Google Meet vs Zoom

Google Meet

Participant capacity is published per plan (100/150/500/1000) with 24-hour meetings, in-domain live streaming and a hardware-room add-on, which is genuinely strong scale. But the evidence is silent on screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation, waiting rooms and what happens on a constrained connection — undocumentable mechanics cannot be relied on for a works assembly.

Zoom

Capacity is published per plan — 100 participants on Basic and Pro, 300 on Business, a paid add-on up to 5,000, webinars at 500 — and breakout rooms carry five roles with timers, preassignment and help requests, which is real host control. Waiting rooms, passcodes and authenticated-only joining are enforced even when meetings are created through the API. We found no public information on adaptive quality or behaviour on constrained and mobile networks, or on diagnostics an administrator could read after a bad call.

Google Meet

Nothing documents any encryption mechanism for Meet media, key handling, lobbies, passcodes or admission control; the only security language is that affiliates and trusted businesses process data under 'appropriate confidentiality and security measures', which is a promise, not a documented mechanism. Judged on documented mechanism, the evidence offers none.

Zoom

Transport encryption is concrete — TLS 1.2 with 256-bit AES-GCM — and meeting access is defended by per-meeting passcode, waiting room and an authenticated-users-only setting the API will not let you remove entirely. But the captured browser support pages mark end-to-end encryption unavailable in every browser listed, and we found no public information on encryption at rest for meetings or recordings, key handling, or a plain statement of what the vendor can technically see in meeting media. Account owners can read users' message content unless advanced chat encryption is enabled — employer-side surveillance a works agreement would have to govern.

Google Meet

The Meet product pages were captured twice and yielded no evidence of browser joining, guest access by link, dial-in, captions or any accessibility statement — the only telephony in the evidence is a separately sold Voice add-on, which is not a way to phone into a meeting. Absence of any evidenced joining path beyond a signed-in client lands at the bottom anchor.

Zoom

Browser joining is documented across Chrome, Edge and Safari families via WebRTC, live transcription and translation are marked available in every supported browser, and Chromebooks are stated to match desktop-browser features. Android Firefox is documented as unsupported and the component view is unavailable on mobile browsers. We found no public information on telephone dial-in, a stated accessibility posture or conformance report, keyboard and screen-reader testing, or behaviour at low bandwidth.

Google Meet

Recording appears from Standard onward and attendance tracking is sold as a Plus feature with no documented off-switch — co-determination over analytics, my central demand, is unmet. Generic per-service deletion, account auto-deletion, Vault retention at Plus and vague admin powers to 'restrict your ability to delete or edit' exist, but nothing on who is told a recording starts, consent, recording storage region, or access logs.

Zoom

Recording comes with a notification, deletion after a configured number of days, and Bring Your Own Storage that keeps the files in the customer's own bucket while the vendor retains only metadata — groundwork a works agreement could use. The rest of what a works council needs goes unanswered: we found no public information on a participant consent prompt, the storage region of cloud recordings, an audit trail of who accessed a recording, an organisation-wide policy over who may record, or any attention tracking and attendance analytics and whether they can be switched off. Transcripts and AI summaries generate automatically alongside recordings, each incurring a separate charge, with no separate retention rule evidenced.

Google Meet

Identity tooling is real (Secure LDAP at Plus, Cloud Identity Premium and context-aware access at Enterprise) and the Meet hardware add-on gives room-system support, but no documented API, SCIM, webhooks or embedding appear anywhere. Cloud-only with no self-hosted or private-cloud option in the evidence caps it.

Zoom

The build stack is real — calendar APIs with access control, OAuth starter apps, OpenAPI downloads, recording webhooks and embeddable Meeting and Video SDKs — and SSO with managed domains is listed at the Business tier. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning, room-system support, or any self-hosted or private-cloud option, so deployment choice does not appear on the public pages.

Google Meet

The vendor is Google LLC of Mountain View, the UK controller is also Google LLC, subprocessors are unnamed 'affiliates and other trusted businesses', and data residency is unconfirmed on the vendor's own pages. Google Ireland as EEA controller and the Enterprise-only 'data regions' feature are the sole EU anchors, and where media and metadata travel is entirely undocumented.

Zoom

The contracting entity is Zoom Communications, Inc. of San Jose, California, and the only European foothold in the captured facts is an EU representative in Cork; we found no public information on data residency or on where meeting media and metadata are processed. Subprocessors appear only as unnamed third-party service providers for payments and infrastructure. Standard contractual clauses, Data Privacy Framework certifications and FTC enforcement are published — legal mechanisms for a non-EU chain, not European processing.

Google Meet

Three of four tiers carry public EUR per-user prices with billing period, annual discount, seat caps (300 on lower tiers) and pooled storage allowances, so an invoice is computable for small host counts. But Enterprise — the only tier with 1000-participant meetings and data regions — is 'Contact sales', the Meet Hardware and Voice add-ons are sold separately with no prices, dial-in rates are absent entirely, and VAT treatment is unstated.

Zoom

Per-host prices are public with billing period and VAT treatment stated — €13.33 per user per month on Pro and €17.49 on Business, both billed annually and excluding VAT — alongside participant caps, licence-count ranges and per-user cloud storage. A buyer still cannot compute the invoice: the large-meeting add-on is quoted only from €46.50 for 500 participants per month, and we found no public information on dial-in rates, webinar add-on pricing or the cloud recording storage plan. The captured pages also give different figures for AI — the homepage claims AI at no extra cost while the developer documentation states cloud recording and AI summary each incur a separate charge.