Microsoft Teams vs Zoom

During the challenging times when remote work is inevitable, companies are increasing their efforts to find means to enhance collaboration among their employees. These collaboration tools have become the talk of the town because they have now become necessary to keep organizations and businesses running. From instant messaging to video calling and file sharing, there are comparisons drawn between the capabilities of different tools available in the market. At the forefront of these are two of the most popular tools, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.

Our perspective will help you decide to choose between Microsoft Teams vs Zoom:

Features of Zoom

Zoom has been growing as a pioneer in the video collaboration space particularly since April 2019. It puts the quality and ease-of-use of video calling as one of the top priorities of collaboration. While it is possible to share files and use instant messages for communication, you can make video calls with a single click.

Some of the other notable features of Zoom include:

High definition audio and video calls with up to 1000 participants
Security features like chat encryption and role-based permissions
Conversation recording and transcribing
History search

However, security issues have surfaced while using Zoom for video collaboration. Hence, many businesses prefer using Microsoft Teams for security reasons.

Features of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is arguably the widest collaboration tool used in the corporate world. The most important advantage of MS Teams is that it effortlessly integrates with other Microsoft products and services. Starting a meeting from Outlook or Exchange Calendar, for example, is not possible with most other applications. Most importantly, Microsoft rolls out updates for Teams at regular intervals making it a secure, state-of-the-art collaboration software.

Some of the most important features of Microsoft Teams include:

Fully integrated with other Office 365 applications
In-line transcription in video conferencing
Smooth screen and file sharing
One-to-one and group messaging
Best available security and compliance features
Plugin and bot integration
Tabular conversations and channels

Now that we have seen the different features available in Zoom and Microsoft Teams, let us compare Zoom and Teams head-to-head based on three different parameters.

Zoom vs Teams Calling Capabilities

Both Zoom and Teams are capable of providing an all-in-one collaboration feature. The telephony feature enables Zoom and Team users to collaborate better both internally and externally. As for the telephony capability, Zoom has introduced the Zoom Phone feature recently with features like call routing, auto-attendant, and IVR capabilities.

Teams, on the other hand, inherits the Microsoft Phone System that is an improved version of cloud PBX. It has been around for a while and has been tried and tested by organizations around the globe. Users can either procure Microsoft Calling Plans or use the Direct Routing system if they prefer to use their own PSTN and carrier.

User Experience in Microsoft Teams vs Zoom

One of the primary reasons for the popular adoption of Zoom is that it has a relatively smaller learning curve to start using all its features. Users can start a meeting with a simple button click with minimal additional support.

While you cannot complain about the lack of user-friendliness in Teams, it could take slightly longer to get used to the applications primarily because of the host of additional features that it provides. It is worth noting that Teams is a tool that was designed to cater to the needs of businesses while Zoom is more of a general-purpose collaboration tool.

Integrations in Teams vs Zoom

Microsoft Teams stands head-and-shoulders above Zoom in terms of its integration capabilities with other applications and services. Users would be able to access and collaborate with peers on widely used Microsoft applications like Word and Excel within the Teams environment. Besides, there is a rich offering of third-party applications integrated with APIs to enable teams to collaborate online within Microsoft Teams.

Zoom users too can enjoy extensibility with the help of add-ons. Interestingly, there is even a Zoom integration for Microsoft Teams for users to conduct Zoom Meetings within Teams.