Zoho Meeting vs. Zoom: Which Is Right For You?
What do you really need to be more efficient when you’re working from home?
As remote work becomes more commonplace, so too have online meeting platforms. Businesses all over the world use video conferencing platforms to stay connected with their remote teams and run their operations efficiently. However, with hundreds of platforms now available, choosing the one that best suits your requirements can be quite confusing.
Zoho Meeting vs. Zoom: An Overview
Zoho Meeting and Zoom are two of the top video conferencing options today. Choosing between one or the other comes down to understanding how their different features and functionalities will work best for an office’s core needs.
About Zoho Meeting
Best known for being a reliable, affordable, and comprehensive video conferencing service, Zoho Meeting is especially convenient for those already using the greater Zoho ecosystem. As a secure, cloud-based video conferencing platform, Zoho can conduct online meetings, web conferences, and webinars with ease. Regardless of whether you’re a small business or a major corporation, Zoho Meetings’ robust features can help businesses to connect with teams in real time via audio or video and ensure better collaboration through screen sharing.
About Zoom
Zoom’s popularity rose in recent years after becoming the go-to video conferencing platform for remote employees around the world. It’s an excellent, straightforward video and web conferencing tool that lets users conduct online meetings, virtual conferences, and webinars with real time audio and video feeds.
Zoho Meeting vs Zoom: Essential Features
Real-Time Online Meeting
One of the primary features of Zoho Meeting is its real-time online meeting capability, which connects team members via high definition audio, video, and screen sharing. Combined, these tools offer a seamless collaboration experience for remote teams that’s hard to beat.
Zoho Meeting is also built with WebRTC in mind, which allows users to launch instant meetings right from their browser. This means there’s no need to download and manage separate software in order to connect with remote teams. Additionally, Zoho Meeting provides a dedicated desktop application and a mobile application for both iOS and Android.
Zoom’s audio, video, and screen sharing features are similarly easy to use and convenient. The platform also supports web-based meetings, however the feature is available with a limited set of functionalities as opposed to Zoho Meeting’s more comprehensive options. Given the limited features of its web interface, users prefer to use the desktop and mobile version of the platform, which means users will need to take the additional step of downloading software.
Meeting Recording
Recording sessions are easy and quick with Zoho Meeting. With just a click of a button, you can begin recording meetings that can be automatically stored in a cloud space, easily accessible from the user’s account. Admin users can easily access, play, download and share the recordings with team members who need to be looped in.
Similarly, Zoom also offers a recording feature that allows users to record online meetings. Users are also able to access the recordings in the future, however where your recordings are stored will depend on whether you are subscribed to a free or paid plan.
Storage for Meeting Recordings
Zoho Meeting allows users to record a specific number of meetings per account, regardless of file size. This means that meeting recordings aren’t abruptly cut short due to storage space limitations.
On the other hand, Zoom provides different storage sizes for different subscription plans. Unlike Zoho Meeting, Zoom stops recording once the storage space limit is reached. This can be an issue for important meetings, in which case recordings are abruptly and unceremoniously cut mid-meeting.
Zoho Meeting vs Zoom: Pricing
Zoho has always been known for their affordability, especially given how comprehensive their collection of tools and features are. That said, the platform’s pricing tiers can conveniently accommodate the varying needs of companies, regardless if they’re SMBs or blue chip corporations.
Zoho Meeting offers three different paid subscription plans: Free, Meeting, and Webinar. Their variable pricing scheme makes it a great platform for companies who want a tool that can scale easily with their business needs and align with their budget.
For Zoom, while they do offer a great, no-credit card required free-forever plan, it is quite limited and any additional features will require upgrading to paid plans. They provide four pricing plans: Basic, Pro, Business, and Enterprise. Unlike Zoho Meeting, Zoom doesn’t offer a variable pricing model. Each plan comes with a fixed price and a limited number of participants.
| Zoho Meeting | Zoom | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | ||
| Time limit for meetings | 60 minutes | 40 minutes |
| Maximum number of participants | 100 participants | 100 participants |
| Paid subscription | ||
| Paid plans | $3 per host/month (10 participants) $18 per host/month (250 participants) |
$14.99 per host/month (100 participants) |
| Time limit for meetings | 24 hours | 30 hours |
Zoho Meeting vs Zoom: Integrations
Integrations play a crucial role in making your online meeting platform a one-stop place to address all your business requirements.
Zoho Meeting comes with a wide range of integrations, including native ones like Zoho CRM, Zoho Mail, and Zoho Notebook. Apart from this, Zoho Meeting is also integrated with popular third-party apps like Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Slack, just to name a few, making Zoho Meeting a comprehensive platform.
Similarly, Zoom offers integrations with several third-party applications like Outlook, Google Calendar, Salesforce, and more. These integrations with collaboration and calendar tools help increase productivity among remote teams. They also have a dedicated marketplace for integrations that helps businesses improve their overall workflows.
Zoho Meeting vs Zoom: Security
Security is a priority when it comes to online meeting software as user information and data is constantly shared across the platform.
Zoho Meeting takes security seriously as evidenced by the platform making sure that audio and video on both host and participants’ ends are protected by DTLS-SRTP encryption. They also follow TLS 1.2 protocols and SHA 256 SSL certificates. Apart from these, Zoho Meeting provides two-factor authentication and the ability to restrict meetings to limited participants.
Because Zoho Meeting is natively built within the Zoho ecosystem, it has no dependencies on third-party apps, and therefore won’t need to share user’s data for commercial reasons, which makes it preferable for businesses.
Unfortunately, one of the major drawbacks of Zoom is its security. Multiple incidents of “Zoom bombings”–where hackers would distrupt meetings–were reported. Of course, Zoom has proactively been more working on addressing this issue, but it is definitely a cause for concern. Zoom currently uses a 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and provides end-to-end encryption for all meetings, to ensure that communication stays between the host and participants. Also, users can enable two-factor authentication to strengthen security on the platform.
Zoho Meeting vs Zoom: Final Thoughts
Remote work is here to stay–and that means tools and platforms that will facilitate better collaboration and communication between teams will be necessary. Pitting the two most prominent names in online meeting software can give you a better understanding of how each one can potentially address diverse business needs.
Overall, Zoho Meeting, given its affordable plans, comprehensive features, and high quality audio, video, and security proves itself to be the best option for businesses across different industries. Still, it’s best to tailor your choice according to your company’s unique needs so be sure to give both platforms a trial run to understand how each platform can help meet your business requirements.