What is the difference between Zoom and Zoom Rooms?
For some users, Zoom Meetings is all they will need; others may opt for Zoom Rooms. Learn about the features each service provides and the supported use cases.
Video conferencing services, like Zoom, have become mainstream in businesses both large and small. Despite the massive uptick in usage, however, confusion clouds the different types of Zoom video conferencing services available and the features that distinguishes them. Let's look at the difference between Zoom and Zoom Rooms.
What is Zoom Meetings?
A standard Zoom Meetings video conferencing license enables an individual user to conduct online meetings using a PC, tablet or smartphone device loaded with the Zoom Meetings software. This is the type of service that most people think of when they hear the word Zoom and is geared to remote, hybrid or work-from-home employees. It turns nearly any computing device with a built-in camera into a virtual meeting space.
Zoom Meetings licensing options come in four different flavors, ranging from a free version to an enterprise license that costs $240 annually. Differences between the licensing models largely revolve around the amount of time the meetings can be scheduled for, the number of simultaneous participants, single sign-on, transcript capabilities, and whether meetings can be recorded and saved to the cloud for repeat viewing purposes.
What is Zoom Rooms?
A Zoom Rooms license is all about the ability to integrate conference room audiovisual (AV) equipment into the Zoom ecosystem. These specialized licenses turn conference and huddle rooms into a Zoom meeting room, complete with a variety of room-specific advantages. Most conference rooms these days contain AV equipment, such as TV screens, projectors, and voice conferencing hardware and software. This enables meeting participants to easily share content to their screens, use digital whiteboards and communicate with other meeting attendants who are not physically in the conference room.
Zoom sells easy-to-install AV equipment hardware, software and licenses that can be used to connect existing TVs and projectors to support Zoom Meetings features in a larger setting. Additionally, Zoom partnered with several popular third-party vendors that enable the use of Zoom Meetings through their hardware. Conference rooms already outfitted with video cameras and microphones may be able to repurpose this equipment for use on the Zoom platform.
Other conference room-specific features provided with a Zoom Rooms license include the following:
- one-touch instant meetings;
- wireless screen sharing; and
- conference room scheduling management tools and hardware options.
Difference between Zoom and Zoom Rooms: What's best?
Zoom's value will depend on the goals the organization has for connecting its employees and customers. Zoom Meetings licenses are ideal for individual users, while Zoom Rooms will be a better option for conference room settings where multiple people are attending or viewing a meeting in the same physical location.
