent items are separately sold add-ons, a business telephony product and an AI add-on mentioning real-time speech translation, which is not dial-in or captions.

Zoom

Browser joining is documented as feature-equivalent to the web client across Chrome, Edge and Safari with a stated two-version support window, and live transcription, live translation and RTMP streaming are marked available on every browser, mobile browsers included from iOS 16.4 and Android Chrome 112. I found no public information on telephone dial-in, on guests joining without an account, on keyboard and screen-reader testing, or on an accessibility conformance report — half of what this criterion asks for is simply absent from the captured pages.

Google Meet

Recording exists from Standard upward and Plus adds attendance tracking, but the evidence never says who may record, whether participants are told, or where recordings are stored — pooled Drive allowances of 30 GB to 5 TB per user are stated and never tied to recordings. Retention appears only as Vault archival tooling and an Enterprise 'Assured Controls' add-on; no recording-specific retention rule, access log, or consent prompt, and no statement that attendance tracking can be switched off.

Zoom

Recording comes with a stated visual-or-otherwise notification, a delete-after-a-specified-number-of-days retention setting, and a bring-your-own-storage option that puts the files in the customer's own S3 bucket — the one real governance lever here, alongside a 30-day retrieval window after contract termination before deletion. We found no public information on the default storage region, on access logging or an audit trail for recordings, or on admin switches to disable transcription and analytics features for a works council; individual recording at least requires the host to enable it and the user to elect it.

Google Meet

Room-system support is real (the Meet Hardware add-on) and directory adjacency exists as Secure LDAP on Plus and Cloud Identity Premium on Enterprise. But for a meeting product sold inside a suite, no calendar integration is ever stated, there is no API, SCIM, webhook or SDK in evidence, and no self-hosted or private-cloud option of any kind — cloud-only.

Zoom

The developer surface is deep and public: meeting create/update APIs, cloud-recording REST APIs with webhooks for completed recordings and transcripts, a documented Calendar API shipped with OpenAPI and Postman artifacts, embeddable web and mobile SDKs, and AI Services APIs. SSO with managed domains arrives at the Business tier. I found no public information on SCIM provisioning, room-system support, or any self-hosted or private-cloud deployment option, which caps this mid-band for a buyer who wants the stack on their own terms.

Google Meet

The vendor is Google LLC of Mountain View; the evidence's own sovereignty attributes mark legal entity, data residency and subprocessor exposure as unknown on the vendor's pages, media routing is unstated, and the subprocessor list is 'affiliates and other trusted businesses' — unnamed. The single EU fact is a controller statement (Google Ireland Limited for EEA users, US entity for UK users), which does not amount to residency or a safeguard; this buyer weighs that heavily, so it sits near the floor.

Zoom

The contract is with Zoom Communications, Inc. of San Jose, the enforcer named is the Federal Trade Commission, and the DPO address is in California — a US contracting entity end to end. We found no public information on media routing regions, data residency, or any named subprocessor list beyond a generic mention of third-party service providers for payments and infrastructure; the Data Privacy Framework certification, standard contractual clauses and an Irish EU representative are mitigations, not EU processing.

Google Meet

Per-user prices, billing periods, discounts and participant caps are public — €4.76 to €14.77 per user with 100/150/500/1000 limits — but dial-in is not merely unpriced, it is unmentioned, and Enterprise is 'Let's talk', so every organisation above Plus's 300-user cap is pushed into a sales conversation. Storage allowances are stated per plan though never linked to recordings, add-ons carry no prices, and VAT treatment is nowhere; an invoice is computable only up to 300 users.

Zoom

Per-host prices are public with billing period and VAT exclusion stated — €13.33 /user per month billed annually for Pro and €17.49 for Business, excluding VAT — with capacity limits of 100 and 300 participants, 10 GB cloud storage per user, and a large-meeting add-on from €46.50 for 500 participants per month. But I found no public information on telephone dial-in or its rates, I found no public price for the Enterprise tier, the AI summary is described only as 'a separate charge' with each feature billed separately, and no minimum term length is stated — so the annual invoice for a given host count is not computable from these pages alone.