Microsoft Teams vs Zoom

Microsoft Teams

Published limits give 300 participants and a 30-hour maximum meeting, with certified room hardware from named partners including Yealink, Crestron and Polycom. I found no public information on breakout rooms, host moderation controls, or how the call behaves on a constrained connection — the last of which is exactly what a works council needs to know before an all-hands.

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.

Microsoft Teams

The only statement is that meetings, chats, calls and files are data-encrypted, with no mechanism, key custody or trade-offs named, and access governed by Microsoft Entra ID identity management. I found no public information on end-to-end encryption, waiting rooms, per-meeting passcodes, or a plain statement of what the vendor can technically see in a meeting.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Dial-in exists as a free add-on with a global dial-in number, live captions cover over 30 languages on business plans (English only on Essentials), translation reaches up to 41 languages with Teams Premium, and the entry plan runs on web and mobile apps. I found no public information on an accessibility statement or conformance report, keyboard and screen-reader operation, guest joining without an account, or documented low-bandwidth behaviour.

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.

Microsoft Teams

I found no public information on who may record, whether participants are told, where recordings sit, how long they live, who accessed them, or whether AI recap and attendance analytics can be switched off for co-determination — while AI meeting features ship in Teams Rooms Pro and the privacy statement reserves the use of customer data for AI model training. All that is documented is deletion on subscription cancellation and an admin center that manages video calling, with personal data possibly stored in the user's region, the United States or any jurisdiction where Microsoft or its service providers operate. As a recording is personal data about everyone in the room, this silence is the deciding fact.

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.

Microsoft Teams

The developer story is real and documented — Microsoft Graph REST APIs with SDKs, Graph Explorer, code samples, PowerShell provisioning, Teams bots and change notifications through Azure Event Hubs — plus room systems and Entra ID identity. I found no public information on calendar integration or SCIM provisioning, and I found no public information on a self-hosted or private-cloud option: the API itself is described as a single endpoint in the Microsoft Cloud.

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.

Microsoft Teams

The privacy statement permits storing and processing personal data in the user's region, the United States and any other jurisdiction where Microsoft or its affiliates and service providers operate, and subcontractors are described only as vendors acting on Microsoft's behalf rather than as a published list. The vendor is Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, the captured pages give no residency commitment for meeting media and leave the contracting entity's jurisdiction unconfirmed, and the only safeguards named are EU-US, UK and Swiss Data Privacy Framework adherence plus a Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited contact address.

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.

Microsoft Teams

Every tier and add-on carries a public per-user price with billing period and VAT treatment stated — Teams Essentials at 3,50 €, Business Basic at 6,07 €, Business Standard with Copilot at 20,36 €, Teams Premium at 8,70 €, Copilot Business at 18,20 € — alongside 300-participant capacity, 30-hour meetings and storage allowances of 10 GB or 1 TB per user, with dial-in as a free add-on and calling-plan minutes published. Pay-per-minute and toll-free charges run through a prepaid Communications Credits wallet for which I found no public rates, and I found no public information on webinar capacity pricing or a recording-storage price beyond the general cloud allowance.

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.