Zoom vs. Microsoft Teams: Which Is Best?

Microsoft Teams and Zoom are both excellent video conferencing and collaboration apps, and over the last few years, Zoom has added all sorts of all-in-one features that make the Zoom vs. Teams comparison more relevant than ever. 

I’ve used both apps a lot in the past, and to write this guide, I spent more time diving deep into each of these tools and exploring all their features to pull out the most important differences that still exist between them. 

Based on my past experiences of using these apps and my time testing them again for this article, here’s my take on how they stack up.

Table of contents:

Zoom vs. Teams at a glance

Zoom is a video conferencing platform with team chat features, and Teams is an internal chat tool with video conferencing features. Both connect to much broader productivity platforms, and you can’t ignore the wider ecosystem if you’re deciding between them. 

Here’s a quick rundown of the difference, but make sure to read on for a point-by-point breakdown of the difference between these two platforms.

Zoom and Teams are both all-in-one collaboration tools

For most of its history, Zoom was a video conferencing app. But over the last few years, it has progressively added more features before eventually launching Zoom Workplace, a full productivity suite that aims to compete with the likes of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

If you haven’t evaluated Zoom in a while, take a deep breath before pulling up its website. There’s a lot to process. Below is a condensed list of what Zoom can now do:

• Video conferencing

• Built-in chat

• Zoom Phone for VoIP

• Zoom Mail

• Zoom Calendar

• Zoom Events and Webinars

• Appointment scheduling

• Zoom-certified hardware for your meeting rooms

• Meeting room reservation systems, visitor management, and digital signage for your office

• The Zoom Productivity Suite (Canvas, Whiteboard, Clips, Hub, Sheets, Slides, Paper, and Video Management)

• Employee engagement software

• You can even send faxes with Zoom

That’s just Zoom Workplace. Zoom also sells specialized business software for customer service, sales, and HR teams. And Zoom AI, which encompasses everything from note taking to AI teammates, is broad enough that it has its own section later in this article.

Theoretically, Zoom Workplace could replace your entire office tech stack. So I was curious: have any businesses actually canceled their Microsoft 365 subscriptions and jumped ship entirely? Some IT teams are at least considering it. The ones that do are often motivated by Zoom Phone, Zoom AI, and Zoom’s systems for reserving office meeting rooms. Plus, some executives just prefer Zoom for video chats and refuse to switch.

Zoom has reduced friction by making its productivity suite cross-compatible with Microsoft’s. If you’re building a presentation in Zoom Slides, for example, you can still export it as a PPTX so your clients won’t have to figure out how to open a new file format.

But Microsoft (and Google) have decades of experience in the office productivity space. Zoom does not. Shifting the perception that it’s basically for video conferencing and phone calls will take time. (As one user says, “Zoom’s product is meetings. It has no credibility in any other area of office software.”)

Microsoft’s legacy advantage with productivity software is particularly potent for internal collaboration, where it gives Microsoft Teams an edge over Zoom Chat. With Teams, you can view and edit files like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint directly in the chat, and multiple team members can edit the same document in real time. Collaboration happens natively, so there’s less context switching.

And with Microsoft Teams’ Loop components, you can quickly create interactive blocks of content in Teams that stay updated no matter where you paste them: they sync across Teams chats, Outlook emails, and the Loop workspace.

If you’re reading all this and thinking, “It sounds like neither platform is best at everything,” you’re exactly right. As a result, lots of teams end up with a blended tech stack that combines Zoom and Microsoft 365 (or Google Workspace)—even though buying licenses for both adds redundancy and cost. It’s not uncommon to see organizations that use Zoom for VoIP, meeting rooms, and external calls with clients and vendors, while sticking with Microsoft for internal collaboration, email and calendars, and productivity software.

Teams is better for internal meetings; Zoom is better for external meetings

One area where these tools differ is the type of meetings they’re built to support. Microsoft Teams is designed with internal team communication in mind, whereas Zoom is built for external meetings, too.

It’s beyond easy for external participants to join a Zoom meeting from anywhere on any device—all you need is a link. This makes it a great option if you host a lot of meetings, large or small, with people outside your organization. The frictionless experience for the people you’re inviting will be a win for both of you.

Part of what makes Zoom so frictionless externally is that it has a wider non-corporate user base than Teams. If you’re setting up a meeting with clients or collaborators outside your organization, there’s a solid chance they already have the Zoom app installed and don’t need to fiddle with settings before the meeting starts. And if they don’t have the app installed, Zoom works on a wider variety of browsers than Teams—particularly on mobile.

You can easily set up meetings with external guests on Teams, but it doesn’t always work as seamlessly when you’re communicating with someone outside of your organization. User permissions are one reason for this: since Teams inherits your Microsoft 365 permissions by default, you might find yourself with more limitations than you expect when collaborating externally, depending on how risk-averse your IT department is. That said, Teams does a better job than it used to of automatically managing permissions so you can collaborate on shared files and Loops with people outside your org.

Zoom is also much stronger when it comes to using video conferencing for marketing and business growth. For example, the ability to stream meetings to social media is available even on entry-level plans. Zoom even has a whole separate package just for running webinars and events, complete with in-session branding, pre-roll content to keep attendees engaged, separate recordings of each speaker’s audio and video, and a production studio for live scene switching. (Microsoft Teams offers webinars too, but has fewer ways to customize them.)

While Microsoft Teams isn’t usually the go-to choice for sales calls or customer presentations, it’s hard to beat for internal meetings—particularly if you’re already spending all day in Teams chats.

Internal Teams video calls usually happen inside the chat channels you already use, so your chat history, shared files, and call notes stay in a place that’s contextually relevant. (Plus, your team can just head to the relevant channel and click Join rather than searching for a meeting invite link.) And if you’re having a meeting about, say, a slide deck, it’s easy to share your screen and invite your team to make real-time collaborative changes, all during the call, and all within Microsoft Teams.

Zoom is better if all you need is video conferencing

Both Zoom and Teams are powerful video conferencing apps, but Zoom tends to be better at coping with larger meetings and keeping people on the call even if they have a bad internet connection. Essential features like screen sharing are smoother and happen with less lag time. And it makes sense: Zoom is primarily a video conferencing tool, so its streaming quality is naturally better. Teams juggles lots of other collaboration features, which means making sacrifices—though minor—where video quality or connection are concerned. 

This is probably why Zoom allows for up to 5,000 participants with the large meeting add-on, whereas participant capacity on Microsoft Teams is capped at 300 (unless you’re on an enterprise plan).

Zoom also has perks that are designed to enhance the video conferencing experience. You have access to things like custom avatars, filters, and studio effects, as well as smart gallery and immersive view. Some of these features can feel a little like a novelty, but they’re indicative of where Zoom’s priorities lie: providing any sort of video conferencing experience you could want.

The audio settings in Zoom are also incredibly advanced. You can choose from different levels of noise reduction, which comes in handy if you’re joining meetings from a noisy cafe. (In the early days of video conferencing, I remember paying for a separate app that did this, so it’s nice to have it built in.) There’s also a spatial audio option, which makes it sound as though a person’s voice is actually coming from their location on the screen in Gallery or Immersive view.

If you’re hosting a meeting, either Zoom or Teams will probably work fine. But Zoom gives you more options to customize the call, and a better shot at providing a smooth video and audio experience.

Zoom gives you more advanced AI features

Both Zoom and Microsoft Teams have leaned hard into developing AI meeting infrastructure. You’ll get the following AI features on either one:

• Meeting summaries and transcripts

• Live captions and multi-language captioning

• In-meeting catch-up

• Noise suppression and voice isolation

• Post-meeting action items

• Suggested replies in chat

• AI search within the platform

With Zoom, you get all of those features on any paid plan. With Microsoft Teams, a few lightweight AI features (like suggested replies) are included on lower-tier plans. For the rest, you need a plan that includes a Copilot license.

Zoom automatically creates summaries, transcripts, and action items from your Zoom meetings, and logs them in your account. My Notes, Zoom’s AI note taker, does something similar, but it also works in third-party apps like Microsoft Teams and can also record in-person conversations using the Zoom mobile app.

Zoom also has an edge when it comes to advanced AI features. It offers an AI Productivity Suite including Zoom Sheets, Zoom Slides, Zoom Paper (for documents), and Zoom Canvas (a Notion-esque app). You can use these tools to create documents for free, but their AI features require a paid add-on. Like many AI apps these days, Zoom lets you create documents from scratch using prompts. What’s far more interesting is its ability to generate documents directly from the content of your meetings, which means after a call, you can quickly follow up with deliverables like spreadsheets, proposals, or presentations.

ZoomMate—also a paid add-on—is a platform-wide AI assistant that has a complete understanding of your meetings, schedule, documents, and work conversations. You can make requests like “Prepare me for my client meeting” or “Make updates to this slide deck that take my most recent customer call into account.” ZoomMate can delegate tasks, create AI agents, set up workflows, generate documents, and search across your Zoom content and third-party apps.

Microsoft Teams has been moving fast on AI, too. Through Copilot, which is embedded into Teams on higher-tier plans, you can catch up on what you missed mid-meeting, generate summaries, and pull action items from the transcript. And you can use Copilot to generate documents based on Teams meeting transcripts, though it requires a couple more steps than Zoom’s process.

Teams also has an AI video recap feature, which auto-clips recorded meetings into short narrated highlights. (Perfect for quickly catching up on that Monday morning all-hands meeting you didn’t quite make it to.) And Facilitator, Microsoft’s in-meeting AI agent, tracks agenda items as your meeting progresses, captures notes in real time, and politely nudges participants who start to drift off track.

If you’re judging the AI capabilities of Zoom and Teams on their own merits, Zoom is somewhat ahead, particularly for the creatives, agencies, and consultants who spend lots of time turning client calls into deliverables. But given that Copilot operates across all of Microsoft 365—not just Teams—it might be the AI you’ll actually get the most use out of if your organization runs on Microsoft.

Teams is more affordable, but Zoom offers AI on every plan

If you just need a no-frills video conferencing solution for your team, Microsoft Teams is cheaper—or free, if you already have a Microsoft 365 license. Microsoft’s Teams Essentials plan is a Teams-only option that costs just $4/month per user (billed annually). Microsoft 365 Business Basic, at $7/month per user, includes Teams plus Microsoft productivity apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Zoom’s entry-level pricing is higher. It does offer a free plan, which gives you access to video conferencing and most other workplace tools, but it limits you to 40 minutes per meeting and throttles access to other features. For team features, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro plan at $14.16/month per user (billed annually). Zoom’s Business plan, at $18.33/month per user, gives you up to 300 meeting participants and adds enterprise security features.

But what if you need AI? That’s where Zoom gets more competitive. To add AI features to Teams, you need a Microsoft 365 plan that includes Copilot, which means you’ll pay at least $23.50/month per user (billed annually). Meanwhile, Zoom includes features like unlimited AI note taking on its $14.16/month Pro plan. Even Zoom’s free plan offers limited AI usage. 

Zoom does offer a couple of AI features as paid add-ons. ZoomMate, an AI teammate, costs $16.67/month per user (billed annually). Zoom’s AI Productivity Suite is included with ZoomMate, or you can buy it separately for $8.33/month per user.

Both apps integrate with the rest of your tech stack

Zoom and Teams are both solidly integrated with other apps, so you can connect each of them to your existing tech stack pretty easily. They integrate with more or less the same number of tools (3,500ish for Zoom vs. 3,000ish for Teams). But Teams has a really tight integration with other Microsoft 365 apps, so if you’re a OneDrive or OneNote user, for example, your work in different apps syncs up without you having to do a thing.

Zoom and Teams also both integrate with Zapier, which means you can connect them to 9,000+ apps—so if the integration you need isn’t available out of the box, it’s almost certainly reachable through Zapier. You can automate things like routing meeting recordings to a shared drive, creating tasks from transcripts, or posting meeting summaries to a Slack channel. And because Zapier manages the authentication and connections between apps, credentials stay out of the picture: your agents and automations don’t need raw API keys to take action across your tools.

Learn more about how to automate Zoom and how to automate Teams.

Teams vs. Zoom: Which should you use?

If you’re still not sure which app to go with, here’s how I’d think about it.

• Go with Teams if your organization already runs on Microsoft 365. It’s already included in your plan, and its integration with Word, Excel, Outlook, and the rest of the Microsoft stack adds a lot of value. It’s also the stronger choice if your meetings are mostly internal and you do a lot of real-time document collaboration with colleagues.

• Go with Zoom if you regularly meet with people outside your organization, like clients or vendors. Zoom offers a more frictionless experience for external interactions. It’s also the better pick for video and audio quality, and for video conferencing options in general, and you get useful AI features even on lower-tier plans.

Or, like many organizations, you can use both Teams and Zoom. Plenty of IT teams use Microsoft 365 for internal collaboration, while also maintaining Zoom licenses for the users who benefit most from them.

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This article was originally published in April 2022 by Katie Paterson. The most recent update was in July 2026.