It took a pandemic to hit the earth and the need for various digital solutions skyrocketed. Among them, the need for video conferencing solutions became extremely important to continue with the daily requirements. Most offices could not have survived without Zoom or Google Meet to support remotely working employees. Now, the question that surfaced is, who is the better one and whom to choose?
Zoom and Google Meet are both widely popular video conferencing platforms which almost provides everything required to conduct a meeting with a team working remotely. There are a few points to consider while comparing one with the other like security issues, privacy issues, user experience, integrations, video quality, meeting management, live captioning, cost, and other factors.
While we love and hate both, in this article we will discuss some of them in detail what makes one better than the other.
A comparison between Google Meet and Zoom
Security system
Zoom’s own security settings led to something well-known as Zoombombing. The settings of Zoom conferences by default are set to public. The users are required to change the settings manually to prevent unauthorized people to hijack the conferences. In Google Meet, there is no requirement for any additional step to prevent such hijackers to disrupt the meeting. It has easily accessible controls that enable meeting organizers to mute, remove or report unwanted meeting attendees.
Moreover, meeting attendees must have a Google account to be allowed in the meeting. Other security measures like randomly generated 10-character-long meeting codes, the ability to alter the details of the meeting in the invite, and Google’s in-built protections make Google Meet a better choice when considering security.
Wide range of integrations provided by both
Integrations, add-ons, and extensions are essential when you want to automate workflows and want some extra features for conferencing experience. Zoom offers 1500+ apps through the Zoom App marketplace, while Google Meet offers integrations through the service automate.io and several extensions like Google Meet Enhancement Suite and Meeting Notes for Google Calendar & Meet.
No extra app installation for Google Meet on desktops
For Google, there is no need to install an extra app for desktop users. It allows hosting and joining of meetings from the browser of the user’s choice by visiting the link meet.google.com and does not involve the usage of any additional software. This makes the usage of Google Meet much easier than Zoom.
For using Zoom, desktop users need to install a desktop app or the browser plugin in order to use the services provided by Zoom. For Google Meet, it eliminates the requirement of IT administrators to keep updating the desktop app or browser plugin.
Better Google Meet UX for mobile and desktop
While Google Meet provides the same experience for both the applications for mobile and desktop, it is not the case for Zoom. Users using Zoom had realized that there is a whole lot of difference in user experience for Zoom on mobile and desktop.
It was noted that Zoom mobile app users had a very downgraded experience than desktop users. Zoom mobile app lacks a lot of essential features like streaming meetings publicly which is present in its desktop application.
More features for Zoom meeting management
A Zoom meeting host is allowed to restrict screen sharing prior to the meeting and during the meeting so that no other random user in the public session is able to take control of the screen and share unwanted content. The host has the authorization to remove or disable a video, mute any unwanted participant, and report a user to the Trust & Safety Team of Zoom.
It also permits only signed-in users into the meeting, locks a meeting, and suspends participants’ in-meeting activities like halting video, audio, screen sharing, recording, in-meeting chat, annotation, disabling private chats, and others.
Likewise, Google Meet has more options for in-meeting activities. However, they are only available to the admins and not the hosts. Also, the features present in Zoom like locking a meeting, removing or disabling a video, muting participants, report mechanism, and others are absent in Google Meet.
Both offers live captioning
Live captioning is an important feature when the user has a hearing impairment or is unable to use the audio. Both Zoom and Google Meet provides live captioning. Zoom can provide manual captioning through a participant or a third-party transcription, and/or go for an automated live transcription feature.
Zoom for large meetings
Google G Suite Essentials and Google G Suite Enterprise Essentials are the two plans that one can get with Google Meet. Both the plans come with myriads of features along with the features included in the free plan which allows up to 100 participants. The G Suite Enterprise Essentials is the highest-paid plan that has a maximum capacity of 250 users per meeting.
On the other hand, Zoom can be used for meetings for large enterprises or where the host requires to reach a larger audience. The basic plan for Zoom is free which allows up to 100 participants in one single meeting. Though the meeting time limit for the free version is 40 mins, it is good for small meetings.
Zoom offers other paid plans like Zoom Pro, Zoom Business, and Zoom Enterprise for varied sizes of companies and with varied features. While Zoom Pro is best suited for small-scale enterprises, Zoom Business is for small and middle-scale enterprises, and Zoom Enterprise plan is mostly for large companies that require up to 500 people to join the video conferencing.
Conclusion
Both Google Meet and Zoom have tons of features to support the video conferencing environment. Yet, some might prefer one over the other. It is according to your requirement that one application might fit and the other may not.
While Zoom has more features to offer, known for easy usage and accommodating a higher number of participants, Google meet can be credited for its simple, user-friendly video conferencing interface which works very well for small meetings and users already using Google Workspace.
Irrespective of some differences both became widely popular and generated a magnanimous amount of ROI for their respective companies.