Zoom
Collaboration · Freemium
Overview
A video meeting service. It runs calls from two people up to large webinars, with screen sharing, recording, and phone dial-in. The company was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former Cisco WebEx engineer, and is based in San Jose. Zoom became widely used during the 2020 shift to remote work because its calls held up on weak connections and in crowded rooms. The product has since expanded into a wider suite called Zoom Workplace, adding team chat, a cloud phone system, a shared whiteboard, documents, email and calendar, and an AI assistant called AI Companion.
What people use it for
Teams use Zoom for day-to-day remote meetings, one-on-ones, and all-hands calls. Sales and customer teams use it for external calls and demos, and recruiters use it for interviews. Companies run training sessions, town halls, and public webinars for hundreds or thousands of attendees, often with registration and follow-up reports. Recorded meetings are shared so people who missed a session can watch later, and AI Companion produces a summary and action items even when nothing was recorded. Zoom Phone replaces a traditional office phone system for some companies. Schools and healthcare providers use Zoom for remote classes and appointments. Many organizations also fit physical conference rooms with Zoom Rooms hardware for hybrid meetings.
Key capabilities
Zoom Meetings supports up to 100 participants on the free plan and 300 on Business, with add-ons for larger meetings and separate webinar and event formats for bigger audiences. Free meetings are capped at 40 minutes; paid meetings run up to 30 hours. Core features include screen sharing, cloud and local recording, breakout rooms, live transcription, and virtual backgrounds. AI Companion, included at no extra cost with paid plans, writes meeting and chat summaries, catches you up if you join late, drafts messages, and completes sentences across the product. Zoom Workplace also includes Team Chat, Zoom Phone as a cloud phone system, Whiteboard, Clips for short screen recordings, Docs, and Mail and Calendar. Zoom Rooms supports hardware for meeting spaces, and Contact Center handles customer service.
Limitations
The free plan's 40-minute cap on group calls pushes regular users to pay. Costs climb with add-ons: larger meetings, bigger webinar audiences, some AI features on lower tiers, and Zoom Phone are separate line items. Zoom keeps adding pieces like Docs, Whiteboard, email, and calendar that overlap with tools companies already run, and few teams asked for a full workplace suite from a call vendor. Recordings and their transcripts pile up and get hard to search later. Zoom has faced security and privacy criticism in the past, including over default settings and call routing. Feature differences between plans and add-ons make it hard to know what a given account can actually do.
Insight
Zoom's reputation rests on one thing that still holds: the calls work. On a bad connection, with thirty people and shared screens, Zoom tends to hold up where others stutter, and that reliability is why it survived the return to a crowded market. The core meeting product does not need much. What Zoom has done instead is add chat, whiteboard, docs, email, and calendar to become Zoom Workplace, competing with tools most companies already run. AI Companion is a reasonable addition and is bundled rather than sold separately, which is fair. But the pricing gets fiddly once webinars, larger meetings, and phone are involved, and it is easy to pay for a suite when you wanted a phone booth. Treat Zoom as the dependable call tool it is and keep the rest optional.
Pricing
Freemium
Website
Last checked 2026-08-30