Microsoft Teams Voice vs. Zoom

Which is the best choice for your business?

Ever since the coronavirus pandemic forced a large-scale shift to remote work, Microsoft Teams has evolved by leaps and bounds. But how does it stack up to Zoom? 

The impact of Microsoft Teams, especially during the pandemic, is undeniable. Moreover, in the past year, Microsoft has been hard at work improving Teams, adding features such as private channels, support for multiple windows, and live captions. It’s clear that Microsoft wants to position Teams as more than just a collaboration add-on for Office 365 — it intends to take on platforms such as Zoom.

One of the most significant steps in that regard came back in November 2020, when the Redmond, Washington tech giant announced that, until further notice, Teams would offer free all-day voice and video calling, with support for up to 300 participants and up. It also added the ability to create group 

chats with up to 250 people and to see up to 49 people simultaneously in a call, either through gallery view or a feature it refers to as Together Mode.

Users can also communicate with people on Teams without needing to have the app installed and through a browser interface, users can join Teams calls without having to create a Microsoft account. 

So with all that said, how does Microsoft Teams stack up to the competition?  Is it capable of taking on the likes of Zoom? Most importantly, which of the two platforms should your business use?

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams Overview

Launched by Microsoft in 2017 as a competitor to Slack and a replacement for Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams is a digital collaboration tool that’s heavily-integrated into Microsoft’s existing ecosystem. It primarily functions as part of Microsoft’s portfolio, with native integration for Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft SharePoint.

Microsoft Teams Features

The Microsoft Teams feature set is comprehensive. In addition to all the basics (voice chat, videoconferencing, messages, etc.), it offers: 

  • Integration with third-party ISV apps.
  • Message threading.
  • Support for process automation and chatbots. 
  • Advanced analytics.
  • PSTN support.
  • Searchable channels
  • Screen sharing and recording.
  • Audio/video recording. 
  • Threaded Messaging. 
  • Guest access.

Strengths of Microsoft Teams

Weaknesses of Microsoft Teams

Strengths of Microsoft Teams
  • Strong integration with other Microsoft products, such as Office 365
  • Powerful API
  • Ability to search for and back up files
  • Bundled with Office 365 by default
  • Easy meeting scheduling
  • Live collaboration
Weaknesses of Microsoft Teams
  • High resource requirement
  • Inability to add/manage PSTN Voice without third-party integrations
  • Can be difficult to configure and deploy
  • No native support for multiple workspaces/accounts
  • Inability to delete chats
  • Permission controls are somewhat lacking

Who Should Use Microsoft Teams?

Although anyone can use Teams, you’ll get the most ouf of it if your organization has already invested into other Microsoft products.Teams also tends to be best-suited for larger businesses, especially those with extensive desktop infrastructure.

What is Zoom?

Zoom Overview

In many ways, Zoom began as the anti-Teams. Although it’s significantly better now, Microsoft Teams suffered from the same issue as most early meeting apps, being cumbersome for both IT and end users. Zoom was, at least in part, born out of frustration with Teams and its competitors. 

It’s intended to be a less expensive, less complicated tool not just for workplace communication, but communication in general.

Zoom Features

Like Teams, Zoom has all the basics you’d expect in a collaboration app, such as breakout rooms and file sharing. Other features include:

  • Support for webinars and other digital events. 
  • Audio & video recording.
  • Screen recording. 
  • Screen and file sharing.
  • Channel-based collaboration. 
  • Annotation.

Strengths of Zoom

Weaknesses of Zoom

Strengths of Zoom
  • Intuitive
  • User-friendly interface
  • Well-priced
  • Integration with Google Calendar
  • Easy to scale
Weaknesses of Zoom
  • No IT command center
  • Has suffered multiple data leaks and breaches
  • Security issues surrounding encryption and meeting invites
  • Poor approach to privacy

Who Should Use Zoom?

Generally, if you don’t plan to discuss sensitive matters in meetings and your business does not operate in a regulated sector, Zoom is a safe choice. Beyond that, Zoom isn’t really marketed or designed for any specific type of user.

Pricing

Microsoft Teams

The big draw of Teams is that it comes bundled as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription, and is also available for download as a free, standalone app. The Microsoft Teams pricing tiers and related features can be found below. Note that all tiers of Teams include the following unless otherwise stated: 

  • Custom backgrounds
  • Screen sharing
  • Scheduling
  • Voice and video
  • Guest access
  • Real-time collaboration
  • Excel, Word, and PowerPoint web apps
  • Data encryption
  • 300 users per meeting
  • 24 hour meeting time limit

Free

Microsoft 365 Business Basic ($5/user/month, paid annually)

Microsoft 365 Business Standard ($12.50/user/month, paid annually)

Office 365 E3 ($20/user/month, paid annually)

Free
  • 500K max users
  • 10 GB total file storage
  • 2 GB of file attachments per user
Microsoft 365 Business Basic ($5/user/month, paid annually)
  • 300 max users
  • 1 TB OneDrive storage
  • Exchange email hosting, Microsoft SharePoint, Yammer, Planner, etc.
  • SSO
  • MFA
  • Auditing/Reporting
  • Administrative tools/analytics
  • 24/7/365 support
Microsoft 365 Business Standard ($12.50/user/month, paid annually)
  • All features offered by Basic
  • Desktop Office 365 Installation
  • Microsoft Bookings
Office 365 E3 ($20/user/month, paid annually)
  • All features in Business Standard
  • Up to 500K users
  • Online events with up to 10K people
  • Unlimited cloud storage
  • Data loss prevention
  • Core eDiscovery
  • FastTrack deployment

Zoom

Rather than offering per-user pricing, licenses for Zoom Meetings are provisioned at a single rate, with add-ons like audioconferencing and Large Meetings. Zoom offers separate plans for meetings/chat, phone, meeting rooms, and video webinars. There’s also Zoom United, which combines meetings, chat, and phone functionality into a single package.

The price tiers for Zoom Meetings can be found below. All prices are per license.

Basic (Free)

Pro ($149.90/Year)

Business ($199.90/Year)

Enterprise ($240/Year)

Basic (Free)
  • Up to 100 participants
  • Unlimited one-on-one meetings
  • Group meetings up to 40 minutes long
  • Private chat
  • Group chat
Pro ($149.90/Year)
  • Maximum of 9 licenses per account
  • All features of Basic, with group meetings up to 30 hours long.
  • Social media streaming
  • 1 gigabyte of cloud recording per license
  • Large Meetings addon can increase participants from 100 to 1000
Business ($199.90/Year)
  • Minimum purchase of 10 licenses
  • All features of Pro
  • SSO
  • Transcripts
  • Managed domains
  • Apply company branding to Zoom
Enterprise ($240/Year)
  • Minimum purchase of 50 licenses. 
  • All features of Business
  • Unlimited cloud storage
  • Up to 500 participants per meeting

Security & Privacy

Although Zoom and Teams look relatively similar from a security standpoint at first glance, Teams has a significant edge. 

Microsoft Teams is secure by design, built on the foundation of the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle. Teams-related cyber incidents are rare, and the platform’s integration with Microsoft Azure adds yet another layer of security. That said, Microsoft did allow a critical security bug in Microsoft Exchange to go unpatched for several months.

Microsoft has, to its credit, always been explicit with how it leverages user data. Anything collected through its products and services is used exclusively to improve those offerings, and not sold to advertisers. Zoom, meanwhile, has been in hot water multiple times for sharing user data with companies like Facebook. 

Zoom’s original privacy policy, revised last year, was concerning. Features such as attention tracking, which alert a host when someone is not focused on the Zoom window, feel overtly invasive. On the security side of things, the company has halted all development of new features to harden its platform, and only appointed a Chief Information Security Officer last year. 

Zoom and Teams also handle meeting security differently. With Teams, you join meetings using either a conference ID number or a URL. Users joining a Microsoft Teams meeting typically must be admitted by the host after entering the lobby.

Zoom exclusively uses conference IDs. Although it’s since fixed the problem, prior to the pandemic it was possible to join a random meeting simply by entering a random ID number. Because there were no PIN codes attached, there was no way to stop people from “Zoom Bombing” meetings.

File Sharing & Document Management

With Microsoft Teams, users are able to share files, collaborate on those documents in real time, and store them in Microsoft SharePoint. Zoom only allows file sharing. Files are also limited to 512 MB in Zoom, whiile Teams has an upper limit of 100 GB per file. 

Although Zoom is technically capable of integrating with Microsoft 365, the integration by nature isn’t as tight as it is with Teams. If document collaboration is non-negotiable, Teams is the better choice.

Task & Project Management

Teams also features calendar integration, task lists, and a project management tool called Planner. These are all available in Teams out of the box. Zoom, while it can support this functionality, must rely on third-party integrations to do so.

Telephony

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams provides users with two options for telephony.

  • Microsoft Teams Business Voice. A cloud-based Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone solution, Teams Voice supports PSTN connectivity, multiple phone numbers, dial-in numbers, and inbound/outbound calls. 
  • Microsoft Direct Routing. Microsoft also works with multiple direct routing partners, each of which is capable of adding telephony directly into the app.
  • 3rd Party (G12) UCaaS Integration.  Because Teams can integrate direct routing partners, it benefits from additional layers of redundancy and reliability. Partners such as G12 Communications can also expand the offering by combining a Cloud PBX platform with the Teams interface  
 
Zoom

Zoom Phone represents Zoom’s telephony option, which as stated earlier is available either as an individual service or as part of Zoom United. It provides everything you’d expect of a telephony solution, including user provisioning/management, call quality metrics, usage data, and voice encryption. Zoom Phone subscribers also have access to call routing, auto attendants, and IVR. 

Which is Better, Microsoft Teams or Zoom?

Whether you choose Zoom or Microsoft Teams comes down to a few factors.

First is how heavily you’ve invested into the Microsoft ecosystem. If your business extensively uses Microsoft’s products and services, Teams adds a great deal more value. If you’re a mobile-first business or don’t use many Microsoft products, Teams is somewhat less attractive as an offering.

There’s also the matter of data security. While both Microsoft and Zoom have demonstrated poor judgement before, the issues with Zoom are typically far more egregious. Even if the company has been working hard to get its security practices and controls up to standard, you may not want to trust it with anything sensitive or regulated. 

Finally, on the telephony side of things, Zoom tends to offer more calling features out of the box along with a lower total

cost of ownership, while Microsoft Business Voice is geared more towards internal collaboration. 

It’s worth noting, too, that Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Business Voice are targeted towards traditional knowledge workers, while Zoom Phone is primarily meant for sales agents and customer support representatives.  The real separation, however, is evident with partners. Combining a UcaaS provider or Direct Routing Partner such as G12 allows an SMB-Enterprise customer to gain far more from Teams than Zoom.

Microsoft Teams vs. Zoom: Final Verdict

If your business needs Direct Routing or the capabilities of another, more established phone system, Microsoft Teams is the clear winner. Although competition between the two solutions is tight, Zoom is ultimately better-suited for personal use, while Teams is geared towards enterprise users, with a more comprehensive feature set to match.

Connect to Teams

Microsoft Teams is redefining the way organizations around the world communicate. G12’s Connect to Teams portfolio gives you the flexibility you need to drive the most value out of your Microsoft Teams solution. Stay connected, collaborative, and productive—from anywhere.

Connect to Teams

Direct Routing

Turn Microsoft Teams into a unified calling solution that’s directly tied into the public switched telephone network.

Connect to Teams

Cloud PBX

Modernize your PBX system and access enhanced calling features directly within Microsoft Teams with our feature-rich Cloud PBX solution.

Connect to Teams

IP PBX

Experience everything Microsoft Teams has to offer without needing to upgrade your existing IP PBX phone system.