As noted in Video platform comparison – article, I have provided one of the many independent comparison reviews that look at the three big players in the video platform arena: Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Given that my background is in education, and I am an active teacher, I am only concerned with how the three platforms work for me, as a teacher. I provided the article as a counterpoint to my biased observations.

Having said that, here is my take:

Overall

Full disclosure – I am most familiar with Zoom, as I have been actively using it the longest. My school district signed on with Zoom in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, and we continue to use it in 2021 for staff meetings and parent-teacher interviews. I have used Google Meet, but only in limited circumstances. My school district does not have a Google Meet Education Fundamentals or Education Plus account, which means that some options are not available to me (see the chart below). I have not used Microsoft Teams, not because I don’t want to, but because I do not have access to it through my school district administration. In contrast with Google Meet, which I am able to use, albeit the basic version, I cannot access Microsoft Teams video at all, without an educational subscription. Anything I write about regarding Teams is gleaned from online articles and Youtube videos and not from personal experience.

With all that in mind, I would give Zoom the overall advantage over Meet and Teams. Why? As you will see in the chart I have constructed below, Zoom has more built-in options, and the options are easy to find and navigate through. Of course, I am most directly comparing it to Google Meet, since I have the ability to test its capabilities, whereas Microsoft Teams remains (for me) largely untested. I have signed up for a Teams account, but my access is very limited. Microsoft suggests that if you want to use video calls for friends and family, that you use Skype, which is part of the Microsoft family.

Details

As mentioned above, Zoom has many features built into it, including its free version. Google Meet, and especially Microsoft Teams, requires an upgrade – and this usually means paid version – to access all of the same features as Zoom. To be clear, all three platforms have the same capabilities, but there are extra costs involved in having them all available for Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. The limitations that Zoom has for its free version are a session time limit of 40 minutes and it is an individual license. See the chart below to get a side-by-side comparison.

To see some of the Google Meet options that would be compared to Zoom, see the video below.