Microsoft Teams vs Zoom

Microsoft Teams

Capacity is published rather than promised — 300 participants and a 30-hour meeting limit on the plans shown — and room hardware is real through named partners Yealink, Crestron, Lenovo, Polycom and AudioCodes, managed from a Teams admin center. But I found no public information on screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation, waiting rooms, bandwidth adaptation, or diagnostics I could pull after a bad call. I judge a product by its worst meeting, and the captured pages never describe that meeting.

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.

Microsoft Teams

One line states data encryption for meetings, chats, calls and files, and I found no public information on the mechanism, key handling, end-to-end encryption, or meeting admission controls such as a lobby or per-meeting passcodes — identity rides on the included Microsoft Entra ID. The privacy statement, meanwhile, says customer data may be used to develop and train AI models. I score documented mechanism, and here the mechanism is the word "encrypted".

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.

Microsoft Teams

Dial-in is genuinely there: a free audio-conferencing add-on with a global dial-in number, PSTN connectivity through calling plans, Teams Phone Mobile, Operator Connect and Direct Routing, number porting, and stated minutes of 3,000 for the US, UK and Canada and 1,200 for other countries. Live captions run to over 30 languages on business plans and translation to 41 with Teams Premium, and web and mobile apps are published. We found no public information on an accessibility statement, keyboard or screen-reader support, or documented behaviour on a poor connection.

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.

Microsoft Teams

We found no public information on who may record a meeting, whether participants are told, where recordings are stored, or any retention policy an admin could enforce. The nearest facts are that all data is deleted when a subscription is cancelled, and that user data may be used to train AI models. A recording is personal data about everyone in the room, and the captured pages give a works council nothing to switch off.

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.

Microsoft Teams

The Microsoft Graph API with SDKs, code samples, bots, change notifications and PowerShell provisioning is an integration surface I can actually build on and administer, and room systems are certified through five named hardware partners. Identity rides on the included Microsoft Entra ID. We found no public information on calendar integration, SCIM provisioning, an embeddable meeting SDK, or any self-hosted or private-cloud deployment option.

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.

Microsoft Teams

The privacy statement says personal data may be stored and processed in the customer's region, the United States and any other jurisdiction where Microsoft or its affiliates, subsidiaries or service providers operate, with international transfers relying on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. The captured pages name Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited only as a contact, do not confirm the contracting entity, and describe subprocessors as vendors acting on Microsoft's behalf without naming them. We found no public information on where meeting media or metadata are processed.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Per-user prices are public with the billing period and VAT treatment stated as exclusive — Teams Essentials at 3,50 € and Business Basic at 6,07 € per user per month billed annually, the Teams Premium add-on at 8,70 € — alongside published capacity of 300 participants, 30-hour meetings and per-user storage allowances, a free dial-in add-on with stated regional minutes, and an international calling plan add-on of 600 minutes per person per month. The gaps: the captured comparison page shows Business Standard only bundled with Copilot at 20,36 €, we found no public information on webinar capacity, and toll-free or pay-per-minute dial-in charges sit in a prepaid Communications Credits wallet.

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.