Zoom’s popularity has exploded over the last couple of months because it’s really easy to use. But when issues like security, performance, and pricing arise, Google Meet is the go-to application. Some of the key features we’ve covered were:
Getting access to meetings
- Zoom – meetings can easily be accessed by sharing the link, but the downside is anyone can guess codes and jump on to meetings (we’ve heard a lot of horror stories about this) up until recently that they rolled out an update on meeting passwords.
- Meet – it is much faster, you can just go to meet.google.com and view the welcome screen that lists all your meetings for the day and jump in from there. You can also share the meeting link and no downloads required since participants can join via browser. Since day one, if someone outside the organization joins, you have the ability allow or deny them from entering the meet.
Recording
- In Zoom, recording is so easy and you have the option to put the recording in a local drive or cloud. However, management is difficult since you need to download it and upload it to your cloud storage. For better recording Zoom is the option.
- In Meet, the record function is only available recently and is free only for enterprise customers (temporarily available for free to everyone until September 2020). All recordings are automatically saved in your Google Drive folder. For storing and management capability, Meet is the better option.
Gallery view
- Zoom has had this feature for a long time and this is one of the reasons why it is so popular.
- During this broadcast, we used a Meet third-party plugin to get the same view. Thankfully, Google has released the tiled view similar to Zoom’s plus a low light mode (finally!).
Security concerns
- Zoom users in the last couple of months are faced with issues like zoom bombings, recordings on the cloud are accessible by third-party, and low encryption level.
- Meet has high security using Google Cloud’s standard of technology and infrastructure.
Both can be integrated with Google Calendar. Other external integrations include:
- Zoom can talk to other apps like Calendar but not much else.
- Meet talks to all other Google apps like Hangouts Chat and lets you easily jump to a video call.
Some features that are not available on Meet (and not sure if they’re planning to release soon):
- Live streaming – no feature to stream live directly to Facebook or Youtube, but within Google Meet there is a function that’s great for webinars or presentations that allow thousands of viewers at once and lets your audience send in their questions in real-time.
- Breakout rooms – a great feature of Zoom for smaller teams within a large meeting (although you can always create a new meeting for your small group)
If you have more questions on Zoom features that you want to do on Meet, drop a comment below.
Our 8-week Remote Work Playbook online course covers:
– Our 5yr journey from office-bound to remote
– Hiring and onboarding remote staff
– Our critical remote work technology stack
– Managing tasks and deliverables in a remote team
– Meeting rhythms, schedule, and strategic execution
– How to be healthy at home (for work and personally)
– How to keep your team culture, energy and enthusiasm alive
– How to ditch the office for good (if you’re game!)
To get full access to the online course, join Concierge today or connect with our team to get started.
Transcription:
Pete Moriarty: G’day guys. Pete Moriarty here, and in this video I’m going to be covering the differences between Zoom and Google Meet, and why you might consider Google Meet over Zoom. Now, Zoom has exploded in popularity over the last couple of months. Gone pretty damn crazy, like 20 or 30x the number of active users that they’ve had on their platform. That’s because it’s really easy to use, really popular, and with everyone moving to remote work due to the current situation that we’re in at the time of recording this video, Zoom has been the easy winner for everyone to jump straight onto.
Now, that hasn’t come without its challenges as well. We’ve had all kinds of issues pop up from security concerns, performance issues. We’ve got lots of customers who have come to us and said, “Hey, well, Zoom is actually pretty expensive when you look at the licensing for all of your team.” And they’ve been asking us, “What is your recommendation?” Now, of course, we’re pretty damn biased, right? We are living and breathing the Google world. We’re doing pretty much Google everything in our business, and yes, we primarily use Google Meet over Zoom internally inside our business. In the past, there’s been a couple of very specific things areas where we would use Zoom, but with the latest updates that have come out for Google Meet and a few little core plugins as well, it means that it’s unlikely for us to ever be reaching for Zoom again, and that’s pretty cool news.
We’re going to be sharing in this video what is the comparison between the two, what are my thoughts, and I’d love to know from you. What are your thoughts? Have maybe you tried to do something in Hangouts, but you haven’t been able to do it in Zoom? Drop a comment down below and we’ll check that out. I want you to very quickly, if you don’t mind, say a warm welcome to the team who are helping me out today. G’day, Team Genius. How you doing, guys? Everyone doing well?
Speaker 2: Yes, hi.
Speaker 3: Hi.
Pete Moriarty: Thanks guys. Thank you for helping out. Let’s first jump straight into where Meet is really great, or I mean, I’m going to go through feature by feature actually. We’re going to talk about the two different platforms here. So the first one is sharing and getting access to meetings, and Zoom made it really, really easy for people to jump into a meeting by just sharing the URL to that meeting, right? So it had a code on the end of the URL. You jump into that, and then bang, you’re immediately in a meeting. That works for anyone inside or outside your company, because that URL just prompts you to download Zoom, and then once you’ve downloaded Zoom, then bang you’re in.
That came with the downside of just about anyone being able to jump into meetings by guessing codes, and this whole phenomenon of Zoom bombings started happening. So we had horrible stories of primary school classes having people jumping on and showing porn or hate speech or whatever on the screen and screen sharing and disrupting the class. That’s obviously a massive problem. But the URL sharing of meetings is something that Zoom did right, that Google didn’t have at the time.
At the time, Google had what they called Google Hangouts, which was the old version of Google’s meetings, and that honestly is still a little bit of a ghost that follows Google behind in their meeting space because everyone remembers how bad Hangouts was. The video compression wasn’t great. The quality wasn’t great. It was, clunky. You had this dialing system. It really just didn’t work all that well, and so switching over to Google Google Meets, Google rewrote it so it was much faster. They created a welcome screen for before you actually jump into a meet, which made it run a little lot smoother, and then thirdly, you can actually share via URL. So you may not know that, but if you have not used Google Meets lately, you can headlong to meet.google.com and you actually get the URL based sharing in a meeting.
But there’s one key difference. When you share that URL with someone, they don’t have to do any downloads, which is really useful. So there’s no downloads required. But secondly, when you share that URL with someone, if someone outside your company tries to join the meeting, there’s a prompt, and that prompt comes up every single time. Now, Zoom have rushed to switch on a what they call the waiting room and make that by default inside of Zoom, but they’ve hidden it in a sub menu, so it makes a little bit hard. Google’s had that on from day one. So anytime we share a meeting with someone, it pops up and it basically says, “Admit.”
So guys, I might even get you to help out. Would someone mind opening this Meet up in an incognito tab, and we can demonstrate what that looks like if someone outside the company tries to join? Now, one of my bugbears with actually using Zoom is that you have to download the app on your computer. One of the great things about Meet is that you’re able to actually use Safari or you can use Chrome. Cool. But you guys get the idea. So basically, once someone requests access … Here we go. We got Chad now. Okay, cool. So we have an unverified person trying to access the meeting. You actually have to admit them before they are allowed in. So nice little one there from Google.
Okay. So my next feature to compare them on is recording, and this is something where Zoom has really won out and they did much better than Google in getting that popularity, because recording is so easy in Zoom. You have two options. You can record to the local desktop, or you can record to the cloud. Now, there’s been some security concerns with their cloud recording because other people have been able to access it, which is a little bit of a worry, but Zoom really has been the winner here for a long time in that recording meetings has just been a part of it. Whereas with Google Meet, you haven’t been able to record meetings until recently, and I’m talking in the last six months or so. The enterprise plan of Google G Suite has allowed recording inside of Meet, and so it’s only now if you’re on the enterprise plan. They’ve made this free temporarily, so they’ve made this free up until September, but normally, on a normal day, it is only available for enterprise customers to have that Meet recording.
Now, the recording is excellent. We’ve had it on our account for since it was released, and we use it all the time. There’s a couple of key features that make it even better than Zoom’s recording. But I think missing that feature on the basic and the business plans of G Suite is a bit of a misstep for Google, because it just makes it harder. Now, that said, if you are on G Suite right now, you get access to recording, so I would recommend you check it out. Now, you have to go and actually switch it on. So if you’re a customer of ours, have a chat to our team. They’ll help you get it switched on. But if you’re not yet a customer ours, then maybe have a chat to us and the team will help you out. Otherwise, you’ve got to dig through the admin settings and switch on enterprise recording for your Meets.
What does that look like? Well, we’re currently recording in our screen at the moment. So you can see here up in the top right hand corner, I’ve got the little recording symbol, which means that the Meet is actually being recorded. To switch that on, it’s pretty easy. You just click on the more options button down the bottom there, and you can start or stop a recording. Now, you can create multiple recordings inside each meeting, just like you can Zoom. The cool thing is, and this is what I really love about this, is inside your Google Drive. You can actually see all of your recordings. So it automatically puts it into a folder called Meet recordings, and then every one of the recordings that you’ve done, when it finally loads, just sit there inside your recordings folder inside Google Meet. So that makes it super, super convenient to record things.
Especially I find, like when we’re doing training, when we’ve got a number of people on the call, and on that training call we want to demonstrate or share something and turn that into a process that we then put into our process library, it works beautifully, because we can do the recording, stop the recording, and then we pop that over into the folder. Then we can embed that into a Google site, we can put it into a Google classroom, but we’ve got that video recording already in drive.
Zoom is easier to record, but the management of the recordings is not as great. With Zoom, you’ve got to go into their cloud portal, download it, or if it’s on your computer, you’ve got to wait for it to convert, and then you’ve got to upload it from your computer. If you’re doing a lot of meetings, which I do meetings basically all day long, that’s effectively my job, it means that I don’t have to be doing the uploading and the downloading all day long. All of my recordings are just automatically saved to my Google Drive, and if I want to put them in a different folder, I just drag and drop. No uploading or downloading to my local machine. So that feature, I really love. The downside of that, and this is where it’s kind of one point for each team here in that the recording actually works better if you’re on Zoom. In terms of making the recording, Google’s better for storing.
So I’ve covered the recording. Next one is gallery view, and this is where Zoom, again, have won out for a long period of time. So we initially were using Zoom because we wanted to have a way of seeing everyone at the same time, and what I’m talking about is what you can see here with the team. Everyone can see each other at the same time. Now, unfortunately, Google Meets’ default is to actually only show a couple of people. So you can see here, I’ve got more people actually are on the Meet at the same time at the moment, but that’s only because I’m using a third party plugin. This gallery view, or some people call it Brady Bunch view, is provided by a third party plugin called Google Meet grid view, and we’ll drop a link to that down there below the video. But this is not built into Google by default.
Google have announced just yesterday that they’re going to be building this feature in, but bloody hell, it took them years. It took them years to actually decide to build the feature in, and I’m just so surprised that Zoom got so far away from Google in terms of popularity before Google had finally decided to switch this on. So this is thankfully now coming to Google. You can use the Chrome plugin currently to get access to it, if you don’t currently have access to it in the native application. This plugin has got a few cool little features, like being able to highlight who’s speaking and choose whether or not you want to include yourself in the grid. It’s basically a rip off of the version that Zoom have built in natively into the app.
Now, here’s the thing. Google are focused on user engagement, and they’re focused on meetings working well. They’re focused on Google Meet as a product growing amongst the Google user base. One of the things where Google I think falls down is they can sometimes have blinders on and not really look at the broader market and what competitors are doing. Now, I understand that for many years Google’s quality wasn’t that good on their meetings, because something like Zoom or Skype or any of the other desktop applications actually did a better job with processing video. So what that meant was when you’re actually in a video meeting, the video was much better if you’re using Skype or using Zoom than it was with Hangouts. It wasn’t until they rewrote everything and relaunched at Google Meet that the video quality actually got a whole lot better, but Google didn’t watch what the competition were doing.
Zoom came along with gallery view, and we ended up using Zoom for gallery view because it was so much more engaging. Particularly when we were doing staff parties and team meets where we had 30 people on a call and we had to do a team conference, and we wanted to see everyone’s engagement and reactions on an individual basis. Whereas Google only was showing the one person speaking, and then even in an update they put out about three months ago, you could see just four people. It still wasn’t good enough. So small things like that, I think Google really could have done a better job of. I’m obviously very thankful and hopeful now that Google have said they’re going to create that grid view for everyone. But unfortunately, that’s one of the reasons why Zoom has really taken off and left Google a little bit in the dust. That is on its way, thankfully, but Google certainly have some catching up to do, particularly with Zoom being so damn popular right now.
So the next one to talk about is security concerns, and we can’t talk about Zoom without acknowledging the very serious security concerns that have come up for them over the past few months. Now, I recorded an extended video today just covering all of those. So I’m going to lightly cover them, but from the Zoom bombings, which we already talked about, to databases of Zoom users being leaked, there’s over half a million Zoom accounts that have been leaked and are being passed around the dark web, to issues where your recordings that are saved in your cloud recordings account are potentially accessible by third parties. There’s been two bugs identified that can now potentially create that. The next one is the encryption level that Zoom said they were using on their encryption, on their meetings, wasn’t actually the encryption they were providing. The encryption they were providing was basically less than half the level of that.
All of those concerns mount up to a company who is obviously through tremendous growth, but could potentially be cause for concern for us actually being able to trust the security of Zoom. Now, I can’t say anything about how secure their systems are right now, because I don’t know, and I don’t work there. But what I do know is that a company like Google, who has literally tens of thousands of employees working in the security and the uptime and just the overall robustness of their cloud platforms, I would just trust Google any day of the week over someone like Zoom with the security of our business.
Now, that’s not to go and say that Zoom is insecure or that it’s a risk. But when you’ve got a company who are right now scrambling to manage the growth that they’re undergoing and Google are just pretty chill. They’re adding more than 2 million new users per day onto the Google Meet platform. They are not having any issues at all with security. Google have built for scale, and they’ve got their whole cloud platform running all of the Google Meet infrastructure, just like all the rest of the Google Cloud and G of apps. What that means is that you can really trust those guys to know how to actually scale things and scale them safely. So I trust Google much more in that area.
There’s lots of reasons to trust Google insecurity in general. This is one of the best ones. A very small example that I want to highlight for you, because when we talk about security, it can get a little bit fluffy, right? With Google, when you’re doing a Meet recording, it’s automatically going to put that recording into your Google Drive. I showed you earlier my Google Drive which has all of the Meet recording stored in there. Now, no one can and access your Meet recordings because they’re locked down with your Google Drive access, and so you’re protected by the security of that capsule of your G Suite account, and if you’ve switched on two factor authentication for you and all of your staff, then you know that all of those accounts are well-protected, which is pretty damn awesome. All right. Now, before we cover the next point, I’m going to take a quick break and check out some of the questions that have been coming through with you guys.
So the next one for us to cover off is integrations. One of my favorite things about both Meet and Zoom is they integrate nicely with Google Calendar. So here’s what that looks like. Let me jump into my Google calendar here. So you can see my Google calendar. I’ll go ahead and create a test event on the next page here. Basically anytime I add a guest, I’ll go ahead and add Angel, our marketing manager. Anytime I add a guest, it’s going to automatically pop up and add a meeting there. So you can see I’ve got joint Hangouts Meet, and it’s automatically created a meeting there. You can have up to 250 participants in there, which is part of the enterprise features that’s been switched on. If I choose, I can actually choose to add a Zoom conference there as well. So both of them have integrations into Google Calendar, which is really nice. They work nicely, and it will automatically generate a meeting.
Now, thankfully Zoom will now generate a meeting with a password, which they weren’t doing previously, which allowed all of that Zoom bombing to happen. But yeah, thankfully that is now built in. But you can click one button there, automatically add a meeting, and then when I go ahead and click save, I’ll send that over. Each person is going to get the meeting there in their calendar, and when they go ahead to click on the calendar link, bang, they can jump straight into the meeting. This works internally and externally, so if you’ve got someone else who’s maybe outside your company, they can also take advantage of a one-click joining into the meeting with you, which makes it nice and easy to get connected.
So an ex note is other integrations and external integrations, and how do the two compare? Now, both Meet and Zoom support connecting to external applications. things like meeting scheduling, things like chat applications, although Zoom doesn’t connect to chat very well. One of the things that I really love about Google Meet is its integration with Hangouts chat. So if you’re already in the G Suite ecosystem, you’re kind of nuts not to use Meet, because all of the integrations talk with all of the other Google apps.
Now, I already showed you calendar. I now want to show you my chat as well. So if I go ahead and open up my chat here with Angel, this is an instant message. We may be chatting back and forward, having a lovely old conversation here, and what tends to happen in instant messaging is you might go back and forward a couple of times there, but you may decide, “Hey, you know what? It might be easier for us to jump on a meeting.” Rather than having to load up Zoom, creating a new meet request, bang, and go through all the different options there, I can just click one button there. If you didn’t see it, I just click the Meet button down the bottom here and I can click that, and then I’ll jump straight into a meet with Angel there, which is really cool.
So that’s my absolute favorite feature of the integration. Some of the other things you can do to inside Hangouts chat, you can ask the Google assistant to schedule a meeting with everyone, and everyone in that room, it’ll check their calendars and schedule meetings. If you haven’t already tried out Google chat, great alternative to Slack. Slack has some nasty things that can happen, like having your data be locked down unless you pay for a plan with them, and so we really love using Google Hangouts chat and it ties in with Meet really nicely there. So it’s best that I cover off some of the ways that Google are missing features that Zoom has. There’s a couple here that Google just hasn’t caught up to yet, and I don’t even know if they’re going to go and build them out. Google have committed to building out some features like gallery view to bring themselves up to par with some of the features that are available for everyone inside of Zoom. But there are some that I’m just not sure are going to be included.
So one of those is live streaming. There’s no current way to live stream from a Google Meet into Facebook or into YouTube live, and frankly, I’m a bit surprised that Google don’t at least have the option to stream into YouTube live. Now, they do have a streaming feature inside of Meet, and that streaming feature allows you to create a stream that up to a hundred thousand people can join. There’s no extra cost. It’s just all based on the Google infrastructure, and that allows you to stream your meeting. You can have up to however many people you want on the actual meeting, but then create a live stream on the back end of that, and then have other people join into the live stream just with a URL. But it’s not quite as versatile as this one streaming options or webinar options that you have inside of Zoom.
Inside of Zoom, you can have a webinar and have people do pre-registrations. If you pay for the webinar add on, you can have things like people raising their hands for nonverbal gestures. These are all features that are not current only available in Meet. Now, there are some hacks and some workarounds to make them work, and there’s even some plugins that allow you to get some of those features as well, but unfortunately they are not currently in Meet. They’re not in there natively. So some of the features like the grid view, everyone has to have the plugin installed on their machine for that to actually work, for them to see that. So what that means is that you just installing it on your end doesn’t mean that everyone else is going to.
Now I’ve got to say, on Saturday night when I’m holding games night with my friends, I still happen to use Zoom because I know that gallery view is there for everyone. I don’t have to hit up my friends to use Hangouts because Pete’s the Google guy, and then have them have to add that plugin to their machine just so they can get the cool gallery view. So there’s still some areas where Google have a bit of catching up to do. Streaming is one of them. The next one that I have on the list here is being able to change your background or blur your background. Those we will see if Google decides to implement them inside of Meet. They’re the ones that people are really asking for, but there’s no public confirmation yet that those features will be added.
The final one that I want to cover off is breakout rooms, and unfortunately breakout rooms are just not available inside of Meet. I have no idea whether or not they’re going to include anything like that, but they’re a great feature of Zoom. If you’re running a large team and we’ve got over 35 staff in our company, we often run team get togethers where we might have a conference, and we might go through an activity, but then we want to break the team out into smaller groups to actually have some discussion or share some personal anecdotes with a smaller team rather than doing an activity with the whole company. The breakout rooms feature is really, really handy for that. No idea whether or not that’s going to come to Google Meet.
So I will say that Google Meat is still great for using for webinars and for presenting. There’s a really great feature of Google Slides, which is the Q&A feature,. So I’ll show that off quickly to you guys. I’ve got here a slide deck inside of Google Slides, and when I present and I want to make it a bit more like a webinar, I can actually use the presenter view. So if I create my presentation and create the presenter view, I can now go to audience tools and start a Q&A. What that does is on top of my slides, it puts a little link there, and people can actually go ahead and ask questions. What will happen is the questions will populate and I might even get the team to throw in some questions here. Let’s drop a link over to my team. If you guys want to put in some dummy questions, that would be awesome.
So you’ll see the questions will start populating here and arrive on my screen, and what that is great for is for your Q&A. So let’s say you’ve got a live audience. You’ve got a bunch of people who are in the crowd. You’re up on stage, maybe, and if you’re up on stage, then you want to be able to field the questions from different people. When you’re fielding questions, you can then have people basically give them and vote democratically for the question that they want to have answered. So I’m going to pop back to my screen here. We don’t have any questions yet. Okay. Maybe the team haven’t sent them over yet, guys, but that’s all right. Maybe they don’t have access. You get the idea. The Q&A section pops up there. So that’s covered it off. If you have any questions that you don’t think I’ve answered, or if there’s any features in Zoom that you’re looking to do in Meet, go ahead and pop your comment or your question below. I’d be very happy to answer them after the live of this video.
Now, if you’re interested in potentially switching to G Suite, if right now you’re paying for Zoom and you’re looking for ways to cut costs in your business or evaluate your video conferencing software, then it’s a good time to have a chat to our team. Head along to the chat link below, say hi to our team, and just let us know where you’re at right now. If you’re already using G Suite, but you haven’t yet switched on the enterprise features like recording inside of Google Meet, then our team can certainly help you make that happen. If you have any other support needs for G Suite or even just any kind of small business technology needs, we’re on hand to help you out with that. But I want to say a massive, massive thank you to the team who’ve helped us out with the presentation today. Thanks guys. Really appreciate your help.
For those that are watching, make sure you check out our playbook. Our remote work online playbook is an eight week series that’s being run private for our customers only. So there’s a link to that below, just click on the playbook. If you’re interested in chatting to the team, let us know where you’re at and if you’re interested in taking part in that, but that course is taking you through an open book of everything that we do to run a remote team of 35 employees. We’ve got a multimillion dollar business, massive team. If you are interested in growing and scaling a remote team, if you’re interested in hiring in the Philippines, if you’re interested in, “How do I deal with this new reality of everybody working from home?” We’ve been doing it for the past five years, and so we are sharing absolutely everything that we know about running a remote team in a completely remote company across multiple time zones, across multiple countries, and how we actually make all of that work. If you’re interested in that, be sure to check out the link below. Okay, until next time. We’ll see you soon. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
