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Zoom meters the person who schedules. Google meters every person you employ. Webex meters how often two of your meetings collide. RingCentral meters a phone user, because underneath the video it is a phone system. Not one of the four publishes a price we could fetch, so this page quotes none of them and compares the shapes instead.
Before you sign anything or move a calendar
All four of these will start a call at the time you asked for and connect everybody who turns up. They diverge on what they charge you for, and the difference only surfaces in the month you hire, or the Tuesday three sessions collide. Three things are worth settling before you commit to any of them.
1
Zoom meters host licences, so the bill tracks how many of your people schedule. Google meters Workspace seats, so it tracks everybody who needs an email address, warehouse staff included. Webex meters concurrency, so it tracks how often two calls overlap, which is a property of your calendar rather than your headcount. RingCentral meters phone users. Not one of those four numbers has any relationship to how much configuration your setup actually needs.
2
Google Workspace Business Starter cannot record a meeting at all, and teams find that out on the morning of the client call. Webex Free records to the laptop of whoever pressed the button, which is not a retention policy so much as the absence of one. Zoom holds single sign on back to Business and unlimited cloud recording back to Enterprise. RingCentral has no free plan, only a fourteen day trial built around phone lines. Work out which pieces you genuinely need first, or you will compare the wrong two tiers.
3
Every vendor here ships a meeting platform and all four of them are good at it. The real question is whether anybody in your business owns the schedule itself, notices when a webinar loses half its audience at minute six, or revisits a reminder timing set once by somebody who has since left. A meeting platform runs exactly what you configured. It never mentions that nobody has reconsidered the configuration in three years.
Every one of them renders its paid rates in your browser rather than printing them in the page, and RingCentral does not publish a video figure anywhere at all. So we quote none of them here, and there is no invented number on this page or on any of the four below it. What is left to compare is the shape of the meter and who is minding what runs on top of it, and not one of the four answers the second part.
VS
A Licence Per Host, Not Per Org
Support Metered By What You Spend
Ten Gigabytes Of Recording Per Licence
Zoom is the deepest meeting product here and much the strongest on conference rooms and hardware, and nothing on this hub argues otherwise. What it prints rather than renders is that live chat support starts above ten dollars a month of spend and live phone support above two hundred. One licensed host runs unlimited meetings, but two people hosting at the same time need two licences between them. Cloud recording is ten gigabytes per licence until Enterprise, where single sign on and translated captions also sit.
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VS
A Seat For Everybody You Employ
The Entry Tier Cannot Record
Three Hundred Users And No Further
Google Meet is not sold on its own. It arrives inside a Workspace seat, so the meeting cost tracks everybody who needs an email address rather than the handful who schedule. If your mail and your files are already Google, it is close to free and very likely the right answer. Business Starter cannot record a meeting to Drive at all, and Starter, Standard and Plus each stop at three hundred users, after which only Enterprise and a contact sales button remain. Meeting length is the honourable exception, at twenty four hours on every tier.
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VS
One Licence, One Meeting At A Time
The Free Plan Records To A Laptop
Toll Dial In Across Fifty Seven Countries
Webex has the only free plan here substantial enough to run a small business on, with unlimited meetings capped at forty minutes each, a hundred attendees, whiteboards and advanced security, and Cisco takes no card for it. The catch is written plainly in their own answers: one host licence runs one meeting at a time, so a second overlapping call is a purchase decision. Free plan recording lands on the laptop that made it. FedRAMP authorisation and unlimited cloud recording sit at Enterprise, behind a let us talk.
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VS
Six Products, Six Pricing Pages
The Video Page Prints No Figure
A Fourteen Day Trial, Not A Free Plan
RingCentral is the odd one out here, and the strongest of the four at the thing it is actually for. It is a business phone system with video attached, split across six pricing pages, and the video one carries a description, a note about annual saving and a contact sales button rather than a tier list. Unlimited calling across the United States and Canada, over three hundred and thirty integrations, and HITRUST, GDPR, PCI and HIPAA behind it. If you are replacing a phone system, buy it. If you only wanted video, you are signing for telephony.
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What the flat three hundred covers, and what it deliberately does not
Three hundred dollars a month, per organization, to read what you actually run and tell you what we think of it, set up the organisation and its hosts, build the meeting and webinar templates, write the registration pages and tune the reminder timings, decide and configure the recording and retention rules, watch the attendance every cycle and revise the whole thing as the business changes. Your Zoho Meeting subscription stays in your name and you buy it from Zoho directly. We do not resell it and we do not mark it up.
Here is the qualification, and it is a blunt one. If two people host and the sessions never overlap, the Webex free plan costs nothing at all and will do the job, and three hundred a month against zero is not a comparison we win. Our fee also sits on top of a Zoho Meeting licence you buy separately. If somebody in your building genuinely owns the schedule, the recordings and the registration pages, stay where you are and keep your money. What we sell is the judgement and the upkeep, not the software.
A calendar that grew one recurring invite at a time is a set of decisions nobody ever made together. We start from what you actually run and who actually attends, work back to the smallest set of sessions that covers that honestly, and end the ones existing only because they existed last year.
All four vendors on this page multiply a rate by a count, whether that count is hosts, seats, simultaneous meetings or phone users, so hiring raises the invoice they send you. Ours does not move at all. Three hundred a month covers the work whether nine people work here or ninety, and the licence you carry is paid to Zoho rather than to us.
Meetings do not fail loudly. Nothing errors, the invites keep going out on time, and half the audience simply leaves at minute six without anybody noticing for four quarters. We read the attendance every cycle, work the registration pages, and say plainly when a session has stopped earning its hour.
How do you compare four meeting platforms when none of them publishes a price?
You gather the quotes first, then compare shapes rather than headlines. Zoom, Google and Cisco all render their paid rates in your browser rather than printing them in the page, and RingCentral publishes no video figure at all. So work out three numbers of your own before you ring anybody: how many of your people genuinely schedule, how many people you employ in total, and how often two of your sessions need to run at the same moment. Those three decide which meter is cheapest for you, and no vendor page will tell you.
How does a meeting platform decision go wrong?
Almost never on the software, and almost always on ownership. The platform gets chosen carefully, switched on well, and then belongs to nobody. Two years on, the reminder still goes out twenty four hours ahead because that was the default, several licences belong to people who left, and a standing Thursday call that forty people decline is still in everybody's calendar. Nothing broke. Nobody was running it.
Who owns the account and the licence if you set this up?
You do, entirely. You hold your own Zoho Meeting subscription in your own name and pay Zoho directly for it. We work inside it as administrators and never sit between you and your account. End this tomorrow and every host, every recording, every registration ever taken and all the reporting stay exactly where they are. Zoho Assist is the single service where the licence sits with us instead.
Should we simply pick one of these and run it ourselves?
For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say it here than after you have signed. If two people host and the calls never overlap, the Webex free plan costs nothing and will do. If your company already runs on Google Workspace, Meet is close to free and switching it on is the obvious answer. If you need a phone system as well, buy RingCentral. Come back when nobody in the building can name who owns the meetings.
Which of the four comes out cheapest for us?
It depends entirely on which of your three counts is largest, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. If almost nobody schedules, Zoom is cheap, because you buy very few host licences. If your headcount is large but only a handful ever run a session, Google is expensive, because it charges for all of them. If your calendar collides often, Webex climbs quickly, because concurrency is the unit. If you need telephony anyway, RingCentral stops being a meeting cost at all. And the Webex free plan is genuinely zero, which beats every paid option here including ours.
What happens when nobody looks at the meetings after go live?
First somebody has to notice, and that is the part that fails, because nothing is broken. No support tier covers it. Zoom puts live chat behind ten dollars of monthly spend and live phone support behind two hundred. Google sells Enhanced and Premium Support as paid upgrades against Enterprise. Cisco prints basic support against its free plan. RingCentral sells an AI Receptionist from thirty nine dollars and Conversational Intelligence from sixty as add-ons. All of that helps your people work the tool. With us, reading the attendance every cycle is part of the fee, so the noticing is ours rather than yours.
Do we have to move every meeting at once?
No, and it usually goes better if you do not. The normal order is the sessions that face customers, then anything tied to a change you are making right now, then the long tail of internal recurring invites. Most of the value sits in the first group and most of the tidying sits in the last, and a fair number of that last group turn out not to need moving at all.
Can you take over a meeting setup somebody else built?
Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read what is configured, find the two recurring sessions doing almost the same thing on different days, identify the licences still assigned to people who have left, and settle which version of each template wins. Expect that last part to be the bulk of it. An inherited meeting setup is usually accurate about what was scheduled and completely silent about why.
How long does this actually take?
Four to eight weeks for most businesses, and longer where the recurring sessions sit on settings nobody wrote down outside the platform. Configuring Zoho Meeting is a couple of days. The time goes on agreeing which sessions should exist at all, on finding every licence nobody has audited since it was bought, and on the first month of live meetings, which has to run and be watched before anybody relaxes.
We already have somebody who owns this. What is left for you?
Possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns this properly will do it better than a monthly retainer, because they are there every day and they know the business. The question is whether it is actually on their list. Reviewing the reminder timings in a month where every meeting connected on time is the work that is always reasonable to postpone until next quarter.
When would you tell us not to bother?
Two cases, and both are common. If fewer than three people ever schedule and the sessions never overlap, the whole setup fits in one person's head, the Webex free plan or a couple of Zoom licences will do, and the money is better spent elsewhere. And if you are replacing a phone system as well, RingCentral is a better answer than we are, and we will say so on the first call rather than sell around it.
What if the meetings turn out not to be the problem?
You will hear that from us before any invoice goes out, which is the whole point of the fit review. Often the real problem is that the webinar content is not landing rather than that the platform is wrong, or that two teams disagree about who a session is even for, or that nobody is willing to say a standing meeting has outlived its purpose. Any of those is worth resolving first, and no amount of meeting configuration fixes any of them.
What does this cost through you, stated as plainly as possible?
Three hundred dollars a month, per organization. You will find it on the Managed Zoho Meeting service page. Headcount does not move it and neither does the number of people hosting. The Zoho Meeting licence comes from Zoho directly and belongs to you.
What happens if we decide to stop?
Thirty days notice ends it. Everything stays exactly where it is, because the subscription was always yours. We hand back the administrator seat, write up what every template is for and why the recording and access rules are set the way they are so the next person is not guessing, and list what we would change next.
What do you need from us to begin?
A list of your standing sessions and who owns each one, your current host or seat count and what you pay for it, and an honest account of which meetings people actually attend rather than which ones are in the calendar. Neither list is ever complete and neither needs to be. They tell us the shape of the problem, and the fit review finds the rest.
