Nowadays, both Google Meet and Zoom are common names for the people. Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, digital communication has become a necessity for organizations like offices, schools, etc. These two video conferencing applications came to the rescue for remotely working employees and students.
Hosting digital meetings, conferences, webinars, online classes are now easy with Zoom and Google Meet. Students using this website know more about online education but since 2020 we all have been living in a new reality. Though both the platforms have some similar features, there are still plenty of differences that lie between the two.
Choosing the right video conferencing app for you might seem confusing at some point. This article is going to fetch you the answer you need.
What are the features of Zoom and Google Meet?
Zoom
Zoom (founded in 2011) is an American online video-conferencing application. It provides a high-quality video chat feature to its users and is widely used by educational institutions and offices. Other than this, text or voice chat are other features of it.
Some features of Zoom
1. No. of Members: You can organize unlimited meetings with up to 100-500 (free version- 100, paid-500) members.
2. Screen Sharing: You can share your device’s screen with others in the meeting. This comes really handy when attending a work meeting or presentation.
3. Splitting Screens: you can use your zoom meeting window as breakout rooms. The maximum number of splitting up your meeting sessions is fifty.
4. Texting: While someone is on a video call, he can still send or receive chat messages during or after the meeting.
5. Record: This feature allows you to record the on-going meeting on your device and save it in the cloud.
6. Call to join the Meeting: the dial-in option lets the user call any other participant during a meeting.
7. Encryption: Zoom’s been questioned several times because of its encryption and security policy. No. of times, hackers have got access to users’ personal data. This resulted in Zoom changing the entire encryption policy. The new policy or GCM encryption is more secure and safe.
8. Beauty Mode: This feature is available on many social media applications, and the same is available on Zoom too. It’s a great feature and can turn your boring meetings funny.
9. Security and Privacy: Like other video conferencing apps, Zoom also gives you basic features like turning the camera or microphone off. This feature is quite secure to some extent.
10. Connect other apps: The program is flexible enough to integrate with other programs to schedule other meetings and continue discussions. Google Calendar, Slack, Microsoft Office are some of the examples of such apps.
Cost
With Zoom’s free service, you can organize unlimited meetings with up to 100 members. However, the paid plans can provide you some extra features. They have four types of plans with added features.
Google Meet
Google Meet Google Meet (previously known as Hangouts Meet) is Google’s own video calling application. It provides secure and high-quality video calling to its users.
Some Features of Google Meet
1. No. of Members: Organize unlimited meetings with up to 100 members.
2. Add Live Captions: One can put an English caption on the ongoing video calls.
3. Cancelling Background noise: One can omit any background noise to host a peaceful video meeting.
4. Text messaging: Same as Zoom, any participant can send a text message to other participants during the meeting.
5. Dial-in: One can call any number irrespective of local or international while they are on the video-meet.
6. Adding other apps: Some applications like Gmail, Google Classroom, Google Calendar and other apps of Google are already there when you connect Meet. In order to have an effortless meeting, you can even integrate other apps like Slack, Trello, etc.
7. Security: Every Google app is trusted and 100 percent secure, and Google Meet is also one of them. It provides security features like an end to end encryption, keeping all the valuable information of their users safe.
8. Screen Sharing: Like Zoom, Google Meet also has the feature of screen sharing. You can easily share the screen of your device with other members in the meeting.
Cost
The free version of Google Meet offers you unlimited meetings for up to 1 hour, and 100 members can join the meeting. However, there are two other paid plans named G Suite Essentials and G Suit Enterprise. Both of them offer some extra and helpful features.
Small & Quick Meetings—Google Meet is the ideal one
Both Google Meet and Zoom offer you to organize large meetings. However, there are some crucial features that Zoom provides, and Google Meet lacks them. This probably because Google Meet is extremely easy to use, and you don’t need to download any other application. You can simply visit Google Meet’s official website on the web, log in with your Gmail, and you are good to go.
For this reason, Google Meet is considered really handy for a sudden, quick and compact meeting.
Hosting Large Meetings—Try Zoom
During this pandemic caused by the covid19 outbreak, Zoom became an important part of everybody’s official life. The popularity and trust that Zoom earned throughout these months are amazing. It is very tough for any other Video Calling application to compete with Zoom. With Zoom, you can organize or attend large scale video calling sessions. The exciting and useful features make it more interesting to use.
When it comes to Large Scale and long meetings, Zoom comes to everybody’s mind.
Zoom or Google Meet—which one is more secure?
Comparing both the security features of Zoom and Google Meet can shed some light on the above-mentioned question.
1. Default Security: Since the rise of Zoom, ‘Zoombombing’ has always been an irritating thing to their users. Zoombombing is the unwanted interference of unknown people into a meeting. These are usually a group of people who disturbs the ongoing meeting with their awkward activities. This hampers the people attending the meeting, and it finally results in shutting down the meeting. Still, Google Meet’s security features do not let these things happen.
2. Steps against Hijackers: The meeting links of Zoom use 9-, 10- or 11- digits. This makes it easy for the Zoombombers who don’t have any ready to use IDs; they just enter random digits and accidentally find a valid ID.
Google Meet uses a strong 25 character string for their meeting IDs, which makes it very difficult for unwanted hijackers to enter into the meeting. They can join the meeting if they get an invitation from the host, and in case any hijacker sends a joining request, the host must accept it for them to join. This makes trespassing into Google Meet meetings extremely difficult.
3. Non-Negotiable Privacy: Zoom always faced allegations for their act of sharing personal user data to other third-party applications, which also includes Facebook. Since then, Zoom has stopped sharing data with Facebook.
However, Google Meet stores its customers’ valuable data into the Google Cloud, keeping it absolutely safe from internet hackers. The best thing is, they don’t use these data for any advertisement purposes.
4. Reliable Encryption in Transit: Zoom claimed that they use end-to-end encryption to secure users’ data which is totally incorrect. Researchers found that Zoom’s encryption algorithm has serious issues in it; this makes it extremely easy for hackers to steal their users’ personal data. Adding to the point, some of the encryption keys used by zoom were issued by Chinese servers even when all the participants are from other countries. This means that if China demands an encryptions key from a particular meeting, Zoom has to give it to them because they are legally obliged.
In Google Meet meetings, they use high-tech security measures. Plus they use a special encryption key, which only lives as long as the meeting. This means there’s no existence of the key when the meeting gets over.
5. No Desktop Software to install: In order to use Zoom, you need to install the Desktop application for it. While downloading the application, many unwanted malware files can get installed into your PC, which acts as a carrier to carry all your personal data to the hackers.
In Google Meet, you don’t have to install any application. Just go to your browser, search Google Meet and join your meeting, reducing the risk of malware attacks.
6. Works Same on Desktop: Zoom users have complained that they don’t have many features on the Desktop version that the mobile version has. One such feature is the meeting control, but Google Meet provides the exact same experience in both the devices.
Generally, Google Meet is considered more secure than Zoom. Google Meet encrypts the messages, but it does not use end to end encryption. It means the data is only encrypted between your device and Google’s server.
Questions have been asked against Zoom’s security because it downloads many desktop applications which can leak anyone’s confidential data. There are some major security issues found by researchers. There are some legal complaints about information getting leaked from Zoom. So, security-wise, Google Meet takes the first place.
Conclusion
The ultimate thought is that both Zoom and Google meet have been saviors in the COVID situation. Online classes, meetings, conferences—everything was possible for those two platforms.
Comparing both the Meet and Zoom features, one can claim that Google Meet is more efficient and user friendly. Businesses or companies having Gsuite accounts are already capable of using Google Meet. On the other hand, personal Google account users are too eligible to access Google Meet, but the usage time is limited (60 minutes).
However, for larger meetings or conferences, Zoom is undoubtedly the best one. The types of equipment generally used in case of any conference can get easily integrated with Zoom.
A true fact is that the premium version of Zoom is costlier than Google Meet. However, the premium version has more features and tools. So, in the end, use any video conferencing platforms that suit your needs and get your job done.