Google Workspace for Education vs. Zoom Workplace

Google [Workspace for Education (formerly G Suite for Education)] is pretty darn good [at] meeting the needs for educators and students. It is not designed to run your business office, transportation group, or lunch services. It doesn't need to be good at those. Focus on teachers and students. They do that really, really well. The Google folks continue to add features that help serve teacher and students. For example, they have really done a good job of adding Google Meet features such as polling and breakout rooms. Those features required a paid subscription to Workspace, but it makes sense since those features compete with Zoom, which requires a subscription for those services.

Incentivized

In most cases, and I mean almost all, Zoom is vastly superior to Teams in terms of functionality and ease of use. Case in point: I recently tried to join a Teams meeting in the web browser, and it took me multiple attempts to access it. This NEVER happens with a Zoom link.

Incentivized

• Email: The best email experience, period. It's fast, has the best mobile apps and tons of addons that extend it.
• Office suite: The Google editors might not have all the features of their MS Office counterparts, but they have most of them and the apps are surprisingly performant.
• Domain management: The Google Admin Console, coupled with the GAM command line tool, is very powerful, easy to use and simplifies any admin's work.

Incentivized

• Audio quality of phone calls is spot on. Calls are clear and crisp.
• Video quality of video meetings are clear and there aren't any pixelization artifacts that some systems can have.
• Having AI summaries have been life changing for us. We no longer have to concentrate on note taking, like we did in the past. The summaries are accurate and enable us to put our efforts in the meeting or conversation. Plus, we can save them into our practice management system as required.

Incentivized

• The admin console regularly feel sluggish
• Require third party tools to make changes to bulk devices
• Support could be a little better

Incentivized

• Love notes - allow insertion of table or grid
• Allow admin to turn off DND
• Allow a way to group individual people chats - not channels just individual peeps into groups for ease of finding - like how you can group shared calendars into sections in Outlook

Incentivized

We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.

Always up, never down. Compatible with so many different platforms, OSes, and tools. For instance, someone can be on a phone, tablet, laptop, and all of those tools are compatible with Google apps like Meet, Docs, Slides, and anything else Google based. It's flexiblity is fantastic and meets our changing hardware and software requirements

Incentivized

Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.

There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.

Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.

Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.

Incentivized

If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.

Google has a simpler approach to its apps. With all applications being online, things like auto-save being a default have been helpful for many staff in our organisation. Compare this to Microsoft where much of the admin has to be managed by the ICT Team, Google allows for a portion of control to the user to manage permissions of areas. This type of user empowerment helps people see how important ICT is to a business.

Incentivized

Zoom Workplace is typically on the more expensive end against other options, but it's the industry leader for a reason. It has the most brand credibility by far, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. There are limitations when it comes to technical performance, customization and video/audio quality. I prefer Slack myself for communication apps, but Zoom Workplace is a good alternative.

Incentivized

The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.

Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.

Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.

• There has been a steady evolution of new features coming out that reduced the need for third party tools
• We have been able to sign agreements to lock in annual renewal costs for up to 5 years
• It's a ubiquitous platform, finding support is generally pretty easy

Incentivized

• We have not lost much productivity in our teamwork during the pandemic because of the ability to have Zoom video calls and keep everyone in touch. This is definitely a positive.
• We are able to have more people participate in coaching sessions (described earlier) because we don't have room space limitations. This is a big positive.
• Being able to start a meeting instantly is great when we are doing support and/or training with a client over the phone and need to be able to share a visible

Incentivized