Choosing between Zoom and Microsoft Teams used to be a straightforward call: Zoom for meetings, Teams for everything else. In 2026 that line has blurred. Both platforms now bundle agentic AI, live translation and enterprise-grade security, and both have restructured their pricing since 2024. This video conferencing comparison looks at what each tool actually costs today, where the real limits sit, and which team each one fits.
Two changes matter more than any feature list. Zoom folded its meeting product into the broader Zoom Workplace platform, and Microsoft was forced to sell Microsoft 365 without Teams after a European antitrust settlement. Both shifts change the maths on which platform is cheaper for you.
Key Insights
- Zoom’s free plan caps meetings at 40 minutes; the free Teams plan allows 60.
- Microsoft 365 Business Basic costs $7.00 per user per month with Teams and $5.40 without it.
- Zoom Pro starts at $14.16 per user per month billed annually, with 30-hour meetings.
- Teams caps interactive participants at 300 on business plans and 1,000 on enterprise plans.
- Zoom Webinars scale to 100,000 attendees with capacity add-ons; Teams town halls reach the same ceiling with an Attendee Capacity Pack.
- Zoom AI Companion is also sold standalone for $10 a month; Teams Premium costs $10 per user per month.
What Changed Since 2024
If you last compared these tools a couple of years ago, three things have moved.
Zoom rebranded its core product as Zoom Workplace, an open collaboration platform that wraps meetings, chat, phone, docs and whiteboard into one app rather than a standalone conferencing tool. At Enterprise Connect in March 2026 the company pushed further in that direction, announcing custom no-code AI agents, an AI-first chat experience, live voice translation and deepfake detection.
Microsoft, meanwhile, stopped bundling Teams with its productivity suites. After the European Commission accepted binding commitments in September 2025, Microsoft sells Microsoft 365 and Office 365 both with and without Teams worldwide. The practical effect shows up on Microsoft’s own price list: Business Basic is $7.00 per user per month with Teams and $5.40 without.
The third change is AI. Both vendors now treat meeting summaries, action items and transcription as table stakes rather than premium extras, which shifts the comparison away from raw meeting functionality and toward what happens after the call ends.
Zoom Workplace in 2026
Zoom’s strength is still the thing it was built for: getting people into a call quickly and keeping the video and audio stable once they are there. A meeting link works in a browser without an account, which matters when half your calls are with clients, candidates or suppliers who do not share your software stack.
The free Basic tier hosts up to 100 participants for 40 minutes. Pro lifts the duration to 30 hours at the same participant cap. Business raises the ceiling to 300 participants, and Enterprise supports up to 1,000 with a 250-licence minimum. For anything larger, Zoom Webinars scale to 100,000 attendees with add-on capacity.
AI Companion is the other half of the story. Zoom announced AI Companion 3.0 in December 2025 with agentic workflows that turn conversations into tasks, and it also sells the assistant standalone for $10 a month without a paid Workplace licence. Basic users can try selected capabilities at no cost. If your team already runs an AI meeting notes workflow through a third-party tool, it is worth checking whether the built-in version now covers the same ground.
Microsoft Teams in 2026
Microsoft Teams is not really a conferencing tool with chat attached. It is a collaboration hub where meetings are one surface among several: persistent channels, shared files in SharePoint, tasks, and deep hooks into Outlook, Word and Excel.
That integration is the whole argument for Teams. If your documents, calendars and identity management already live in Microsoft 365, Teams removes a layer of friction that no competitor can match. Files opened in a meeting are the same files sitting in your channel. Permissions follow your existing tenant. Nothing has to be re-provisioned.
The free plan allows 60-minute group meetings with up to 100 participants and 5 GB of cloud storage per user. Teams Essentials at $4.00 per user per month (paid yearly) lifts meetings to 30 hours and 300 participants without the rest of the Office apps. From there you move into the Microsoft 365 suites.
Teams Premium sits on top as a $10 per user per month add-on covering intelligent recap, meeting branding and advanced protection for sensitive meetings. It requires a paid Teams licence underneath it, so treat it as a second line item rather than a plan.
Pricing Compared
Headline prices are only half the picture, because the two vendors package things differently. Zoom sells a communications platform. Microsoft sells an office suite that happens to include one.
Zoom Workplace (per user, per month, billed annually):
- Basic: free — 40-minute meetings, 100 participants
- Pro: $14.16 — 30-hour meetings, 100 participants
- Business: $15.58 for the first year, then $18.33 — 300 participants
- Business Plus: $19.60 for the first year, then $24.50
- Enterprise: custom pricing, 250-licence minimum
Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 (per user, per month, paid yearly):
- Teams free: 60-minute group meetings, 100 participants
- Teams Essentials: $4.00 — 30-hour meetings, 300 participants
- Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $7.00 with Teams, $5.40 without
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot: $23.50 with Teams, $20.30 without
- Teams Premium add-on: $10.00
On a pure per-seat basis Teams wins, and it is not close — Essentials undercuts Zoom Pro by roughly ten dollars a seat. But the comparison only holds if Teams Essentials genuinely covers your needs. If you would otherwise pay for Microsoft 365 anyway, Teams is close to free at the margin. If you already run Google Workspace, adding Teams means paying for a suite you will not use, and Zoom is the cleaner buy. Our Google Workspace review covers that third path in more detail, and the same logic applies when you compare cloud storage and collaboration suites generally.
Meeting Limits That Actually Matter
Participant caps are where marketing copy tends to drift from reality, so here are the current numbers.
Both platforms allow meetings of up to 30 hours on paid plans, which means duration is no longer a differentiator outside the free tiers. Zoom caps standard meetings at 100 participants on Pro, 300 on Business and up to 1,000 on Enterprise. Teams caps interactive participants at 300 on business plans; enterprise plans support 1,000 interactive plus 10,000 view-only attendees, for 11,000 total.
For large events, Teams town halls handle up to 10,000 view-only attendees and scale to 100,000 with an Attendee Capacity Pack. Zoom Webinars reach the same 100,000 ceiling through add-on capacity. One practical detail teams miss: Teams recordings stop and automatically restart at four hours or 1.5 GB, whichever comes first.
If your calendar is full of small internal calls, none of these ceilings will ever bind. In that case the more useful question is how to run fewer and better meetings — the platform matters less than the defaults you set. Shortening your standard slot from 60 to 45 minutes, in the spirit of Parkinson’s Law, will do more for your week than any feature comparison.
AI Features Compared
This is the fastest-moving part of both products, and it is where the pricing models diverge.
Zoom bundles AI Companion with paid Workplace accounts and, since AI Companion 3.0, sells it standalone for $10 a month for people who do not want a full Zoom licence. The 3.0 release moved beyond summaries into agentic workflows — turning discussion into tasks and triggering actions in connected systems like Salesforce, ServiceNow and Box.
Microsoft splits its AI across two products. Basic transcription and captions come with Teams; intelligent recap and the more advanced meeting AI sit in Teams Premium at $10 per user per month, while Copilot is priced separately again inside the Microsoft 365 suites.
Both now offer live translation in meetings, though each covers a limited set of languages inside its own platform. If you run genuinely multilingual calls, compare the built-in options against dedicated real-time translation tools before assuming the native feature is enough. And if you are building broader automation on top of meeting output, the patterns in our guide to agentic AI workflows apply to both platforms.
Security and Compliance
Zoom’s 2020 security problems are genuinely historical at this point. The company added end-to-end encryption, and in May 2024 it became the first major provider to ship post-quantum end-to-end encryption for meetings, protecting sessions against future decryption attempts. Waiting rooms, passcodes and host controls are on by default.
Microsoft’s advantage is not encryption strength but administrative depth. Teams inherits your tenant’s conditional access, data loss prevention, retention policies and compliance boundaries. For a regulated organisation, that single control plane is often the deciding factor — the security question is really an identity and governance question. Teams Premium adds watermarking and sensitivity labels for meetings that need extra protection.
Neither choice removes the need for a wider architecture. If your workforce is distributed across cloud, home and office endpoints, the platform is one node in a distributed security architecture, not a substitute for one.
Integrations and Ecosystem
Zoom runs an app marketplace covering project management, CRM, scheduling and note-taking, and its API is widely supported by third-party tools. The strength here is breadth: Zoom integrates outward into whatever stack you already run.
Teams integrates inward. Its deepest connections are to Microsoft’s own products, and the experience of pinning a SharePoint file or an Excel sheet into a channel is smoother than anything a third party can bolt on. Beyond Microsoft, Teams also hosts apps from vendors like Asana and Trello, and a growing class of AI assistants that live inside Slack and Teams rather than in a separate window.
Both connect to the tools that surround a meeting rather than sit inside it: automated scheduling tools that end the back-and-forth of finding a slot, and the wider set of productivity apps your team already uses. If chat volume is the problem rather than meeting volume, Teams and Slack sit closer together than Teams and Zoom do — our Slack review and this Slack versus Teams comparison cover that ground, and the habits in our guide to instant messaging boundaries matter more than the logo on the app.
Who Should Choose Zoom
Zoom fits you if meetings with people outside your organisation are a large share of your calendar. Consultants, recruiters, educators, sales teams and client-facing freelancers all benefit from a platform guests can join in one click without an account or a download.
It also fits organisations that are not standardised on Microsoft. If your documents live in Google Drive or Notion, buying a Microsoft suite to get Teams is an expensive way to acquire a conferencing tool.
Finally, Zoom suits anyone running webinars and virtual events at scale, where the dedicated Webinars and Events products are more mature than the equivalent Microsoft path.
Who Should Choose Microsoft Teams
Teams fits you if your organisation already pays for Microsoft 365. At that point the marginal cost is close to zero, the identity and compliance story is already solved, and the file collaboration is genuinely better than a bolt-on.
It also fits organisations where the meeting is the smaller part of the work. Persistent channels, shared task lists and files that stay put after the call ends make Teams the better home for ongoing project work, in the same way that other team collaboration tools are judged on what survives the meeting rather than what happens during it.
And it fits regulated industries. Retention policies, legal hold, data residency and conditional access are handled at tenant level rather than per application — a meaningful advantage when auditors get involved.
Conclusion
The honest answer in 2026 is that both platforms are good enough at video that video quality should not decide it. Both do 1080p, both handle unstable connections well, both run 30-hour meetings on paid plans.
What should decide it is the rest of your stack. If you are a Microsoft organisation, Teams is the obvious and cheapest choice, and Teams Essentials at $4.00 per user per month is the best value in this comparison for teams that need meetings and little else. If you are not a Microsoft organisation, or if most of your meetings involve external guests, Zoom’s frictionless join and stronger events tooling justify the higher per-seat price.
The one thing worth resisting is buying both. Plenty of companies end up paying for Zoom and Teams simultaneously because nobody made a decision, and the cost of that indecision usually exceeds the difference between the two. Pick the one your ecosystem points to, set sensible defaults around it, and spend the saved effort on managing the calendar instead.
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