Zoom vs. Google Meet vs. Teams in 2026: Which One to Use

Pick Microsoft Teams if your company runs on Microsoft 365, Google Meet if it runs on Google Workspace, and Zoom if you need a standalone tool for large meetings, webinars or free local recording. On free plans, Google Meet and Teams both give group calls 60 minutes; free Zoom stops every meeting at 40 minutes.

Choosing between the three rarely starts from a blank page. A client sends a Zoom link, the office calendar adds a Teams link to every invite, and the agency you hire works out of Google Calendar. This guide puts the three side by side on what you'll actually run into: free time limits, what the paid plans cost, how many people fit, where recordings end up, which AI notes come included, and how easy each is for a guest to join.

Zoom vs. Google Meet vs. Teams at a glance

The fastest way to compare them is on the limits that end a call or block a feature. Figures below come from Zoom's pricing page, Google's Meet requirements page and edition comparison, and Microsoft's free Teams page, Teams Essentials page and Teams limits documentation, checked in October 2026.

If you only need two of the three, my Google Meet vs. Zoom comparison goes deeper on that pair.

Which free plan gives you the most?

For free group calls, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams tie at 60 minutes and Zoom trails at 40. For free one-on-ones, Teams allows up to 30 hours and Meet up to 24 hours on a computer, while free Zoom still stops at 40 minutes. All three let up to 100 people join a free meeting.

Zoom Basic (free)

• 40 minutes per meeting and up to 100 participants, per Zoom's pricing page.
• Local recording to your own computer. Neither free Meet nor free Teams promises that.
• 3 meeting summaries a month for meetings you host, plus a small allowance of other AI uses.

Google Meet with a free Google account

• Up to 100 participants. One-on-ones hosted on a computer run up to 24 hours; calls with three or more people end at 60 minutes, according to Google's Meet help page.
• A warning at 50 minutes. Everyone hears a chime and sees a notice that the meeting is about to end, and the host can upgrade to keep going.
• No recording on a free account. Google's premium features page lists recording with the Google One Premium 2 TB plan and the Google AI Pro and Ultra plans.

Microsoft Teams (free)

• Group meetings up to 60 minutes and one-on-ones up to 30 hours, per Microsoft's free Teams page.
• Up to 100 participants per meeting.
• 5 GB of cloud storage per user for files.

A free group call on Teams once cut out on me right at the hour, with three of us halfway through deciding who would take which part of a project. Nobody had been watching the clock. Since then, if a free call has more than two people and could run long, I book 50 minutes in the invite and say so at the start.

How much do Zoom, Google Meet and Teams cost?

Microsoft Teams is the cheapest way to pay for meetings alone: Teams Essentials costs $4 a seat each month on a yearly commitment. Google Meet only comes inside Google Workspace, from $7 a seat, and Zoom's paid plans start at $14.16 a seat on yearly billing.

Sources: Teams Essentials, Microsoft 365 Business Basic after its July 1, 2026 price rise from $6 to $7, Google's Workspace billing page (updated October 22, 2026) and Zoom's pricing page. Enterprise plans for all three are priced through sales.

The prices don't buy the same thing, and that matters more than the headline number. Teams Essentials is Teams on its own, with no business email. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 Business Basic are whole office suites with email on your own domain. Zoom is the only one you'd buy purely as a video tool.

When I priced meetings for a three-person project, the gap was wider than I expected. Three seats of Teams Essentials came to $12 a month, three seats of Workspace Business Starter to $21, and three seats of Zoom Pro to $42.48, all on annual billing. Workspace Starter, though, couldn't record, so the honest comparison was Business Standard at $42 for the three of us, almost exactly the Zoom Pro price, with email and Docs thrown in.

How many people can join, and for how long?

On business plans, Microsoft Teams and Zoom Business both allow 300 people per meeting, while Google Meet ranges from 100 on Business Starter to 500 on Business Plus. Teams and Zoom paid meetings run up to 30 hours; every Google Workspace edition allows 24 hours.

• Microsoft Teams: Microsoft's limits page lists 300 people on Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium and Teams Essentials, and up to 1,000 on enterprise plans such as Microsoft 365 E3 and E5. Meetings, webinars and town halls have a 30-hour limit.
• Google Meet: Google's edition comparison lists 100 on Business Starter, 150 on Business Standard, 500 on Business Plus and Enterprise Standard, and 1,000 on Enterprise Plus, where people beyond 500 join view-only.
• Zoom: Zoom's pricing page lists 100 on Pro and 300 on Business, with a Large Meeting add-on for up to 1,000. Webinars for 500 attendees come with Enterprise.

Teams has one change worth knowing if you run big internal broadcasts: Microsoft retired Teams live events on June 30, 2026, and points organizers to Teams town halls and webinars instead, according to the same limits page. Events already scheduled before that date are supported through February 28, 2027.

Recording, transcripts and AI notes

All three record and transcribe meetings, but on different plans and to different places. Zoom records locally for free and to its cloud on Pro; Google Meet records to Google Drive from Workspace Business Standard; Teams saves recordings to the organizer's OneDrive, or to SharePoint for channel meetings.

Zoom

Zoom's pricing page lists local recording on every plan, 10 GB of cloud recording per license on Pro and unlimited cloud recording on Enterprise. Paid plans include unlimited meeting summaries, AI note-taking and in-meeting questions; the free plan gets a small monthly allowance, including 3 meeting summaries.

Google Meet

Google Meet saves recordings and transcripts to Drive from Business Standard up, per Google's edition comparison, and Business Plus and Enterprise editions can start them automatically. The AI feature is Take notes for me. Google's Take notes for me page explains that the notes land in Docs, filed under a Google Meet folder in the organizer's Drive and attached to the Calendar event; anyone arriving late can catch up from a running summary, and the organizer gets a recap link by email. It works in eight languages, one per meeting, and Google recommends it for meetings between 15 minutes and 8 hours. For step-by-step help, see how to record a Google Meet.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft's recording guide says a recorded meeting is uploaded to the organizer's OneDrive, or to the channel's SharePoint site for a channel meeting, linked in the meeting chat and listed on the calendar event's recordings tab. An admin controls whether people can record at all, through meeting policies in the Teams admin center. A single recording stops at 4 hours or 1.5 GB and starts again automatically, per the limits page.

The AI summary is where Teams costs extra. Microsoft's Meeting Recaps help page says intelligent recaps require a Microsoft Copilot license or a Teams Premium license, and audio and video recaps require Copilot. Without either, you can still open the transcripts and recordings you have permission to see.

Joining from a browser, and what guests see

Google Meet is the easiest of the three for outside guests, because it runs in current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari with nothing to install. Zoom and Teams both work in a browser too, but Zoom recommends its desktop app and Teams limits what a browser can show.

• Google Meet runs in the browser, with apps for Android and iPhone, according to Google's requirements page.
• Zoom's web app brings "the full Zoom Workplace experience" to a browser with no download, but Zoom recommends the desktop app for the best audio and video, per its support article. By default, links open in the app unless an admin changes that.
• Microsoft Teams fully supports meetings in current Edge and Chrome, and in Firefox and Safari with some conditions. Microsoft's limits page notes that browser meetings show a single stream: either the current speaker's video or a screen share, not both.

That last limit caught me the first time a client's team sent me a Teams invite and I joined from Chrome. They shared a spreadsheet, and I lost sight of the person walking through it, so I couldn't tell who was talking about which row. For any Teams call where someone presents, I now install the app or join from my phone as a second screen.

Which one should you choose?

Choose the meeting tool that comes with the email and calendar your team already pays for, then add a second tool only for a job the first can't do. Work through these questions in order and stop at the first yes.

1. Does your company already pay for Microsoft 365 with Teams? Use Teams. Meetings, chat and recordings are already in the bill, and everyone you work with internally has the app.
2. Does your company already pay for Google Workspace? Use Google Meet. On Business Standard and up you have recording, breakout rooms and Take notes for me.
3. Do you mostly meet one-on-one and want to pay nothing? Teams (30 hours) or Meet (24 hours on a computer). Free Zoom ends those calls at 40 minutes.
4. Do you need a recording without paying? Zoom Basic, which saves recordings to your computer.
5. Do you run webinars or meetings with hundreds of outside people? Zoom, with Business for 300-person meetings and Enterprise for 500-person webinars.
6. Do you just need cheap, reliable meetings for a small team, with email handled elsewhere? Teams Essentials at $4 a user is the lowest paid price of the three.

Many teams end up with two. A common split is the suite's own tool for internal meetings and one or two Zoom licenses for the people who run webinars or customer training. Paying for Zoom Pro for everyone on top of Microsoft 365 or Workspace usually means paying for every internal meeting twice.

Whatever you pick for yourself, you'll keep joining the other two. Clients and partners send their own links, so keep all three working on your computer and test your camera and microphone in each one before a call that counts. If you're also choosing a chat tool, my Teams vs. Slack comparison covers that decision.

Do you need a separate AI note taker?

You don't need one if all your meetings happen in one tool and its AI notes come with your plan: Zoom Pro, an eligible Google Workspace edition, or Teams with Copilot or Teams Premium. A separate note taker earns its place when your calls are split across Zoom, Meet and Teams, because each built-in summary only covers its own app and saves to a different place.

Whichever writes the notes, read them before you forward them. Built-in summaries are good at topics and weaker on who agreed to what by when, which is the part people act on. If you're weighing a dedicated one, this roundup of meeting note takers lines up built-in and standalone options by free plan, limits and whether a bot joins the call.