Microsoft Teams vs Zoom

Microsoft Teams

The hard numbers a buyer can hold onto are 300 participants and a 30-hour meeting duration, published per plan, plus apps for computer, tablet and phone, meeting apps and room hardware. Beyond that I found no public information on screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation, waiting rooms, or behaviour on constrained connections — the mechanics that decide whether a call survives a bad network.

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.

Microsoft Teams

One line — data encryption for meetings, chats, calls and files — with no mechanism named behind it, and a free Entra ID tier that is directory identity, not meeting admission. I found no public information on end-to-end encryption, key handling, lobbies, per-meeting passcodes, or a plain statement of what the vendor can technically see.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Dial-in comes as a free add-on with a global dial-in number, published minutes (3,000 for the US, UK and Canada, 1,200 elsewhere) and an optional 600-minute international plan; live captions cover over 30 languages on business plans — English only on Essentials — with translation up to 41 languages behind Teams Premium. Apps span computer, tablet and phone and web-plus-mobile-only is itself a plan tier, but I found no public information on guest joining by link, keyboard and screen-reader operation, an accessibility statement, or low-bandwidth behaviour.

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.

Microsoft Teams

A recording is personal data about everyone in the room, and I found no public information on who may record, whether participants are notified, where recordings are stored, or any retention rule or organisation-wide policy. The only adjacent facts are that cancelling a subscription deletes associated data and that a privacy dashboard exists for exercising rights.

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.

Microsoft Teams

The API surface is genuinely documented — Microsoft Graph REST with SDKs, code samples, Teams bots, change notifications and PowerShell provisioning — and room support is real through Teams Rooms and certified devices from Yealink, Crestron, Lenovo, Polycom and AudioCodes. Identity ships as a free Entra ID tier, but I found no public information on SCIM provisioning, an embeddable meeting SDK, calendar integration stated for scheduling, or any self-hosted or private-cloud deployment option.

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.

Microsoft Teams

The vendor is US-based and its privacy statement reserves storage and processing of personal data in the customer's region, in the United States and in any other jurisdiction where Microsoft, its affiliates or its service providers operate facilities, with the EU-US Data Privacy Framework as the safeguard. Subprocessors appear only as unnamed vendors acting on Microsoft's behalf, and Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited is named as a contact, not as the contracting entity — I found no public information confirming an EU contracting party, EU-only processing, or a published subprocessor list.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Per-user prices are public and specific — Teams Essentials at 3,50 € Benutzer/Monat, Business Basic at 6,07 €, Business Standard with Copilot at 20,36 €, the Teams Premium add-on at 8,70 € — each with annual billing, auto-renewal and VAT excluded stated, alongside a 300-participant capacity, a 30-hour cap, per-plan cloud storage, dial-in as a free add-on with published minutes, a Communications Credits prepaid wallet for pay-per-minute charges, a one-month trial with auto-conversion and a 7-day proportional refund. What keeps it short of full computability: I found no public information on an invoice calculator, per-region dial-in rates beyond free dial-out to USA/Canada, or recording storage priced as its own line.

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.