Microsoft Teams vs Zoom

Microsoft Teams

The captured pages publish capacity of 300 participants and 30-hour meeting duration across all three plans, with meetings, events, phone and rooms named as solution areas and apps usable before, during and after a meeting. But we found no public information on screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation or how the call behaves on a constrained connection, so scale is documented while the meeting's everyday mechanics are not.

Zoom

Capacity is published per plan — 100 participants on Basic and Pro, 300 on Business, a large-meeting add-on reaching 5,000 and a 500-attendee webinar — and breakout rooms are documented down to roles, timers and per-room user limits, with meetings required to carry a passcode, waiting room or authenticated-only join. What the pages do not show is behaviour under strain: no adaptive bitrate or simulcast claim, no documented mobile-network reliability, and no diagnostics an admin can read after a bad call. Quality appears only as hardware gates — 1080p send demands an eight-core machine, GPU and "quality network connections".

Microsoft Teams

One comparison-table line — data encryption for meetings, chats, calls and files — with no mechanism, no key custody and no statement of which meetings could be end-to-end encrypted or what that costs in features; the word alone answers nothing. Meanwhile the privacy statement reserves the right to use my data to develop and train the vendor's AI models and lists Teams communication metadata (time, date, participants) among what it collects, and we found no public information on lobbies, passcodes, host-controlled admission or SSO-gated joining.

Zoom

The captured pages mark end-to-end encryption unsupported on every browser for the web client, and the only mechanism documented is "TLS 1.2 and 256-bit AES-GCM Encryption" — with nothing on key handling or encryption at rest for recordings. Access control is the stronger story: at least one of a passcode, waiting room or authenticated-only join is required, the meeting API overwrites any request that tries to switch all three off, and on most account sizes that requirement is locked. But the privacy pages themselves record that account owners can read chat and even encrypted email content and that Zoom automatically scans shared files — so what the vendor can see is documented only in fragments, never as a plain statement about meeting media.

Microsoft Teams

Dial-in is genuinely evidenced: a global dial-in number as a free add-on, 3,000 calling-plan minutes for the US, UK and Canada and 1,200 elsewhere, multiple PSTN connectivity options and certified phones and room systems from named partners, plus live captions in over 30 languages and translation into up to 41 with a Premium license. We found no public information on joining by browser without an install, guest access without an account, keyboard and screen-reader operation, or behaviour on a poor connection.

Zoom

Browser joining is solid: the web client claims feature parity, WebRTC video is supported across Chrome, Edge, Safari and iOS WebKit, live transcription and live translation are marked supported on every browser, and mobile send is documented down to OS versions. We found no public information on telephone dial-in, on joining as a guest without an account, or on any accessibility conformance statement, keyboard operation or screen-reader testing. Constrained connections appear only as requirements for reaching higher resolutions, not as a documented degraded mode.

Microsoft Teams

We found no public information on who may record a meeting, whether participants are told, where recordings are stored, how long they live, or what an administrator can switch off; the only adjacent evidence is deletion of all subscription data on cancellation and general administration of video calling from the Teams admin center. A recording is personal data about everyone in the room, and on these pages its governance is undocumented.

Zoom

Recording is host-controlled in the SDK with a contractual notification when recording is enabled, participants can request recording or be permitted to start it, a delete-after-a-set-number-of-days policy exists, and a bring-your-own-storage mode keeps the files in the customer's own S3 bucket with Zoom holding only metadata. For the works council the gaps are real: we found no public information on the storage region of Zoom-held recordings, on encryption at rest or access logs for recordings, on a separate retention rule for transcripts and AI summaries, or on switching off attendance analytics. Termination is handled — thirty days to retrieve content before deletion — but that is the end of the relationship, not the life of a recording.

Microsoft Teams

The developer surface is broad and documented — Microsoft Graph REST APIs with SDKs, change notifications with Azure Event Hubs, Teams bots, PowerShell provisioning and Bicep templates — and room systems come from named certified partners. But we found no public information on calendar integration in the captured pages, on SCIM provisioning, or on any on-premises or private-cloud deployment; identity runs on the vendor's own Entra ID.

Zoom

The developer surface is broad: meeting create-and-update APIs, a calendar API complete with access-control lists, webhooks for recording, transcript and summary events, OAuth with automatic token refresh, a downloadable OpenAPI spec with client libraries, and the Business tier carries SSO with managed domains. We found no public information on SCIM provisioning, room-system support, or any self-hosted or private-cloud deployment — every captured endpoint sits on the vendor's cloud — and the SSO mechanism is not named as SAML or OIDC. Embedding via SDK is well documented, but third-party app data rides under the app developers' own privacy policies rather than the meeting vendor's.

Microsoft Teams

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, subsidiaries or service providers operate facilities — a global-processing reservation, not a residency commitment, from a US contracting entity. Subprocessors are unnamed beyond controlled affiliates and vendors acting on the vendor's behalf, the claimed safeguard is the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and the only European element we found is Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited as a contact address; this buyer weighs that heavily.

Zoom

The contracting entity is Zoom Communications, Inc., a US company with the Federal Trade Commission named as enforcer of its data-framework commitments; the EU-facing facts are a representative in Cork, standard contractual clauses and US Data Privacy Framework certifications — mechanisms for sending data out, not for keeping it in. We found no public information on where media and metadata are processed, and subprocessors appear only as unnamed third-party service providers for infrastructure and payment processing. Weighted heavily, as this buyer does, that is a US chain end to end with the geography of the traffic itself unpublished.

Microsoft Teams

Per-user prices are public with billing period, auto-renewal and VAT treatment stated — Teams Essentials at 3,50 € per user per month, Business Basic at 6,07 €, Teams Premium as an 8,70 € add-on — alongside capacity limits, per-plan storage allowances, dial-in minutes by region and a 7-day proportional refund. What stops me computing the annual invoice from these pages alone: toll-free and pay-per-minute charges sit in a prepaid Communications Credits wallet with no published rates, and there is no calculator for the total.

Zoom

Headline per-host prices are public with billing period and VAT treatment stated — Pro at €13.33 /user per month billed annually excluding VAT, Business at €17.49 — alongside participant caps, 10 GB cloud storage per license, tier license counts, webinar capacity of 500, and terms that payments are non-refundable. Computing the real invoice still fails: we found no public information on dial-in rates, the large-meeting add-on is priced only "From €46.50 for 500 participants per month" with no figures up to 5,000, and cloud recording and the AI summary are each "a separate charge" whose rates sit behind a developer credit plan.