Stop settling for "good enough collaboration"

By Chris Barwick, Head of Americas Sales at Zoom

Better business outcomes, without the extra cost.

Most enterprises already run the Zoom and Microsoft platforms side by side. Not because anyone drew it up that way on a whiteboard, but because it works. Microsoft handles the productivity layer: email, documents, and calendar. Zoom handles collaboration: meetings, phone, contact center, rooms, and events. Ask the people who actually use these tools every day, and they will tell you the split feels natural.

So it is worth questioning why the industry keeps framing this as a choice. Zoom Workplace or Microsoft 365. One platform or the other. The organizations getting great results are not choosing. They are using both, on purpose, and getting more out of each because of it. Coexistence done intentionally beats consolidation done by default.

Microsoft's playbook has been bundling core productivity applications with "good enough" peripheral software for almost 20 years. To justify ever-increasing prices, they tell customers they can reduce the complexity of their tech stack and save money by eliminating spend on redundant vendors. This has worked very well for Microsoft, transforming them into one of the largest and most dominant companies in the world. It hasn't always been good for customers or end users, and it has often stifled industry innovation. For most companies, the promises of lower complexity and lower costs sound cleaner in the pitch than they hold up in practice.

The "platform consolidation" pitch sounds great until you dig deeper

You have heard the pitch, probably more than once. "You already have Teams. It's bundled into your Microsoft 365 license. Why pay for anything else?" It usually arrives with a nudge: your Microsoft prices are going up unless you buy more, so consolidate everything onto Microsoft and cut the redundant partners loose.

It sounds tidy. It sounds cheaper. And then you have to actually live with it.

Here is the metaphor I keep coming back to: the collaboration iceberg. On the surface, Teams looks free. Below the waterline, the costs stack up fast. Teams Premium adds $10 per user per month for advanced meeting features, meeting summaries, and call queueing. Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) is $40 per conference room per month. Copilot runs $30 or more per user per month for AI. What started as "already included" becomes dozens of line items across a stack of separate SKUs.

If you think E7 is only $99 per user/month, or CoPilot is only $30 per user/month, then watch Patrick Kelley's "Microsoft 365 E7: The $99 License Trap You Need to Know".

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The numbers tell the story plainly. At street pricing, a 1,000-seat enterprise pays roughly twice as much for Microsoft's full collaboration stack as it would for the equivalent from Zoom. Add Teams Phone to the picture, and the gap widens: for organizations that unbundled Teams following Microsoft's commitments in the EU, the Microsoft 365 suite runs about 2.5 times higher.

Picking on Microsoft's pricing is beside the point. The real issue is the trap itself: consolidation for its own sake is a default, not a strategy. And defaults have a way of getting expensive while adding complexity and delivering a poor end-user experience.

It is true that Microsoft provides Teams Meetings and Chat for free in E1, E3, E5, and E7. At the surface level, that would seem to be an opportunity to save money and eliminate redundant spend, but let's dig a little deeper.

• 85% of companies use two or more meeting platforms, typically because for larger, critical, or external meetings, customers prefer and use a more robust meeting platform.
• Webinars or all-hands meetings: These are some of your most critical events. Almost every customer uses someone other than Microsoft, and the vast majority use Zoom.
• Meetings summaries: These have quickly become a must-have that your end-users can't live without, like meetings or chat. These don't come for free from Microsoft. It requires Teams Premium at $10 per user/month or CoPilot at $30 per user/month, and they don't even work with other meeting platforms. That means that most customers leverage or purchase a third party note-taker.
• Workplace experience: Desk and room reservation, visitor management, wayfinding, digital signage, and more. Some customers have tried to use Microsoft Places for this functionality, but the vast majority use another platform.
• Phone: If you're small and calling isn't important to your organization, you can probably get away with Microsoft Teams Phone. For the vast majority of enterprises, Microsoft Teams Phone doesn't meet their capabilities, is hard to manage, and is expensive. You can validate this in Gartner's Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications as a Service 2026 Report, where they provided "caution on telephony, scalability, and support."
• Session Border Controllers (SBC): Most likely if you are doing a large deployment of Microsoft Teams Phone, you will need SBC's.
• Contact Center: Microsoft is increasing its capabilities with Dynamics 365 Contact Center, but this won't meet the vast majority of customers' needs. In fact, Gartner doesn't even include Microsoft in their Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service.
• AI: For getting work done, most of your users are going to leverage AI. Some customers trying to consolidate their tech stack on Microsoft will settle for Copilot. But not all will. Many will leverage another vendor like Anthropic, Google Gemini, or Zoom.

Even if you eliminate half of these vendors and settle for Microsoft, the platform consolidation promise does not hold. In practice, you still end up managing multiple tools, just with fewer alternatives and less leverage.

The sustainability and total cost question most Microsoft strategies skip

Before you consolidate, there is a question worth sitting with: what does this cost you in three years, not three months?

Going all-in on E5 and stacking Copilot, Teams Premium, and the rest assumes the price you sign for today is the price you live with tomorrow. Microsoft's track record points the other way. Gartner advises Microsoft customers to plan for total software costs to climb 30 to 50 percent over a three-year span, driven by a mix of list-price increases, eroding volume discounts, and product-mix changes that push you onto pricier bundles.*

That kind of increase rarely shows up as a single, obvious line on a renewal. It arrives quietly. Features move between SKUs. Capabilities you already use get repackaged as new paid add-ons. An "expanded access" announcement introduces a new fee where there was not one before.

Standardizing everything on one vendor concentrates that exposure. When the platform you built your collaboration around raises prices, reshuffles features, or retires the ones your teams depend on, you have limited room to push back and no ready alternative. Running the Zoom and Microsoft platforms together keeps the bargaining power where it belongs — with you — and caps the downside of any single vendor's roadmap.

The importance of meeting summaries

Meeting summaries are essential because they turn spoken conversation into clear, actionable plans that keep teams aligned and accountable. The context of these discussions is often much more important than any content that was shared. On average, I have between 15-20 meetings a day. If I didn't have time to attend a meeting, I absolutely don't have time to watch a meeting recording. However, I can consume a 30-60 minute meeting in just minutes with an effective meeting summary. I need these meeting summaries across all meeting types (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex, in-person meetings, conference room discussions, etc.). I need AI to automatically identify speakers and action items, assign them, and be available for queries across multiple meetings at a later date.

The vast majority of modern knowledge workers will need these same capabilities to be productive and get their work done. Microsoft requires Teams Premium $10 per user/month per user/month, or CoPilot $30 per user/month, to get meeting summaries that work on Microsoft Teams meetings. In other words, Microsoft Teams Meetings really aren't free.

My Notes is included at no additional cost in paid Zoom plans and captures conversations across Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, and in-person discussions. It summarizes what was discussed, pulls out action items, and builds a running record filtered to what matters to you specifically. Workflows handle the follow-up: summaries go to Slack or Team Chat automatically, so nothing falls through the cracks.

The part that actually changes how I work: I can sit in a Microsoft Teams meeting, have My Notes capture and summarize it from my perspective, and route that summary to my team without buying Teams Premium or bolting on a separate notetaker. It just works, regardless of where the meeting happened.

What "better together" actually looks like

Coexistence is what happens when you let each platform do the job it is genuinely best at. Far from a consolation prize, it is the setup that lets you get the most out of both.

• Meeting quality and reliability: The Zoom platform delivers superior meeting quality, reliability, and simplicity that people prefer, recognized in the 2026 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for UCaaS and as a Leader in the Forrester Wave for UCaaS platforms, Q3 2026.†‡
• AI built in at no extra cost: Zoom includes meeting summaries, note-taking that works across meeting platforms including connected third-party solutions like Teams, Webex, and Google Meet, and live translated captions across 35 languages come standard. with Zoom Workplace Enterprise. Microsoft keeps those capabilities behind Teams Premium or Copilot licenses, and as of mid-2026 only about 7 percent of Microsoft 365 commercial seats carry a paid Copilot license.§ Of those that have access to paid Copilot only 20% to 30% see sustained weekly usage.¶Enable UC recently published a 3rd party report benchmarking Zoom AI. They tested the things people actually leverage AI at work: meeting summaries, action items, decisions, cross-meeting synthesis, document summarization, project status updates, grounded Q&A, and more. The results were pretty eye-opening: "Zoom's strongest differentiator is not simply model quality, but its ability to consolidate and use relevant work context through first-party capabilities and built-in connectors." "The findings suggest that organizations may be able to realize meaningful productivity value from Zoom without adding separate, overlapping AI tools." "Zoom completed all 10 tests 3-5x faster than the competition." Most importantly, these capabilities from Zoom are included in Workplace Enterprise and have $0 additional cost compared to $20-$30+ per user/month from Gemini, ChatGPT, Anthropic, or Microsoft.

Enable UC recently published a 3rd party report benchmarking Zoom AI. They tested the things people actually leverage AI at work: meeting summaries, action items, decisions, cross-meeting synthesis, document summarization, project status updates, grounded Q&A, and more. The results were pretty eye-opening:

• "Zoom's strongest differentiator is not simply model quality, but its ability to consolidate and use relevant work context through first-party capabilities and built-in connectors."
• "The findings suggest that organizations may be able to realize meaningful productivity value from Zoom without adding separate, overlapping AI tools."
• "Zoom completed all 10 tests 3-5x faster than the competition."
• Most importantly, these capabilities from Zoom are included in Workplace Enterprise and have $0 additional cost compared to $20-$30+ per user/month from Gemini, ChatGPT, Anthropic, or Microsoft.
• Enterprise-grade voice: Zoom Phone offers a 99.999% uptime SLA, maintains call quality even under heavy packet loss, and now offers Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams, so you can route Zoom Phone calling directly into Teams without adding on-site hardware. Zoom Phone has delivered continuous innovation across AI, calling, platform, and resilience, with AI-first communications included in Zoom Workplace Enterprise licensing. Capabilities for modern business calling with mobile, native SMS, native fax, native nomadic e-911, auto-dialer, and a revenue acceleration platform. The Frost Radar for Cloud Communications Platforms 2026 just announced Zoom as a Visionary Leader that "stands out for its ability to operationalize this vision through an AI-first platform that transforms conversations into completed work, combining deep portfolio depth with a differentiated agentic AI orchestration layer".
• Zoom Phone has delivered continuous innovation across AI, calling, platform, and resilience, with AI-first communications included in Zoom Workplace Enterprise licensing.
• Capabilities for modern business calling with mobile, native SMS, native fax, native nomadic e-911, auto-dialer, and a revenue acceleration platform.
• The Frost Radar for Cloud Communications Platforms 2026 just announced Zoom as a Visionary Leader that "stands out for its ability to operationalize this vision through an AI-first platform that transforms conversations into completed work, combining deep portfolio depth with a differentiated agentic AI orchestration layer".
• Complete workplace platform: Zoom Workplace bundles rooms, workspace reservation, visitor management, wayfinding, and digital signaling natively, while Microsoft requires three separate licenses to reach parity. In true Zoom fashion, Zoom Rooms and Zoom Spaces are easy to deploy and easy to manage, while coming at zero cost to Zoom Workplace Enterprise customers.

None of that diminishes what Microsoft does well. The Microsoft 365 productivity suite, from email and documents to calendars, SharePoint, and OneDrive, is deeply embedded in how most organizations work, and the Zoom platform integrates closely with the most widely used parts of it, right down to real-time document co-creation. Teams, on their own, leave gaps in collaboration. Webinars and events, meeting summaries, contact center, and workspace management are either missing entirely or locked behind premium SKUs. Running both platforms with intent closes those gaps, and does it at a lower total cost in most scenarios.

See it in action. Join Patrick Kelley and the Zoom team demo exactly how tightly Zoom and Microsoft co-exist.

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The customers who run this way say the same thing.

Dan Clark, Senior Network and Security Administrator at MDaudit, explains: "We use both Microsoft Teams and Zoom Workplace for calls and meetings. We feel that the Zoom Workplace Apps are superior in the cybersecurity and compliance areas, so endeavor to push our users to utilize Zoom Workplace whenever they need to contact a customer and discuss sensitive information."

François Lavallée, President of Aliter Concept, puts it more bluntly: "I alternate between Teams and Zoom to facilitate meetings with my clients. Although Teams has improved, it is still far behind Zoom in terms of ease of use and functionality."

Stop settling for "good enough" collaboration while your vendor consolidation efforts fail, and yours costs get out of control

The winning cross-platform collaboration strategy is the one that actually performs, not the one that attempts to consolidate your tech stack to justify ever-increasing costs.

The organizations that take this approach pick the right tool for each job rather than picking sides, and they refuse to accept "good enough" as the ceiling. Do that, and the results speak for themselves: in the experience your teams have every day, in the capabilities you unlock, and in what you keep off the renewal order.

For the vast majority of customers, coexistence between Zoom and Microsoft beats consolidation efforts. Leverage Microsoft for their productivity tools, while you provide Zoom for the world's best AI-First real-time Collaboration platform and do it at a more predictable and lower cost. Your end-users and customers will thank you for it.

Sources

* Gartner, "3 Steps to Strategic Negotiations With Microsoft," June 2024.

§ Microsoft FY2026 Q4 Earnings, July 2026 (30 million paid Copilot seats against approximately 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 seats).

‖ G2 customer reviews. Dan Clark, Senior Network and Security Administrator, MDaudit; François Lavallée, President, Aliter Concept. Sourced from internal Zoom research document, August 2026.

†† Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications as a Service. Pankil Sheth, Nitin Narang, Megan Fernandez, 03 August 2026.