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Video meetings: Zoom or Teams?

As more and more people work from home, largely due to the covid-19 pandemic, video meetings get more popular. Zoom and Teams are two major players on the market. Here is a brief introduction of both to give you a big picture.

 

What is Zoom

Zoom is a cloud platform for video meetings, one on one or group. This is Zoom’s original mission. The company has extended to other field, such as phone system.

 

What is Teams

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool / platform, you can chat, call or have video meetings. Of course you can collaborate on documents, too.

Teams consolidates some services Microsoft had provided previously. Its audio & video technology comes from popular Skype, in fact, to promote Teams, Microsoft even decommissioned Skype for Business.

 

Brief Comparison

Pricing

For Zoom, it’s pretty straightforward, check out https://zoom.us/pricing
For Teams, it’s complicated. Some Office 365 subscriptions, such Business Premium, Enterprises, include Teams feature.

Both offers free option. The restrictions of free Teams include: max 250 participants, 2gb storage per user. The restrictions of free Zoom include: max 100 participants in meeting and max 40 minutes; 1 to 1 meeting is unlimited though.

Security

Zoom encrypt all shared content using AES-256 encryption. Chats are encrypted from end to end with AES.
Teams encrypt data in transit, not the documents saved on sender’s device.

Privacy

Zoom’s privacy term: “Whether you have Zoom account or not, we may collect Personal Data from or about you when you use or otherwise interact with our Products.”
Teams’: “does not use your data for anything other than providing you with the service that you have subscribed to.”

 

Your Choice

If your organization already are subscribing Office 365, Teams is a great choice; If you are not using Office 365, a major advantage of Teams doesn’t apply to you.

If you value great video meeting experience, Zoom is hard to beat. Teams is rather young, it’s still evolving significantly.

If data security means a lot to you, Zoom does better here.

If privacy is super big deal, Microsoft seems to be less nosy.

Whatever fits your needs is the best option for you.

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