Microsoft Teams vs Zoom

Microsoft Teams

Published capacity of 300 participants, 30-hour meetings, hardware-room support through certified Yealink, Crestron, Lenovo, Polycom and AudioCodes partners, and Teams admin center management give a real meeting platform. But we found no public information on screen sharing, breakout rooms, moderation controls, or what happens on a constrained connection, so the core mechanics of an ordinary call rest on inference.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Encryption appears as a single feature line — data encryption for meetings, chats, calls and files — and we found no public information on the mechanism, key handling, or what the vendor can technically see. Microsoft Entra ID identity management comes with all plans, but we found no public information on lobbies, per-meeting passcodes, or host-controlled admission.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Live captions in over 30 languages (English only on Essentials), translation into up to 41 languages with a Teams Premium license, and a global dial-in number as a free audio-conferencing add-on mean my deaf colleague and the colleague with no usable data connection both have a way in. But we found no public information on a published accessibility conformance report, keyboard operation, or screen-reader testing — captions without a conformance report tell me the deaf colleague can attend, not that the screen-reader user can run the meeting.

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.

Microsoft Teams

The governance facts I can find are deletion of all data when the subscription is cancelled and admin-center management of video calling; we found no public information on who may record, participant notification, storage region, retention rules, or access logs. For a works council the sharper problem is the privacy statement: customer data may be used to develop and train Microsoft's AI models, with no documented switch for meeting recordings or transcripts.

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.

Microsoft Teams

A genuinely documented developer surface — Microsoft Graph REST APIs, SDKs, Teams bots, PowerShell provisioning, change notifications via Azure Event Hubs — plus certified room systems and PSTN options including Operator Connect and Direct Routing. We found no public information on calendar integration for other suites, SCIM provisioning, embedded meeting SDKs, or any self-hosted and on-premises deployment.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft is a US vendor headquartered in Redmond, and the privacy statement says personal data may be stored and processed in your region, in the United States, and in any other jurisdiction where Microsoft, its affiliates or its service providers operate — so media and metadata routing is left open, and subprocessors appear only as unnamed classes. The EU-US Data Privacy Framework certification and a Microsoft Ireland contact entity are the only European touchpoints in the captured pages.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Per-user prices are public with billing period, auto-renewal and VAT treatment stated — Teams Essentials at 3,50 €, Business Basic at 6,07 €, Teams Premium as an add-on at 8,70 € per user per month — alongside capacity of 300, storage limits, included dial-in minutes and a 7-day refund window. The gaps: pay-per-minute dial-out runs through a Communications Credits prepaid wallet and an international calling add-on with no published rates, and webinar capacity is not stated.

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.