Pros & Cons
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- Affordable
- Mostly straightforward interface
- Accurate transcriptions and meeting highlights
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- Complicated AI setup
- Some features are underwhelming
Zoho Meeting Specs
| 24/7 Phone Support | |
| Audio Recordings | |
| Blur Backgrounds | |
| Calendar Integration | |
| Cloud Storage | |
| Free Version Offered | |
| In-App Messaging | |
| In-App Private Chat | |
| Multi-Language Support | |
| Share Desktop | |
| Share Mouse / Keyboard | |
| Social Media Integration | |
| Transcription | |
| Video Recordings | |
| Virtual Backgrounds | |
| Whiteboard Tools |
With no shortage of video conferencing options in the world of remote work, Zoho Meeting stands out with extremely affordable pricing. It provides all the features we expect, including annotation tools and collaborative whiteboards, in a mostly intuitive interface, and does a good job of transcribing meetings. We also like its AI tools for pulling out key meeting highlights and the Zapier-powered automations for integrating third-party apps into your workflows. All that said, Zoho's AI setup process isn't simple, and other features don't work as smoothly as they could. Webex by Cisco and Zoom Workplace cost more, but they remain our Editors’ Choice winners for the category, thanks to their slicker user experiences and more sophisticated feature sets.
Pricing: Ultra-Low Costs
Zoho Meeting's free tier supports meetings up to an hour long with up to 100 attendees. You get standard features like chat, polls, Q&As, virtual backgrounds, and whiteboards. This is a competitive offering, though RingCentral Video notably offers AI-powered meeting highlights and summaries at no cost, along with closed captioning and live transcriptions.
Zoho Meet's Standard plan ($1 per host per month, billed annually) supports up to 10 participants, but you can increase the limit to 250 participants ($10 per host per month, billed annually). This tier adds business-oriented features, such as 5GB of cloud storage for recordings, custom virtual backgrounds, live annotations, and the ability to share control of your keyboard and mouse. Meeting time and participant limits go up to 24 hours and 250 participants, respectively.
Upgrading to the Professional tier ($3 per host per month, billed annually) unlocks Zia, Zoho’s OpenAI-powered AI assistant. You also get breakout rooms, end-to-end encryption, meeting keynotes (highlights), recording transcripts, and priority support.
Zoho Meeting's Webinar plans (starting at $8 per host per month, billed annually) support more participants (up to 5,000 for the Enterprise level) and add other corporate-friendly features.
(Credit: Zoho Meeting/PCMag)Webex by Cisco ($12 per user per month, billed annually) and Zoom Workplace ($13.33 per user per month, billed annually) both cost significantly more, though each offers capable free versions. Zoho Meeting's Professional tier has about as many AI tools as those more expensive services, though it's not as user-friendly.
Interface and Ease of Use: Some Unnecessary Complexity
You can use Zoho Meeting in a browser or download dedicated mobile apps (available for Android and iOS). I primarily tested the web version.
Zoho Meeting’s dashboard uses a simple, somewhat plain layout, so you shouldn't have any issues finding what you need. The main page lets you start or schedule video meetings and webinars, and launch your personal meeting room. A left-hand navigation menu organizes analytics, calendar, and file management tools, along with VoIP functionality (should your business need a phone line).
However, this straightforward design style doesn't extend across the whole experience. For example, if you want to connect first- and third-party apps, you have to go through the Integrations section of the Settings menu. This functionality should be more prominent, and newcomers to the platform might not even think to look for it here. The Settings menu is also where you find your application programming interface (API) and software development kit (SDK), the former of which you need to set up the product's AI features. Zoom Workplace makes it easier to connect apps and use its AI tools. Both it and Webex by Cisco support far more third-party (and non-Zoho) apps, too.
Video Meeting Experience: Virtual Backgrounds Could Be Better
You can share a meeting link with people outside the Zoho ecosystem. Those on PCs can join meetings in progress via a web browser, but those on a phone will need to download the Zoho Meeting app.
Zoho Meeting's video call interface is easy to use. Most of the features you need are accessible via a toolbar at the bottom. Not much here stands out, however. The Reactions feature lets you raise a virtual hand to interject with a question or comment. Likewise, you can use other gestures to indicate your emotional state or that you're following along. Most competitors offer these capabilities, too, but Webex by Cisco goes further, letting you trigger on-screen reactions using your actual hands.
(Credit: Zoho Meeting/PCMag)Virtual backgrounds are critical for digital meet-ups, and Zoho offers a decent selection. You can also go for the classic blur effect or, at the Professional tier, set a custom background. Although some amount of tearing is acceptable for virtual backgrounds, I found Zoho Meeting's to be pretty unstable. Even with a simple blur effect, most of my movements disrupted the area around me. No virtual backgrounds (even those for competitors) work perfectly, but the issues are distracting in this case.
Furthermore, the AI-generated virtual backgrounds look particularly bad. I'm not sure why anyone needs AI to create a picture of a Christmas landscape, but it ends up looking tacky. For the record, I tested the experience using the stock webcam on a 2025 MacBook Air.
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Annotation, Whiteboards, and Notes: Standard Tools
If you’re conducting a business meeting, you'll likely have to take notes or share your screen. Launching a collaborative whiteboard from the bottom toolbar is simple, and everything works as expected. You can upload a document from your computer and choose from several markup options. You can draw lines or shapes, for example, and Zoho even has an optional shape recognizer that can make your lines and scribbles a bit cleaner. Oddly, however, no eraser tool is available. You can reset the entire whiteboard, but not clean up immediate mistakes. RingCentral Video gives you more tools, including a grid outline option for better organizing documents and drawings.
(Credit: Zoho Meeting/PCMag)Annotation tools are available once you share your screen, and you get most of the same capabilities as with whiteboards. You can add text, draw with your mouse, make shapes, and more. This feature set includes an eraser that deletes entire shapes. Be careful about where you add your text or shapes because you can’t move them after the fact. Like the whiteboard tools, the annotation features work well but don't exceed expectations.
Zoho also offers the Session Notes feature, which collects everything from meeting transcriptions to on-the-fly to-do lists. Although some rich text formatting options are available, they're still relatively basic. Intermedia AnyMeeting lets you add color and highlight text in notes for comparison. Still, this feature serves its purpose.
Recordings, Transcriptions, and AI: Works Well After the Setup
Recording your video calls is important because team members might need information from a meeting they couldn't attend. The record button is in the bottom toolbar. Once a recording is in process, Zoho Meeting notifies all attendees. Recorded meetings end up in the Files section of your dashboard, but they require processing before you can access them. The processing times were inconsistent in testing. For a meeting that lasted between 5 and 10 minutes, processing took over an hour, even with Zia (which handles transcriptions and meeting highlights) off. That said, a shorter, one-minute video finished processing in just a few minutes. You can rewatch meeting recordings and download or share them from the Files section.
(Credit: Zoho Meeting/PCMag)As mentioned, transcriptions are generated by the OpenAI-powered Zia AI assistant. But setting it up isn't seamless. You need to download Zia from the Integrations page in the Settings section, connect your OpenAI account, and copy over your API key (also available in the Settings).
On the bright side, transcriptions work well. In testing, the Zia transcribed the correct words and used proper grammar almost every time. Some margin of error is acceptable, of course. Zoho Meeting breaks your transcription into paragraphs every couple of seconds, and clicking one takes you to the corresponding part of the video. You can copy sections or add them to your meeting notes, but it's not possible to edit the text directly in the transcription menu.
You can also use Zia to create post-meeting keynotes, which are key takeaways from a meeting. This feature worked reliably. Whether I fed it business notes or excerpts from a novel, Zia broke everything down into helpful bullet points.
In testing, I got a weird prompt that said I had exceeded my OpenAI keynotes request rate after trying to request a transcription of a one-minute video. However, Zia did end up transcribing the entire video, so it might have just been a glitch.
Finally, Zoho now lets you build Zapier-powered automations to upload recorded meetings to Google Drive, send Slack notifications when meetings begin, and more. You can set up this feature from the Integrations page in the Settings section.
Privacy: Is Zoho Meeting Safe to Use?
When you log into Zoho Meeting for the first time, it prompts you to set up multi-factor authentication via one of several methods. If you choose to download Zoho’s authenticator app, OneAuth, make sure to enable push notifications, as you may need to interact with them directly to log in to your account.
(Credit: Zoho Meeting/PCMag)Zoho Meeting protects meetings with passwords and lets you lock them so that no one else (even those with the link) can join without approval.
Zoho says that all transmissions use SSL/128-bit AES encryption, and that it fully encrypts and securely stores all data you share. Its security and privacy policies are relatively up to date, but lengthy.