The original comparison ran in March and treated Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams as roughly stable rivals converging on the same feature set. Six months later the biggest change isn't a feature, it's a rebrand: Zoom quietly renamed its core paid tier from "Pro" to "Workplace," and the pricing pages reflect a platform that's stopped calling itself a video conferencing tool and started calling itself a workplace operating system.
Zoom's Rebrand Is the Real Story Here
Zoom's pricing page now carries the title "Zoom Workplace Pricing," not "Zoom Pricing." That's not cosmetic. The old Pro tier is now Workplace, running $13.33/user/month billed annually, and the old Business tier holds its name at $18.33/user/month annually. Monthly billing costs more on both tiers. The free Basic tier is unchanged: 100 participants, 40-minute cap on group calls.
The rename tracks with what Zoom has been building for two years now: Zoom Phone, Zoom Rooms, Zoom Events, AI Companion, all bundled under one "Workplace" umbrella rather than sold as a video call tool with add-ons bolted on. For a buyer, the practical effect is limited, the video conferencing core works the same way it did in March, but it signals where Zoom thinks its competitive fight actually is: not against other video tools, but against Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace as full productivity suites.
Google Meet: Steady, With a Live Promo Worth Knowing About
Google Workspace's pricing page confirms Meet's underlying tiers are unchanged from March: Business Starter at $7/user/month, Business Standard at $14/user/month, Business Plus at $22/user/month, all bundled with the rest of Workspace rather than sold as standalone Meet licenses. Worth flagging: the page is currently running a limited-time discount, 20 to 50 percent off across tiers, dropping Starter to $5.60 and Plus to $11 for new signups. That's a promotional price, not the standing rate, so don't build a permanent budget assumption around it. The free tier's 60-minute group call limit hasn't moved.
Meet's core pitch hasn't changed either: if you're already paying for Gmail, Docs, and Drive, adding Zoom on top is redundant spending unless you specifically need Zoom's webinar scale. Nothing in this refresh changes that math.
Microsoft Teams: Priced Inside the Microsoft 365 Bundle, As Always
Microsoft doesn't sell Teams pricing as cleanly as Zoom or Google do, it's bundled into Microsoft 365 business tiers, with Microsoft's own comparison page laying out what each tier includes rather than a flat per-seat Teams price. Teams Essentials runs $4/user/month standalone, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic, which includes Teams plus the full Office web apps and 1TB of storage, runs $6/user/month. For any company already paying for Microsoft 365, Teams effectively costs nothing extra, which remains the single strongest argument for choosing it over either competitor.
What Hasn't Changed
The AI feature race between all three platforms continues, and none of them have pulled meaningfully ahead since March. Zoom's AI Companion, Google's Gemini-powered Meet features, and Microsoft's Copilot in Teams all handle transcription, meeting summaries, and action item extraction at roughly comparable quality. If AI meeting notes are the deciding factor for your team, none of these three should be ruled out on that basis alone, the differentiation is elsewhere.
Teams' performance complaints haven't gone away either. Reddit threads from IT admins still report high CPU and RAM usage, particularly on Mac where screen sharing has a documented history of causing system lag. That's a real cost against Teams' bundling advantage: a "free" tool that visibly slows down every laptop it runs on isn't actually free once you count the support tickets.
Security Posture, Unchanged and Worth Restating
Zoom's 2023 terms-of-service reversal, where the company walked back language permitting AI training on customer content after backlash, remains the baseline any security review should reference. Zoom now requires explicit consent for AI-related data use, and that hasn't regressed since March. All three platforms carry the compliance certifications enterprise buyers expect at this point, SOC 2, GDPR support, and EU data residency options on paid tiers. None of the three has had a materially new security incident since the last comparison, which is itself worth noting as a quiet positive for an industry that had a rough security reputation five years ago. For any security review comparing the three, the practical differentiator isn't which platform is more secure on paper, all three clear the bar for most compliance frameworks, it's which platform your admin team already knows how to configure correctly. A misconfigured Teams tenant or an over-permissive Zoom account setting causes more real incidents than any platform-level vulnerability at this point.
Cost at Real Team Size
A 25-person team on Zoom Workplace pays 33.25/month billed annually ($13.33 times 25). The same team on Google Workspace Business Standard pays $350/month ($14 times 25), close enough that the choice comes down to ecosystem fit rather than raw price. On Microsoft 365 Business Basic, that team pays $150/month ($6 times 25), less than half of either competitor, and that gap is the entire reason Teams keeps winning deals it has no business winning on features alone. The bundling isn't a minor discount, it's a structural pricing advantage neither Zoom nor Google can match without giving away their core product for free.
That said, cost isn't the only variable worth running the numbers on. A 25-person team already locked into Zoom Phone and Zoom Rooms for physical conference room hardware faces real switching costs beyond the per-seat license difference, migrating hardware and retraining staff on a new platform usually costs more than a year or two of the price gap would save.
Mobile and Browser Experience
Google Meet's browser-first approach remains its clearest differentiator: no app install required to join, which eliminates the friction of sending links to external guests who don't already have an account. Zoom and Teams both push a client install for the full feature set, and while both offer browser-based joining as a fallback, the experience is noticeably stripped down compared to their native apps. For companies running frequent client-facing calls with external attendees, Meet's zero-friction join flow is worth weighing against its comparatively thinner feature set for internal meetings.
The Recommendation, Still Standing
Nothing in this refresh reverses the original verdict, it just sharpens it. If you're on Microsoft 365, Teams costs nothing extra and the performance complaints are a real but secondary concern against that price. If you're on Google Workspace, Meet at $7-22/user/month (watch for the current promo pricing before assuming the discount is permanent) covers internal meetings well and there's no reason to add Zoom on top. If you're not locked into either ecosystem, or you run webinars and large virtual events regularly, Zoom Workplace at $13.33/user/month remains the most capable standalone option, the rebrand changed the name, not the reasons to choose it, and I wouldn't let the new branding alone push you toward or away from a platform that was already the right or wrong fit in March.
For a closer look at how Teams stacks up against Slack specifically for enterprise chat, the Slack vs Teams enterprise comparison covers that angle in more depth, and if self-hosting is on the table for compliance reasons, the Mattermost vs Slack vs Teams comparison is worth reading before committing to any of the three platforms covered here.