Owing to its rise to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom has become both a noun and a verb in common language. Despite competition from many popular and effective video conferencing applications, Zoom has remained relevant in the post-pandemic era by pivoting from a simple video meeting app to a more comprehensive business communications tool. With those efforts comes a new brand: Zoom One.
It makes a lot of sense for Zoom to take this approach, one that expands the feature set to add an AI-powered assistant and new collaboration tools that you use outside of meetings. After all, its main competitors are part of large business software ecosystems that often include team messaging and voice over IP (VoIP) phone features. Moreover, we're impressed enough with the results that Zoom One retains the Editors' Choice nod we gave it when it was merely Zoom Meetings. It's a top-notch video conferencing solution, sharing the award with fellow Editors' Choice winners Cisco Webex and Intermedia AnyMeeting.
Getting Started With Zoom One Meetings
Despite the Zoom One rebrand, Zoom Meetings is still central to the product, it's just no longer an island. Its core features, such as video meetings, chat, and online whiteboards, are now joined by other collaboration capabilities within the same client app. But significantly, rather than reinventing the wheel by implementing all of these functions itself, Zoom provides a wide range of integrations with other software and tools. The upshot is that you don't have to leave your existing software stack behind, and in some cases, you don't even need to click away from Zoom One at all.
The desktop client is Zoom One's centerpiece. The app is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and it has a Chrome PWA. More importantly, it ties together Contact, Meetings, Phone, Team Chat, and Whiteboards. The desktop client is quite streamlined, and it's obvious that Zoom's primary goal is to keep you in it. It's worth noting that this desktop focus differs from Google Meet's approach, which only lets you connect to the service from a browser or mobile app. However, if the desktop client isn't your thing, there are Zoom apps available for Android, iOS, and the web.
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Zoom Meetings is still the core of Zoom One, and this portion of the product hasn't changed much from the previous iteration. To get started, you must create an account. Your account receives its own Personal Meeting ID (PMI) that you share with others to start impromptu meetings.
However, launching meetings this way is arguably insecure. The alternative, formally scheduling a meeting, generates a unique identifier for each meeting, which keeps interlopers away and is Zoom's recommended practice. You can schedule meetings from the Zoom desktop client, but you can also use plug-ins for either your browser or Microsoft Teams, if you prefer.
How Much Does Zoom One Cost?
As is typically the case with video conferencing products, Zoom offers a number of pricing tiers. If you aren't ready to commit but want to kick the tires, there is a free version of Zoom One that you can try. Free Meetings can last up to 40 minutes with up to 100 attendees. You also get notes, chat, and basic whiteboard functionality. Although we feel confident recommending this free tier for individuals, especially if you're using it for non-work purposes, it's too feature-limited to evaluate the service as a business tool.
We think the same is true for the Pro tier, which costs $149.90 per user per year when billed annually. Although it allows up to nine users and adds some additional features (AI companion and 5GB of cloud storage), it doesn't quite have the capabilities to qualify it for a mission-critical service like business communications.
There are really only two packages we think are worth considering as a small business. The Business package, priced at $199.90 per user per year, gives you 30 hours and up to 300 attendees per meeting. It also includes team chat, mail, and calendar, as well as 5GB of cloud storage.
Business Plus is the plan we tested for this review. It's priced at $250 per year per user and adds automated captions and translations. It also adds unlimited local calling via Zoom Phone, the company's new voice over IP (VoIP) calling service, although a full evaluation of that feature is outside the scope of this review.
Another thing to be aware of is that if you need more than 99 licenses, you have no choice but to go with the Enterprise pricing tier. You'll get some additional, enterprise-centric features for that price point, but you must contact Zoom's sales team to get a custom quote at this level.
Zoom Meetings Features
Zoom Meetings includes the many features typically found in business video conferencing services, including HD video and audio conferencing, screen sharing, whiteboards, closed captioning, meeting recording, and transcription. It also provides some "nice to have" fun features like background blurring and virtual backgrounds, avatars, reactions, and gesture recognition.
If you want to collaborate while in a meeting (one not involving a screen share or whiteboard), you can do so with a platform that provides this functionality. Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive are all worthy options, assuming you enable the relevant file-sharing integration. Your experience will depend on the solution you pick.
One powerful Zoom Meetings feature is the ability to create breakout rooms, which is particularly useful for remote teams. A meeting host can assign participants to groups (or let them select the group they want), sending them into their own private video chat. When finished, everyone can easily reconvene in the main video call. Zoom One's fellow Editors' Choice pick, Intermedia AnyMeeting, lacks this feature.
Notes is a new feature, one that comes bundled with all Zoom One plans. It functions as you'd expect of a note-taking tool. Participants can take notes throughout a meeting, and share them with others before, during, and after the session. The tool has a handful of basic text formatting options that let you create and share notes from either the desktop client or the web portal.
Another new feature is Zoom AI Companion, a ChatGPT-powered assistant that performs tasks like transcribing and summarizing meetings. It can also translate transcriptions into a variety of languages. We tested a preview release of this tool (when it was known as Zoom IQ) and found it performed these functions in near real time. Zoom AI Companion is included in all Zoom One plans except for the free tier.
Is Zoom Secure?
In past Zoom Meetings reviews, we felt it necessary to point out a few controversies. For example, there was the phenomenon of "Zoom bombing," where 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 debate about the countries through which some Zoom traffic was routed, such as China, which raised further security concerns.
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 only allowing signed-in users to join, limiting access to sharing, adding passcodes, and locking meetings after they start. Zoom's end-to-end encryption support has dramatically improved, letting customers bring their own encryption keys to the platform.
More recently, there was concern that Zoom intended to use meeting content to train AI models, which was widely regarded as an invasion of privacy. Zoom has since updated its terms of service to clarify that it has no such plans.
All of this is only natural, given Zoom's efforts to build a greater presence in the business communications market, and it gives us confidence that Zoom's security-related growing pains are a thing of the past.
Zoom Team Chat and Whiteboards
As mentioned earlier, the major change with the Zoom One rebrand is the addition of new collaboration tools that can be used outside the context of Zoom Meetings. Two examples that have rolled out already are Team Chat and Whiteboards, neither of which requires you to join a traditional video conference to use.
Although you could always chat during Zoom Meetings, Team Chat now extends that capability to any time you're engaging with Zoom, whether you've joined a meeting or not. The important distinction is that Zoom Team Chat sessions persist and are searchable, which you couldn't easily do with in-meeting chat sessions. In a nice touch, you can now move in-meeting chats to Team Chats to continue them after the meeting ends.
In our tests, we found Team Chat to be on par with Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and similar team messaging apps. You can create groups, channels, and individual chats. They work well, but the UI in the desktop app is less than intuitive. It also includes features to keep work lighthearted and productive, such as the ability to post emojis and GIFs. Our chief complaint is the limited, built-in integrations between Zoom's chat capabilities and other services, such as Hangouts, Slack, and Teams. You must use a third-party, paid service to do two-way chats with folks who use messaging services other than Zoom.
Standalone Whiteboards is another out-of-meeting feature that, like Team Chat, is similarly well executed. We like that Zoom provides templates for use cases like Pros and Cons, Mind Maps, and Kanban tables. The templates are excellent time savers for people less skilled in the art of the whiteboard.
Will Zoom One Work With My Apps and Services?
There's another move that Zoom made to make Zoom One a more comprehensive business communications platform: provide integrations with third-party software. Although it's disabled by default, calendar and mail integration is built into the desktop client. It supports three well-known options: Google Mail, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft 365. The calendar and mail integration is flawless once you turn it on. We never felt the need to leave the platform to check our Gmail or Microsoft 365 accounts. In many ways, the controls mirror the UI style of each service, which avoids creating the knee-jerk reaction of switching back to the native client.
However, the platform's real power comes from the Zoom App Marketplace, which lets you add features and integrations from a catalog of apps provided by Zoom and third-party vendors. Apps are essentially Zoom One plug-ins. If there's a service you use for business, there's a fair chance that an app is available for it. Some of them are free and some require paid accounts to take full advantage of their features. Zoom bundles a set of what it calls "essential apps" with any plan free for one year; after that, whether the apps' paid features are worth the cost will depend on your needs.
Although you'll likely find that some plug-ins are of more value than others, the App Marketplace provides excellent coverage across the business application spectrum. There are many useful free integration, while others are a bit awkward to deal with and take the form of chatbots (like the one for Google Drive). Having to learn a new command set to talk to third-party software may not be intuitive for everyone, so your mileage may vary with some of them.
Zoom also has an active developer community, so you can find documentation, a developer blog, and a community forum if you have the resources to roll your own Zoom app.
What Else Does Zoom Offer?
It's worth mentioning that, outside of the base Zoom One offerings, Zoom is building out a portfolio of paid add-ons and companion products, most of which will likely appeal mainly to larger businesses or those in specialized niches. Again, whether they're worth the cost depends on your needs.
Add-on features are available at all paid tiers. Examples include cloud storage, support for large meetings of up to 1,000 participants, and a conference room connector. Some are quite affordable, such as translated captioning for $50 per year, while others are costly. For example, the ability to dial into meetings from global phone numbers will set you back $1,200 per year.
Similarly, Zoom offers a few companion products that build on the platform, each of which is a separate purchase. As of this writing, Zoom Spaces aims to support connected conference rooms; Zoom Events enables webinars and other one-to-many use cases; and Zoom Contact Center focuses on video-centric customer service.
Zoom has also designed specialized Zoom One offerings tailored to specific verticals. These include education, financial services, government, manufacturing, and retail, and each of these typically costs extra because of the extra requirements they fulfill. For example, Zoom One for Healthcare guarantees compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). We couldn't cover all of these industry-specific plans in this review, so you should contact Zoom sales if you have unusual needs.
If you need to reach out to Zoom about an issue, you can access the company's community forums and 24/7 chatbot for answers. People who subscribe to at least the Pro tier can submit tickets via the web. Live chat support and live phone support are bundled with the Business, Business Plus, and Enterprise plans, though you can add either to the Pro package for a fee.
Excellent Conferencing and Collaboration
It's impressive how Zoom has evolved its platform from a high-quality video conferencing system to a more comprehensive business collaboration suite with its collaboration tools, AI assistant, transcription tech, and many integrations. The company says one of its main goals in developing Zoom One is to reduce the "toggle tax," a term it uses to refer to the productivity that's lost when you have to jump between multiple apps to switch tasks. By integrating multiple collaboration functions into a single desktop app, Zoom One achieves this goal (though the level of integration across third-party products is uneven). We wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to any business, which is why it earns our Editors' Choice nod once again this year.
Yet, it's not the only option that growing businesses may want to consider. For example, fellow Editors' Choice pick Cisco Webex has a significantly more mature ecosystem of third-party hardware for smart meeting rooms and other dedicated office solutions. And depending on your needs, Intermedia AnyMeeting may give you more bang for your buck.
Zoom One's impressive transformation from a simple video conferencing app to a full communication hub makes it a robust, business-friendly collaboration tool.
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