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Zoom Meetings has arguably become the most well-known video conferencing app over the past few years. But it’s just one part of the Zoom Workplace platform, which encompasses a full set of productivity and communication tools. It even has an AI Companion that can summarize meetings, transcribe recordings, and pull out action items. Between its capable free version, accessible pricing, and broad capabilities, Zoom Workplace earns our Editors’ Choice award alongside the more enterprise-friendly Webex by Cisco.
How Much Does Zoom Workplace Cost?
Zoom Workplace offers several pricing tiers, including a free version. Available for a single user, the free plan lets you conduct video meetings of up to 40 minutes with up to 100 attendees. You also get access to mail and calendar clients, a rich-text notes app, and a limited version of Zoom Docs (a document creation platform). This tier gives you cloud-based communications staples like Team Chat and Whiteboard (shared digital spaces for brainstorming) functionality, too. You even get a basic version of Zoom Clips, which allows you to create, edit, and share short-form videos (such as tutorials).
(Credit: Zoom/PCMag)
The Pro tier, which costs $15.99 per user per month, allows up to nine users. It unlocks Zoom’s AI Companion (we discuss this later) and 5GB of cloud storage, and bumps the maximum meeting length to 30 hours. This tier includes access to what Zoom calls Essential Apps for a year; these apps (which work only on the desktop version) can analyze meetings in real time, add virtual name tags for attendees, and more. We don’t consider these critical, but you might still want them for your business.
Finally, the Business tier caters to larger companies that need large-scale, cloud-based communications. For $21.99 per user per month, it supports up to 250 users, up to 300 attendees per meeting, a meeting scheduler, managed domain tools, and unlimited Whiteboards.
If you need more than 250 licenses, the Enterprise tier is your only option. At that level, you get some additional features, but you must contact Zoom’s sales team for a custom quote.
Businesses that need phone services can add those capabilities for an extra cost. For example, you can bundle the Pro Plus or Business Plus phone plans with either the Pro or Business tiers of Zoom Workplace. The Pro Plus plan ($219.90 per user per year) supports up to 99 users, while the Business Plus plan ($269.90 per user per year) accommodates up to 250. Both allow for unlimited calls to the US and Canada via Zoom Phone, the company’s VoIP service.
Zoom is a good value compared with the competition. Webex by Cisco offers a free tier and charges $12 per user per month for its paid Webex Meet plan. These plans are very competitive overall, even if they don’t lean quite as far into productivity as those for Zoom Workplace. You can also use Google Meet for free, though you must upgrade to a paid Google Workspace (starting at $6 per user per month) plan to take advantage of advanced features.
Getting Started With Zoom Workplace
Zoom Meetings hasn’t changed much over the years, but it’s still the core of Zoom Workplace. It now provides both first- and third-party collaboration tools (we discuss these later) in addition to its video meeting, Team Chat, and Whiteboard features.
The desktop client is the centerpiece of Zoom Workplace. It’s available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, as well as a Chrome progressive web app. The desktop app looks quite slick and ties together the Contact, Meetings, Phone, Team Chat, and Whiteboards capabilities of Zoom. It’s worth noting that this focus on the desktop app differs from Google Meet’s approach; the latter lets you connect only via a browser or mobile app. Of course, if you don’t want to use the desktop client, Zoom Workplace is available on those same platforms. Zoom even offers an app for the Apple Vision Pro and the Apple Watch.
(Credit: Zoom/PCMag)
To get started with Zoom Workplace, all you need to do is create an account. Once you do, the easiest way to start a meeting is to share the Personal Meeting ID (PMI) that the service generates for you. However, launching meetings this way isn’t particularly secure. It’s better to schedule meetings, which get a unique identifier that helps keep interlopers away. Scheduling a meeting is possible from wherever you can sign into Zoom.
If you need to contact Zoom about an issue, you can access the company’s community forums and chatbot for answers. All subscribers to at least the Pro tier get live chat support and the option to submit tickets via the web. Finally, Business tier subscribers get phone support and, depending on the number of users, video chat support.
What Features Does Zoom Workplace Offer?
Zoom Meetings offers all of the features we expect from a video conferencing service, including closed captioning, HD video and audio support, meeting recording, screen sharing, transcription, and whiteboards. It also provides some fun features like avatars, background blurring and virtual backgrounds, gesture recognition, and reactions.
One powerful Zoom Meetings feature is the ability to create breakout rooms. This is particularly useful for remote teams. A meeting host can assign participants to groups (or let them select the group they want) and send them into a private video chat. Afterward, everyone can easily reconvene in the main video call. Intermedia AnyMeeting lacks this feature.
Notes functions as you might expect. Participants can take notes throughout a meeting and share them with others before, during, and after the session. The tool also has a handful of basic text formatting options.
(Credit: Zoom/PCMag)
Zoom Docs helps establish Zoom Workplace as a true business communication platform. It’s difficult to imagine switching from Microsoft Office or Google Docs, but Zoom Docs is an adequate stand-in. It’s a slick tool overall with flashy, customizable flair, like a library of fun headers and icons you can add at the top of your doc. A Zoom representative said that the company designed this application from the ground up with AI in mind. You can easily add meeting transcriptions into a document to get action items and breakdowns from it, for instance. That said, Zoom Docs lags behind other platforms in spelling and grammar correction. In testing, it was slow to detect misspelled words and typos and failed entirely to call out words that were complete gibberish.
Zoom Clips is a helpful way to make short tutorials (no longer than two minutes) for team members. You can download, share, and trim meeting recordings as necessary. We can imagine a few use cases for this, such as recording a project update and sending it to a meeting you can’t attend or creating a tutorial to share with new team members. We would have preferred a version that pairs with the Whiteboards feature to allow you to circle or highlight documents.
How Does Zoom’s AI Companion Work?
The Pro and Business tiers include Zoom’s AI Companion, a proprietary large language model (LLM) that works in conjunction with Anthropic, Meta Llama 2, and OpenAI. Zoom doesn’t use customer data to train any of its models, and all of its functions are optional. To that last point, the settings page on the Zoom web client offers a staggering number of toggles for these features, and you can easily turn off all AI features in meeting windows.
Should you choose to use the AI Companion, however, it offers neat capabilities. For instance, it can create a mental summary of meetings as they go. You can click the AI icon in the bottom toolbar to either stop this summary or ask questions related to the meeting. Doing the latter brings up a chatbot-like interface. It can tell you if someone mentioned your name and if there are any action items, for instance. You can also ask it to catch you up or anything else relevant to the meeting. In testing, we asked the chatbot to break down the action items from a meeting, and it quickly came up with a set of actionable bullet points.
(Credit: Zoom/PCMag)
You can send meeting recordings to your cloud storage, after which Zoom’s AI Companion can create a transcript. For the first test we ran, we used our computer microphones and speakers. The AI Companion misspelled or misheard a lot of what we said. It got much better (but still wasn’t perfect) after we switched to higher-quality audio devices.
You get several additional features for saved video and transcriptions, including smart chapters, which break your video into sections, and My Meeting Coach, which provides helpful data such as your longest spiel, patience, talk-listen ratio, talk speed, and use of filler words. Will this data make you a better public speaker? Maybe, but in case it doesn’t, only the end user and admin can access it. Finally, depending on the meeting, you might have some action items to complete.
Team Chat and Whiteboards
Two features that remain critical to Zoom Workplace are Team Chat and Whiteboards, neither of which require you to join a traditional video meeting to use.
In testing, Team Chat is about on par with Microsoft Teams, Slack, and similar team messaging apps. It supports channels, groups, and individual chats, as well as lighthearted features like the ability to post emojis and GIFs. However, the desktop app’s UI isn’t very intuitive, and the built-in integrations with other chat services are rather basic. You must use a paid third-party service to do two-way chats with folks who use messaging services other than Zoom, for example. Zoom AI is now part of the Team Chat experience. It can help you with basic functions like sentence completion and advanced ones like drafting full messages and adjusting your tone.
(Credit: Zoom/PCMag)
We also like Zoom’s Whiteboards feature. Zoom provides templates for use cases like Kanban tables, Mind Maps, and Pros and Cons, all of which help save time. The AI Companion lets you generate content for Whiteboards. Simply click the AI icon and choose a format for the answer. We asked, “How can I achieve a better work-life balance?” The flow chart it created included tips that would make a life coach blush.
What Apps and Services Does Zoom Workplace Support?
Zoom’s first- and third-party integrations make it into a comprehensive platform. These work with specific apps within the suite, such as Zoom Meetings.
Although they aren’t active by default, Zoom builds calendar and mail apps into the desktop client. These support three well-known options: Google Mail, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft 365. The apps work flawlessly, and their designs encourage you to stay within the Zoom client.
(Credit: Zoom/PCMag)
However, the platform’s real power comes from the Zoom App Marketplace, which lets you add hundreds of apps and integrations from third-party vendors. Whatever service you use for your business, Zoom Workplace very likely supports it in one way or another. Some are free, though others require a paid account to access all their features. File-sharing integrations with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive are basic examples.
Zoom Workplace has an active developer community, too; it maintains a community forum, a developer blog, and extensive documentation. If you have the resources, you can even consider creating a custom Zoom app.
What Else Does Zoom Workplace Offer?
Outside of Zoom Workplace, Zoom is building a portfolio of paid add-ons and companion products, most of which will mainly appeal to larger businesses or those with specialized needs.
Add-on features are available for all paid tiers. Examples include more cloud storage, a conference room connector, and support for meetings of up to 1,000 participants. Some, such as translated captioning ($5 per user per month), are quite affordable. Another that allows participants to dial into meetings from global phone numbers will set you back $100 per month.
Zoom also offers a few companion products, each of which is a separate purchase. As of this writing, Zoom Webinars & Events enables webinars and other one-to-many use cases, while Zoom Rooms aims to support connected conference spaces.
The company also designs specialized Zoom Workplace offerings for development, education, and healthcare companies. These typically cost more because of the extra requirements they fulfill. For example, Zoom Workplace for Healthcare guarantees compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Is Zoom Workplace Secure?
We previously felt it necessary to point out a few controversies. For example, there was the phenomenon of “Zoom bombing,” in which trolls would hijack meetings in progress and cause various kinds of havoc. For a while, the platform lacked end-to-end encryption, which let skilled attackers intercept meeting traffic. There was even discussion about the countries through which Zoom routed some traffic.
Fortunately, we’re satisfied that Zoom has addressed these concerns over the last few years. Zoom bombing is basically a thing of the past. There are now well-defined controls for limiting access to meetings, such as adding passcodes, allowing only signed-in users to join, limiting access to sharing, and locking meetings after they start. Zoom’s end-to-end encryption support has dramatically improved, too, even letting customers supply their own encryption keys.
More recently, there was concern that Zoom intended to use meeting content to train AI models, something many regarded as an invasion of privacy. Zoom has since updated its terms of service to clarify that it has no such plans.
Verdict: Excellent for Conferencing and Collaboration
Zoom Workplace goes well beyond video conferencing to provide a comprehensive business productivity suite. The Zoom Meetings experience is still superb thanks to its integrated breakout room, Team Chat, and Whiteboard features (among others), while tools like Zoom Docs and Notes give you more options than before for collaboration. And the staggering number of add-ins goes a long way to ensure that the various apps within Zoom Workplace work with your company’s existing software. For all of these reasons, Zoom Workplace earns our Editors’ Choice award alongside Webex by Cisco, which has a more mature ecosystem of third-party hardware and other enterprise-focused features.
Daniel Brame contributed to this story.
The Bottom Line
In addition to top-notch video chat, Zoom Workplace offers many useful AI-powered communication and productivity tools, making it an excellent business collaboration platform.
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