Head of Product
Zoom's position in the video conferencing market in 2024 is more complex than the straightforward dominance it held a few years ago, and understanding the split helps clarify when it remains the default and when teams have moved elsewhere. The shift has been largely ecosystem-driven rather than product-driven. Microsoft Teams has absorbed significant enterprise video market share, not because Teams is technically superior to Zoom for video calls, but because it comes bundled with Microsoft 365 licenses that organizations were already paying for. For a company already running on Exchange, SharePoint, and Office, adding Teams meetings costs nothing marginal and sits inside the same interface where people are already working. The same logic applies to Google Meet for organizations on Google Workspace. When video is embedded in the productivity suite you're already using, the friction of choosing and expensing a separate video tool becomes hard to justify. Where Zoom has retained and strengthened its position is in specific use cases where its product depth matters. Large meetings with hundreds of participants, webinar functionality with registration flows and attendee analytics, breakout rooms for workshop facilitation, and the polished room hardware ecosystem for conference rooms are all areas where Zoom's feature investment shows. Organizations that run frequent external events, customer training sessions, or company-wide all-hands tend to find Zoom's capabilities noticeably stronger than what's available in Teams or Meet for those scenarios. The audio and video quality reliability, particularly in poor network conditions, also remains a common reason why customer-facing teams prefer Zoom for external calls even when their internal communication has moved elsewhere. The most common pattern is a split-use model: internal meetings on Teams or Meet (whichever aligns with the productivity suite), and external or client-facing meetings on Zoom because it's the lowest common denominator that the counterparty is most likely to already have installed. That split creates a situation where many organizations are paying for both, which raises legitimate questions about consolidation. Teams and Meet have both improved their core video experience over the last few years, and the feature gap between them and Zoom for standard business meetings has narrowed substantially. The remaining gap shows up most clearly at the high end — large events, sophisticated webinars, complex breakout room facilitation — rather than in everyday one-on-one or small-group calls. For teams making a fresh decision, the practical starting point is usually the productivity suite: if you're already in one ecosystem, use its native video tool for internal meetings, and keep Zoom available for external meetings where you need a reliable neutral option. Adding a second video tool specifically to replace Zoom for internal use rarely produces enough benefit to justify the switching cost and dual subscription.