Google Meet vs. Zoom - Which is Better?

September 03, 2020 September 06, 2020

When it comes to video calling nowadays Zoom has become the most popular option out there. But now that Google has announced that Google Meet is available for free I think it's time to dive in and see how it actually compares to Zoom and which one of these video calling services you may want to use. Now Google has actually been doing video calling for as long as Zoom has.

Both had their initial product launch in 2013, however, Zoom has historically been focused on business conferencing for education and businesses, competing with other vendors like Cisco's WebEx andBluejeans. Google's first video called the product was Hangouts and that was mainly focused on the consumer market to compete with Skype. Over the years Google has debuted additional communication products like Google Duo and then finally Google Meet in 2017 which targeted Google's G Suite enterprise clients. Fast-forward to just a few months ago and it seems like Zoom took over the world in a matter of days when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Why did that happen you may ask.

Well out of all of the video calling services out there, Zoom's is by far the easiest to use when actually trying to get into a meeting you just download an app put in a code, and bam you're in the meeting now this of course led to an infamous issue that got its own name Zoom bombing where people who typically were not originally invited to a meeting would get access to the code come into the meeting and would stream inappropriate videos on famous people Zoom calls zoom has since added some security features to prevent this while Zoom calls are dead easy to use and free they don't last forever and if you've used a free Zoom account you've likely already run into that 40-minute time limit for a Zoom meeting also if you try to dial into a Zoom meeting through a telephone line that can have an additional cost this is one of the major differences between google meet and zoom

Google Meet has a time limitcap of 60 minutes for up to 100 participants however now throughSeptember that cap has been lifted up to 24 hours per meetinganother huge difference between these two platforms is that with Google Meetyou have to have a Google account and with zoom you do not have to have a zoomaccount to join a meeting you just download an app put in a codeand bam you're in the meeting now while zoom does have an app for the computeryou can use Zoom just in a browser as well though there are quite a fewfeatures missing from the web client like gallery view recording a meetingscheduling a one-time or recurring meeting pulls live-streaming share andannotate a whiteboard and all chat contact and setting menu toggles googlemeet works in any modern browser on a computer like Chrome, Firefox, Edge andSafari there's no app to download for meat on computers and it's wellintegrated now with Gmail as well as Google Calendar when you create aninvite on Google Calendar it just takes you one click to add a Google Meetinvite link all right so that's a little bit about the big differences betweenthese two platforms now let's take a look at the user experience and userinterface of Google Meet and Zoom and how they compare when you go to meetgoogle.

\com you see a pretty simple screen you can immediately start ameeting or enter a meeting code to join an existing meeting you also have theoption on the right-hand side to schedule a meeting when you fire up thezoom app on desktop you're presented with a simple layout a button to start anew meeting schedule an upcoming meeting join an existing meeting and sharescreen when you start a meeting on Zoom you're presented with a simple userinterface on the left side of the bottom bar you have controls to turn on and offyour video and microphone you now have a security button that when clicked givesyou quick actions that you can take to make your meeting more secure likeenabling a waiting room where people who want to join your meeting will waituntil you approve them to enter the meeting

you can also toggle on and offwhether or not you want to allow your participants to be able to share theirscreen chat rename themselves or unmute themselves from there there are buttonsto see the participants open up the chat and know that you can send individualchat messages to specific in a Zoom call as well as send messagesout to the entire group on the call which is pretty cool you also have abutton to record the meeting as well as add reactions you can change the meetingview up at the top right hand corner when you have multiple participants inyour meeting with gallery view being the most popular and the view that makesZoom look like Zoom now to gets the cool Zoom background replacement feature on aMac click on Zoom us preferences and then virtual background here you'll beable to create a virtual background or use your own photo as a background andthose are just some of the main popular features of Zoom there are of course alot of other settings and preferences you can enable with zoom now let's takea look at Google Meet when you click start a meeting it brings you to aholding screen where you can double check that your hair is good and thendecide whether or not you want to keep your camera and mic on before you enterthe meeting when you click into the meeting you'll see that fewer optionsare presented to you than in Zoom the bottom left hand corner shows you themeeting details which you can expand Center on the bottom bar or the buttonsto turn on and off your mic and camera as well as end the call you can clickthe people icon in the top right hand corner to see all of the participants inthe meeting and you can also access the chat in this area of the UI as well youcan send messages and links to all participants of your call but do noteyou cannot send messages to individual call participants in the right corner ofthe bottom bar you'll see a captions button when you enable this Google willautomatically do a live translation of whatever is said in the meeting which issomething that Zoom currently cannot do though they do have a closed captionfeature where somebody can type in closed captions for something like awebinar present now will allow you to share your current screen and if you'reon a Mac when you do this you'll need to click on the smaller version of yourscreen in the window that pops up and then click share for your screen to beshared Google does have a gallery view now that rival Zoom's that you can changeto when you have multiple people on the call to change the view click on thethree dots in the bottom bar and hit changelayout or if you do nothing it should automatically switch to a tiled viewwhen a certain number of people join the call the three dots menu also links tosettings where you can change your audio and visual settings for google meet I'veactually used both of these platforms on and off for over the past year now so Iknow what you're gonna ask me you're gonna ask me okay Josh tell me which oneI should use.

My answer there is it depends I'd say go use google meet if you just need a simple video calling solution because it works pretty well it's got basic features you don't have to download an app for it as long as everybody has a Google account it's gonna work really well for your situation and the biggest plus right now for using Google Meet is there is a no40-minute time limit the time limit per meeting is 24 hours now keep in mind that time limit will reduce to 60 minutes come September 2020.

Now if you need a video calling solution that has more advanced features like live-streaming or background replacement then I'd say yes you definitely want to use Zoom. It's the solution everybody has heard of and it works really well now if you've used both Google Meet and Zoom, let me know in the comments which platform you prefer, and if you liked this video and found it helps make sure you hit that thumbs up button below and subscribe to the channel to see more videos on tech platforms and comparisons between them like this one. Well, that'll do it for me, for 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder, thanks for watching.