Zoho Meeting is video conferencing software that's just one of the many components within the broader Zoho ecosystem. Current Zoho customers should consider Meetings, as recent upgrades such as AI-powered transcription features bring the service more in line with the competition. That said, those AI tools require a few too many steps to get up and running, and the app may not appeal to you if you're looking for a standalone business-focused video conferencing solution. If you want a high-quality video conferencing option that requires less setup, check out our Editors' Choice winners Intermedia AnyMeeting, Webex by Cisco, and Zoom One.
What Does Zoho Meeting Cost?
Zoho Meeting's greatest strength is its low cost. Its free tier supports 100 attendees, but meetings top out at 60 minutes. Some companies can work within those constraints, but other organizations will want a premium tier for increased flexibility. This free tier includes features like virtual backgrounds, collaborative whiteboards, meeting notes, and file sharing through its in-meeting chat box.
The paid Meetings tier starts at $1 per host per month when meetings are limited to 10 attendees and scales up from there. For example, to get the same 100 attendees as the free tier, you must pay $6 per host per month. However, the paid product offers an admin portal, cloud recording, annotation, and other desirable video conferencing features.
If webinars are more your thing, Zoho's Webinars plan starts at $8 per organizer per month when limited to 25 attendees, and scales up similarly to the Meetings plan. This tier introduces features that cater to webinars, such as live streaming, uploading and sharing materials, Q&A and polls, event registration tools, and 5,000 attendee seats.
Similar Products
Zoom One
Intermedia AnyMeeting
Webex by Cisco
RingCentral Video
Google Meet
GoToMeeting
ClickMeeting
Microsoft Teams
Getting Started With Zoho Meeting
Zoho Meeting has clients for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows, which covers all the bases. If you're using another video conferencing service or your organization's IT policy won't let you install a desktop app, you can join Zoho Meeting via its web client.
Once you're signed in, you'll see a handy Meet Now button that expands to offer a quick audio or video conference. It's the fastest way to start chatting with coworkers. If you need more scheduling power, Zoho Meeting integrates with the rest of the Zoho suite, so you can add a meeting from Zoho Calendar, which is a nice touch. There's also an Outlook plug-in that provides similar functionality for Microsoft shops, and even a version of Zoho Meeting that integrates with Google Workspace, should your organization prefer Google's suite.
Zoho Meeting's layout is clean and unobtrusive. In fact, the refreshed UI greatly resembles the competition. You can quickly spot Google Meet and Webex's influence on how the icons hide when your mouse is still to avoid distractions during a meeting. These include the typical buttons to mute your audio and video, and share your screen or a particular application. You can also change the layout between the standard tiled view (which focuses on the active speaker) and placing everybody but the speaker in the sidebar.
The Participants button gives hosts typical moderator controls, such as muting, unmuting, and inviting additional guests. Lock Meeting prevents new people from joining. It acts as a safeguard to stop unwanted participants from hopping in if they snag your meeting ID and password, a phenomenon known as "Zoom bombing."
What Features Does Zoho Meeting Offer?
Although Zoho Meeting offers a rich feature set, it lags behind the competition. We suspect this is due to Meeting being one product among a galaxy of Zoho apps, while other video conferencing vendors offer more specialized services.
For example, 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. Nearly all of the other video conferencing services we've tested have had the latter feature for a while, and some do it much better. For example, Webex by Cisco lets you trigger reactions by placing your flesh-and-blood hands in front of the camera.
Virtual backgrounds are a necessity when working from a messy home office. Zoho's backgrounds library has many satisfying options, including some animated choices, though they're a bit silly. However, their quality depends on your webcam. A stock MacBook Pro worked well in testing, but the virtual backgrounds suffered image-tearing when we moved about. A beefier Logitech C920x HD Pro worked flawlessly. Google Meet does a much better job with its backgrounds, likely attributable to a superior algorithm.
Session Notes is a note-taking feature that saves notes to Zoho Notebook for later reference. It’s a versatile tool that affords users a one-stop shop for all notes, whether they're meeting transcriptions or on-the-fly to-do lists. Although it offers some rich text formatting, it's relatively basic. For example, Intermedia AnyMeeting lets you highlight text and add color. Still, Session Notes serves its intended purpose, which is taking meeting minutes.
Zoho Meeting includes a network performance monitor. It only displays information about your connection, but it's a fair indicator of whether your network (or another participant's) is at fault during a poor meeting experience.
What's New in Zoho Meeting?
Zoho added business phone calling to Meeting in 2023. As a result, you can use Meeting to place VoIP calls, send SMS, create queues, and keep a log of incoming and outgoing calls. This feature has a dashboard that records useful analytics. Although its use will vary from company to company—many will prefer a dedicated business VoIP system—it's a welcome addition that makes Zoho Meeting a compelling communications competitor.
Zoho Meeting Annotator, introduced in 2024, is a helpful widget that lets you write text and draw shapes over your shared screen in real time. It works well once installed, but that's one problem: Like many advanced Zoho Meeting features, you can only use them once you install them. It lacks a unified feel in many places.
Also new this year is integration with Zia, Zoho's artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant. Zoho partnered with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to create Zia, which adds much-appreciated AI features across multiple Zoho apps. Zoho Meeting's Zia integration means it can now create automatic transcripts of recorded meetings. In our tests, Zia worked as advertised, nailing words and grammar.
You can also use Zia to create post-meeting "keynotes," although that confusing term might better be called "key insights." Whatever you call it, its purpose is to boil a meeting transcript down to its most important takeaways. This feature, too, works well. Whether we fed it business notes or excerpts from a novel, Zia broke down those words and turned them into helpful bullet points.
Is Zoho Meeting Easy to Use?
We had a major point of contention with Zoho Meeting: its UI is inconsistent and not always intuitive. Yes, Zoho Meeting's essential features, such as starting meetings and calls, are easy to navigate. However, many additional features are either hard to find or need to be added after you start using the software.
For example, the Annotator feature does not come stock with Zoho Meeting—it's an additional download. Moreover, we couldn't download Annotator using the desktop client; it was limited to the browser-based version while sharing the full screen. Worse, to download the Annotator and other Zoho Meeting add-on features, we had to visit the Settings tab, which is probably not where most users would look to find Zoho's equivalent of an app store.
Setting up the Zia AI assistant is even more complicated than activating Annotator. After finding Zia, you must feed it an OpenAI API key, which you'll either need to obtain from your IT department or generate after registering for a separate OpenAI account.
These extra steps highlight one of our chief reservations about Zoho Meeting: Too much self-service installation and configuration is necessary to take advantage of the software's most compelling features. AI-powered keynotes and transcripts are advertised as new flagship features for Zoho Meeting, and as such, they should come stock with the service or, at the very least, not be such a hassle to set up. Not every company has a dedicated staff who can walk users through the process.
Verdict: Video Conferencing Essentials for Zoho Users
Zoho Meeting gets the job done, and if you are already using Zoho's other products, it fits nicely into that scheme. Although it isn't the best video conferencing product on the market, its price is extremely competitive and its feature set is good enough that it's an easy choice. Then again, if cost isn't a top concern and you're not interested in going all-in on Zoho, there are better options. These include our Editors' Choice winners Intermedia AnyMeeting and Zoom One, affordable services that offer more unified experiences. And well-heeled shoppers owe it to themselves to check out Webex, another Editors' Choice winner that leverages Cisco's compelling hardware ecosystem.
Zoho Meeting is a useful low-cost video conferencing service that provides most of what you need for online meetings, but it remains clunky in key areas.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
)