Google Meet vs Zoom: limits, features, and which one to run your meeting on

Zoom gives you more meeting mechanics: breakout rooms on every plan, local recording without paying, and deeper host controls. Google Meet gives you a longer free group meeting and zero setup if your organisation already runs Google Workspace. Most teams choose on which suite they already pay for, then live with the feature gaps.

On Spotsaas, Zoom holds a 4.44 rating from 5,971 reviews and Google Meet holds 4.4 from 506 reviews, inside a video conferencing software category of 81 products.

Google Meet vs Zoom time limit on the free plans

This is the single most-searched detail, and the answer is not symmetrical.

Zoom’s free Basic plan caps a meeting at 40 minutes. That applies to group meetings, and Zoom has applied it to one-to-one calls as well, so the old trick of dropping to two participants to keep talking no longer reliably works. When the timer runs out the meeting ends and the host can immediately restart with the same link, which is the workaround most people actually use.

Google Meet’s free personal tier caps group meetings at 60 minutes. A call between two people on a personal Google account can run far longer, up to a full day. So for an informal three-person catch-up, Meet buys you an extra twenty minutes before anyone has to rejoin.

Both free tiers top out at 100 participants, so the participant ceiling is rarely the thing that decides it. The length cap is.

Paid plans lift the limit substantially on both sides. If your meetings routinely run past an hour, you are buying a paid plan either way, and at that point the comparison moves to the features below instead of the clock.

Breakout rooms, recording, and the features people actually hit

Here is where Zoom’s depth shows, and where Meet’s answer is usually “yes, on a paid edition.”

Breakout rooms. Zoom supports breakout rooms and the host enables them from account settings before the meeting. They are available on the free plan, which is why trainers, teachers, and workshop facilitators default to Zoom. Google Meet offers breakout rooms too, but on eligible paid Workspace editions, not the free personal tier. If splitting a group into small discussions is core to what you do, this one feature often settles the decision on its own.

Recording. Zoom’s free plan allows local recording to your own computer, so you can capture a call without paying. Cloud recording, with the shareable link and storage, comes with paid plans. Google Meet recording is available on eligible paid Workspace editions, and recordings save to the organiser’s Google Drive, which is genuinely convenient because sharing follows the Drive permissions you already manage.

Transcripts and captions. Both offer live captions at no cost. Saved transcripts are a paid feature in both, and Meet’s land in Drive next to the recording.

Host controls. Zoom has the richer set: waiting rooms, granular mute and rename permissions, co-hosts, polls, and spotlighting. Meet covers the essentials well, with host management, quick access controls, and moderation that is easy to find rather than extensive.

Joining friction. Meet runs fully in the browser with a link, no download, and it is already present in a Google Calendar invite. Zoom works in the browser but still nudges toward the desktop app, where most of its advanced features live. For a call with external people who are not technical, Meet has the smoother first thirty seconds.

Zoom vs Google Meet pricing, without the invented numbers

Our catalogue records both as subscription products with quote-based options, and neither carries a published starting figure in our data, so rather than repeat a price that may have changed this quarter, here is how the money actually works.

Google Meet is not really sold on its own. You get it free with a personal Google account, and you get the business-grade version as part of a Google Workspace plan, which also covers business email, Drive storage, Docs, and Calendar. If your organisation already pays for Workspace, Meet’s marginal cost is zero and moving up a Workspace tier adds the conferencing features you want, rather than buying conferencing separately.

Zoom is sold as conferencing first. You buy per host, per month, with annual billing cheaper than monthly, and you add webinars, phone, or larger meeting capacity as separate purchases. That makes Zoom the more expensive line item in isolation and the more flexible one if conferencing is the actual product you need in place of a feature of a suite.

The practical test: count how many people in your organisation need to host a long or recorded meeting, not how many need to attend one. Attendees are free on both. Zoom’s bill scales with hosts, so a company of 200 where 12 people run client calls is a cheap Zoom company. A company where everyone runs recorded sessions is a company that should price Workspace tiers carefully.

Google Meet vs Zoom vs Teams

The three-way comparison usually comes up because someone is already paying for one of the two big suites.

Microsoft Teams is bundled with Microsoft 365 the same way Meet is bundled with Workspace, and it does far more than meetings: persistent channels, file collaboration in SharePoint, and chat as the primary surface. Its free tier also limits group meeting length, and its meeting features sit between Meet and Zoom in depth. The honest reason to pick Teams is that you already pay for Microsoft 365 and your files and chat already live there.

The decision tree most organisations actually follow:

• Already on Google Workspace, meetings are internal and short. Use Meet. Adding a second product buys you very little.
• Already on Microsoft 365, chat matters as much as video. Use Teams. The meeting is the smaller half of what you are getting.
• Meetings are the work: training, webinars, client sessions, external attendees. Use Zoom, regardless of which suite you run. Breakout rooms, host controls, and webinar capability are not matched by the bundled options.
• Mixed and external-heavy, with people who will not install anything. Meet’s browser-first joining removes the most common failure in a call with people outside your company.

On market share, be careful with the numbers floating around: most published figures measure different things, from paid seats to meeting minutes to website visits, and they disagree wildly. What we can tell you from our own data is the review gap: Zoom carries 5,971 reviews on Spotsaas against Meet’s 506. That reflects how much each is independently chosen and evaluated as conferencing, which is a different question from how many people have access to one through a suite.

Data usage on a weak connection

Both products adapt video quality to the connection they find, and both will keep audio alive while degrading video rather than dropping you. If bandwidth is your constraint, the controls that help are the same in either: turn off your own camera, cap incoming video quality in settings, hide non-speaker video, and prefer dial-in or phone audio where it is available.

Rather than trust a headline bandwidth figure, test on the connection you actually have. A 20-minute call from the room and the network you will really use tells you more than any published per-hour number, because the variable that matters is your uplink, not the vendor.

Frequently asked questions

Compare conferencing products on Spotsaas

See the full data behind this comparison on Zoom and Google Meet, or browse all 81 products in video conferencing software if your requirement is narrower than either of the big two.

Related reading

• Best video conferencing software: the wider field beyond the big two.
• Microsoft Teams vs Zoom: the third option most companies already pay for.
• Best AI meeting assistants: for notes and action items once the call is over.
• Zoom vs GoToWebinar: if what you are running is a webinar, not a meeting.