Zoom Review 2025: It Is 2am and I Have Had 7 Meetings Today

It is 2:17 in the morning and I have had seven Zoom meetings today. Seven. The first one started at 8:30am with the design team in a standup that lasted 47 minutes because someone started screen-sharing a Figma file and then three people had opinions. The last one ended at 9pm with a client in San Francisco who wanted to "quickly" walk through feedback on a prototype, and "quickly" turned into ninety minutes because it always does.

I am sitting here with the blue glow of my monitor in a dark room, a half-finished cup of chai that went cold two hours ago, and a kind of bone-deep tiredness that only comes from spending an entire day looking at tiny rectangles containing human faces. And I am thinking: I should write that Zoom review I have been putting off. Right now. Because I have never been more qualified to talk about this app than I am at this exact moment, having just lived through a day that is basically the product's entire use case compressed into 13 hours.

So here goes. Unfiltered. Possibly incoherent. Definitely honest.

The Thing That Still Works

Zoom works. I know that sounds like the lowest possible bar, but you need to remember what video calling was like before Zoom. I remember Skype. I remember Google Hangouts. I remember WebEx in 2018 when joining a meeting required downloading a Java plugin that crashed your browser. I remember the constant "can you hear me?" and "you're frozen" and "let me try reconnecting" that used to eat up the first five minutes of every video call.

Zoom made that go away. You click a link and you are in a meeting. The video works. The audio works. The screen sharing works. It works on my Mac, it works on my phone when I take a call from the car, it works in my browser when I can not be bothered to open the app. This sounds boring and unremarkable, but five years ago it was revolutionary, and the fact that it still consistently works when everything else in software seems to be getting buggier is worth acknowledging.

Today, across seven meetings, I had zero technical issues. No dropped calls, no audio problems, no "can you see my screen?" failures. Meeting number four had a participant on terrible hotel WiFi in Mumbai and even they stayed connected, albeit with a fuzzy video feed. Zoom's ability to degrade gracefully on bad connections -- prioritizing audio clarity, reducing video resolution, staying connected -- is still the best in the business. I have used Teams on bad WiFi and it drops the entire call. Zoom just makes you look like a Minecraft character for a bit and keeps going.

AI Companion or Whatever They Are Calling It

OK so Zoom added this AI thing. AI Companion. It generates meeting summaries after calls end, which is probably the single feature I get the most value from on a daily basis, and I mean that sincerely even though I realize it sounds like I am being sarcastic because it is 2am and everything I say sounds vaguely sarcastic right now.

Here is what actually happens. Meeting ends. A few minutes later, I get a summary in my Zoom account and optionally via email. The summary lists the main topics discussed, the decisions made, and the action items with names attached. Today's client call summary correctly identified that (a) we agreed to revise the homepage hero section, (b) the deadline is March 15, (c) I am responsible for the mockups, and (d) the client will send updated copy by Monday. That is genuinely useful because by meeting number seven my brain had turned to mush and I would not have remembered any of that without checking notes.

The summaries are not perfect. Meeting number three was a brainstorming session with a lot of crosstalk and the summary missed some of the subtleties -- it captured the main ideas but missed the nuances and the "well actually, we kind of decided against that in the end" turns that happened in the conversation. But for maybe 70% of meetings, the summary is good enough to replace manual note-taking, which means I can actually pay attention during calls instead of typing furiously.

The best part: it is included with paid plans at no extra cost. Microsoft charges 30 dollars per user per month for Copilot. Google charges for Gemini features. Zoom just... includes it. That is weirdly generous and probably a strategic move to keep people from switching to Teams, but whatever the motivation, the result is good for users.

The 40-Minute Prison

If you are on the free plan, group meetings are limited to 40 minutes. I know this because I have friends and family members who use the free plan and every group birthday call, every casual catch-up with college friends, every "let us all get on a call" moment hits that 40-minute wall. The meeting just... ends. Everyone gets kicked out. Then someone has to create a new meeting and share the link again and everyone rejoins and someone inevitably says "wait, we were in the middle of something" and you lose five minutes of momentum.

This is the most Zoom thing about Zoom. The product works so well that you forget you are on a timer until the timer goes off. And then you are annoyed, and then you think about paying, which is of course the entire point. I do not love this as a user experience choice, but I understand it as a business decision. The free plan is a funnel, not a product.

The Pro plan costs about 13 dollars per user per month and removes the limit (up to 30 hours, which is enough for anyone who is not running a 24-hour telethon). For professional use, this is a reasonable price. For personal use -- family calls, friend groups -- it feels expensive for what is basically a utility, and most people just restart the meeting instead of paying.

Zoom Fatigue is a Real Thing and Zoom Knows It

I want to talk about this because it is 2am and I am living proof. Zoom fatigue is not marketing speak. It is a documented psychological phenomenon. Researchers at Stanford found that extended video calls cause more mental exhaustion than equivalent in-person interactions because of the constant close-up eye contact, the cognitive load of processing non-verbal cues through a screen, and the weird experience of seeing your own face for hours at a time.

Zoom has actually tried to address this, to their credit. You can hide self-view so you are not staring at your own face. The speaker view reduces the number of faces you see at once. The "focus mode" hides other participants' videos from each other (useful for classes). There are little quality-of-life touches like the ability to turn off your video while staying in the call, which I do during at least two meetings per day when I need to stretch or eat something or just exist without performing presence for a camera.

But the fundamental tension remains: Zoom's business model depends on people having more meetings, and having more meetings makes people tired and resentful of Zoom. There is an irony there that I find fascinating in a detached, 2am-brain sort of way. The better Zoom gets at facilitating meetings, the more meetings there are, the more people complain about Zoom fatigue, the more they associate that exhaustion with the Zoom brand even though the real problem is meeting culture, not the software.

Teams vs. Zoom: The Vibes Comparison

I use both. My company uses Teams for internal communication and Zoom for external calls. This is apparently a common setup, and it means I have a direct daily comparison.

Teams feels like work. It feels like the office building of video calling. Everything is corporate-functional, designed by committee, integrated with Outlook and SharePoint and the rest of the Microsoft machine. Joining a Teams meeting sometimes takes 15 seconds of loading. The interface has too many buttons. Finding the right meeting link requires navigating through channels and chats and calendars. But once you are in, it is fine. The video quality is fine. The audio is fine. Everything is fine.

Zoom feels like showing up. Click the link, you are there. The interface is clean. The video quality is consistently a notch better than Teams, especially in gallery view. The controls are where you expect them to be. Starting a screen share takes one click, not three. There is a lightness to Zoom that Teams lacks, and I think that lightness is why Zoom became the verb instead of Teams, even though Teams has more monthly active users now.

Google Meet is fine. I use it maybe once a week for calls with people who are in the Google ecosystem. It works in the browser, which is convenient. The quality is decent. The AI transcription is actually quite good. But it feels like a feature of Google Workspace rather than a product that stands on its own. Nobody says "let's Meet" -- they say "let's hop on a Google Meet" which somehow sounds less natural. Vibes-wise, it is the most neutral of the three. Not bad, not exciting, just there.

Things I Noticed at 2am That I Might Not Notice at 2pm

The "You are on mute" notification is the most passive-aggressive feature in all of software. It appears when you are talking with your microphone muted, and the way it pops up with that little warning feels like the app is judging you. I know it is helpful. I know it has saved me from giving a two-minute monologue to nobody at least a dozen times. But at 2am it feels like Zoom is rolling its eyes at me.

The virtual backgrounds are fine for hiding a messy room but they create this uncanny valley effect where your edges shimmer and your hands disappear when you gesture. I have gotten used to it, but early on, during the pandemic days, watching someone's head float against a beach background while their hand periodically phased in and out of existence was deeply unsettling. The blur option is better -- it softens the background without replacing it, so you still look like a person sitting in a room rather than a floating head superimposed on stock photography.

Breakout rooms are underappreciated. For workshops, training sessions, and any meeting where you want small group discussions, breakout rooms work well. The host can create rooms, assign people, set timers, and broadcast messages to all rooms. I used them yesterday for a client workshop and the flow was smooth -- groups worked independently for ten minutes and then came back together. The implementation is solid even if it sounds like corporate jargon.

Zoom Clips -- the async video message feature -- is actually something I have started using more than expected. Instead of scheduling a meeting to walk someone through a design change, I record a 3-minute Zoom Clip sharing my screen and talking through the changes, and send the link. They watch it on their own time and respond when ready. It is not a new idea (Loom has been doing this for years), but having it built into the same app I am already in reduces the friction enough that I actually use it.

The recording feature is good and I wish I used it more. Cloud recording on paid plans stores the video, audio, chat transcript, and now the AI summary all together. For any meeting where decisions are made, having a recording is invaluable. The problem is that recording meetings makes some people uncomfortable, which is a social problem not a technical one, but it limits how often I actually hit the record button.

What Zoom Is Trying to Become

Zoom wants to be more than video calling. They have added team chat, phone, email, calendar, whiteboard, notes, and clips. They call it Zoom Workplace, and the pitch is that you can consolidate all your communication and collaboration tools into one platform.

I have mixed feelings about this and I am too tired to organize them into a coherent argument, so here they are as a list of thoughts:

The team chat is fine. It is not Slack. It is not going to replace Slack for anyone who already uses Slack. But if you do not have a team chat tool and you already pay for Zoom, it is there and it works and it is one less thing to set up.

Zoom Phone is apparently good. I do not use it because our company uses a different phone system, but colleagues at other companies who have switched to Zoom Phone say it is reliable and the integration with meetings (upgrade a phone call to a video meeting with one click) is genuinely useful.

Zoom Whiteboard is basic. If you need a collaborative whiteboard, Miro and FigJam are significantly better. Zoom Whiteboard feels like it was built to check a box on a feature comparison chart.

The calendar and email are brand new and I have not tried them because switching calendars and email providers sounds like a nightmare I am not ready to volunteer for, especially at 2am.

The Money Part

Free: 40-minute group meetings, 100 participants, local recording. Enough for casual use. Annoying for anything regular.

Pro at roughly 13 dollars per user per month: 30-hour meetings, cloud recording, AI Companion. This is the sweet spot for most small teams and the plan I would recommend to anyone asking.

Business at roughly 18 dollars: 300 participants, managed domains, SSO. Needed once your company is big enough to care about admin controls.

Business Plus at 22 dollars: adds Zoom Phone. Only relevant if you need the phone system.

Enterprise: call sales. You know the drill.

Is it worth the money? For professional use, yes. The Pro plan's combination of unlimited meeting duration and AI Companion is a solid value at 13 dollars per month, especially compared to the cost of the meeting time itself. An hour of three people's time in a meeting is probably 150 dollars or more in salary costs -- the 13-dollar software that makes those meetings more productive and better-documented is a rounding error.

For personal use, the free plan works if you can tolerate the 40-minute limit. If you can not, Google Meet offers free 60-minute group meetings, which is a better deal for casual use.

What I Think at 2:47am