Microsoft Teams or Zoom for online meetings and team chat?

What you get without paying

Both allow free meetings of up to 100 people, but for different lengths. Per Microsoft's free Teams page, group meetings run up to 60 minutes, 1:1 meetings up to 30 hours, each user gets 5 GB of cloud storage and chat is unlimited. Zoom's Basic plan ends every meeting after 40 minutes and records only to the local device. In exchange, it offers a taste of AI: 3 meeting summaries, 20 AI queries and 3 AI note-taking uses a month. Hosts on free Zoom accounts must verify a phone number.

For a small group that meets often and is not ready to pay, the extra 20 minutes and unlimited chat on Teams count for more than a few AI summaries. If you only hold the occasional short call with outside guests, Zoom Basic's 40-minute cap rarely gets in the way.

Business plans, like for like

Both list prices in USD; neither record has an official Vietnamese-dong price list. At the bottom of the business range, Teams Essentials is $4/user/month, billed yearly with auto-renewal, for 300-person meetings of up to 30 hours and 10 GB storage per user. Zoom Pro is $16.99/user/month, or $14.16 billed yearly, for 100 participants, 30-hour meetings, 10 GB cloud storage, cloud recording and unlimited meeting summaries. To host 300 people on Zoom you need Business: $21.99/user/month, or $18.33 billed yearly.

On the Microsoft side, Microsoft 365 plans with Teams add email and Office: Business Basic at $7, Standard at $14 and Premium at $22 per user per month on an annual commitment. Per Office Watch, Basic rose from $6 and Standard from $12.50 on July 1, 2026, while Premium was unchanged. Microsoft also sells lower-priced versions without Teams. Two caveats: no monthly-billing prices are documented for Microsoft, and its business pricing pages could not be opened during research; Zoom's pricing page is inconsistent about Enterprise participant counts and Business cloud storage. Check both before buying.

Team workspace or dedicated meeting room

Teams combines channel-based team chat, video meetings, calling, webinars and file sharing in one app, wired into SharePoint, Outlook, OneDrive and the Office apps. Its value is clearest when the whole organisation already runs on Microsoft 365, so documents, calendars and conversations sit together. AI comes as Copilot, sold separately as an add-on.

Zoom invests in the meeting itself: HD video, noise suppression, backgrounds and effects, whiteboards, docs and notes, and multi-language captions with translation. Zoom AI (including My Notes) summarises meetings and suggests next steps, described on the product page as included at no additional cost; from Business, AI notes and summaries are unlimited. The product page describes Zoom's chat mainly as meeting-linked channels; groups that already chat elsewhere can connect it, since Zoom integrates with Outlook, Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Slack. It also runs on Linux and offers a browser extension and Zoom Rooms for meeting spaces, none of which the Teams record lists.

Security record and data handling

Of the two records, only Zoom's documents a security incident. On April 1, 2020 Zoom paused new features for 90 days to focus on privacy and security. On November 9, 2020 the FTC announced a settlement: the FTC alleged that since at least 2016 Zoom had touted 256-bit end-to-end encryption while providing a lower level of security, and that some cloud recordings were stored unencrypted for up to 60 days. Zoom settled and must maintain an information security programme with biennial independent assessments. Today Zoom offers optional end-to-end encryption: the account owner must enable it, everyone must join from the Zoom Workplace app or Zoom Rooms, and enabling it disables AI, cloud recording and live transcription. Zoom's privacy statement (updated September 17, 2026) says meeting, chat and file content is not used to train AI, but gives no retention periods and notes that business contact data may be sold via Zoom Common Room.

The Teams record has no dedicated incident section, so finding none there is not proof there were none. What it does record is a competition case: on June 25, 2024 the European Commission charged Microsoft with antitrust violations over bundling Teams with Office, and Microsoft now sells plans without Teams. Microsoft's company-wide privacy statement says data, often de-identified, is used to train AI, and that chat, video-call and email content is not used to target ads, though other data feeds personalised ads; for Teams inside an organisation, handling also depends on the Microsoft 365 setup and its admins.

What users rate and complain about

In the app stores Teams edges ahead: 4.8/5 on the US App Store (3.3M+ ratings), 4.6/5 on the Vietnamese App Store (about 119,000) and 4.7/5 on Google Play (8.8M+). Zoom has 4.7/5 on the US App Store (3.2M+), 4.2/5 on the Vietnamese App Store (about 321,000) and 4.1/5 on Google Play (4.5M+). On business software review sites Zoom is slightly ahead: 4.5/5 on G2 and 4.6/5 on Capterra, against 4.4/5 and 4.5/5 for Teams.

The complaints differ. For Teams, Capterra lists glitches, crashes and a heavy, slow app among the top cons, G2 reviewers mention resource use on older machines, and some report being signed out repeatedly. For Zoom, connection drops are a common G2 complaint even though many reviewers praise its stability on weak networks, and some Capterra reviewers criticise support and cancellation. Neither has independent call-quality data.