Teams Rooms vs Zoom Rooms: How UK Offices Choose

Licensing is where the two platforms genuinely differ on price. Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro costs £30.80 per room, per month (ex VAT, paid yearly) per Microsoft's UK pricing. A Zoom Rooms licence costs £39 per room, per month billed monthly, or £33.25 per room, per month billed annually (ex VAT) per Zoom's pricing page. On annual terms the gap is small - a few pounds per room per month.

The bigger difference is at the entry level. Teams Rooms Basic is free for up to 25 rooms per organisation, per Microsoft's licensing documentation. It covers the essentials - one-touch join, ad hoc meetings, content sharing, whiteboarding and even Direct Guest Join into Zoom and Webex meetings. What it leaves out matters in bigger rooms: no front row layout, no dual screen support, no large gallery, no meeting chat on the room display, no intelligent audio and video features, and only basic device management. Zoom has no equivalent ongoing free tier for shared rooms - there is a free 30-day trial, then every shared-space room consumes a paid licence.

In practice: a small Microsoft 365 business with a handful of small rooms can run Teams Rooms with zero licence spend. A business standardising on boardroom-grade features will pay a monthly per-room licence on either platform, and the amounts are close enough that licensing alone should rarely decide the platform.

Both certification programmes are dominated by the same manufacturers. Neat, Poly, Logitech and Yealink all make certified systems for Teams Rooms and for Zoom Rooms, alongside Crestron, Jabra, AVer, Lenovo, DTEN and others, per Microsoft's certified hardware list and Zoom's certified hardware programme. In many cases the same video bar family ships in a Teams variant and a Zoom variant, and the platform is effectively a software decision made at deployment.

That is why the installed cost is near-identical whichever way you go. Displays, cabling, containment, acoustic treatment, microphones and the installation labour do not care which meeting platform the room runs. MAV Reality's banded pricing for both platforms starts at £3,000 to £4,500 for a small room and runs to £15,000 to £35,000 for large rooms and town hall spaces, ex VAT.

It also means the decision is less permanent than most buyers fear. Many certified appliances can be redeployed to the other platform later, though this needs checking model by model before you rely on it - some devices require a different software load, and certification status differs per variant. If a future platform switch is a realistic scenario for your business, tell your installer at design stage and they can specify hardware that keeps the door open.

Day to day, a well-installed room on either platform behaves the same way: walk in, tap once, the meeting starts. The bigger operational difference is how IT looks after the estate.

Microsoft's Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal is the deeper toolset. On a Basic licence you get enrolment, inventory and automatic software updates; the Pro licence adds detailed system and configuration information, peripheral health management, remote configuration, custom health alerts, device history, ITSM integration and device analytics, per Microsoft's licensing documentation. Pro also bundles Microsoft Intune and Entra ID P1, so room devices can sit under the same conditional access policies as the rest of a Microsoft estate.

Zoom Device Management lives inside the standard Zoom web portal - Zoom's documentation names no separate management SKU. Admins can enrol devices, upgrade or downgrade the Zoom Rooms app remotely, and launch a web-based version of the room controller to operate a room without being in it, per Zoom's support documentation.

A fair summary: Teams Rooms Pro offers more granular estate management, but you pay for it per room. Zoom's management is lighter but included. For a 5-room estate the difference is minor; for a 50-room estate with a small IT team, the management tooling is often the deciding factor.

Start with your identity and calendar stack, not the room. If your organisation runs Microsoft 365 - Outlook calendars, Entra ID accounts, Teams for internal calls - a Teams Room drops straight into that world: the room's resource account, calendar processing and management all live where your IT team already works. If Zoom is your primary platform, the same logic applies in reverse.

Then count how often your rooms will join the other platform's meetings. Both platforms handle occasional cross-platform joins well: a Teams Room joins Zoom meetings one-touch via Direct Guest Join on any licence, and a Zoom Room joins Teams meetings one-touch as a web guest. Both are guest experiences with real limits - a Teams Room in a Zoom meeting cannot send content over HDMI, and a Zoom Room in a Teams meeting has a capped gallery layout and cannot screen share without the Teams client. If a room will spend half its life on the other platform, that room is on the wrong platform.

Finally, count rooms and check the shape of your estate. Under 25 rooms on Microsoft 365? Teams Rooms Basic makes the licensing free while you prove the rooms work. Mixed-platform estate with lots of external hosting? Zoom Rooms plus its BYOD mode gives users an escape hatch to any platform via a laptop and the room's own camera and audio.

There is no best platform - there is a best platform for your estate. MAV Reality installs both weekly, and a short conversation about your calendar stack, room count and external meeting patterns usually settles the question in minutes.