Microsoft Teams Rooms vs Zoom Rooms: A 2026 Comparison

Microsoft Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms are both dedicated meeting-room appliances: a small computer or all-in-one bar that turns a screen, camera and microphone into a one-touch video-conferencing system, with no laptop required. The right choice almost always follows your primary platform — run Teams Rooms if your business already lives in Microsoft 365, Zoom Rooms if Zoom is your default. Where it gets interesting is licensing cost, hardware choice, AI features and whether a room can join the other platform’s meetings. This guide compares both for 2026.

If you are at the earlier stage of planning a room — displays, cameras, audio and acoustics — start with our meeting room AV design guide and the AV design standards reference. This piece assumes you have decided to standardise on a room platform and are choosing between the two market leaders.

The short answer

For most Hong Kong businesses, the decision is made for you by the platform your staff and clients already use:

• You are a Microsoft 365 organisation — Teams is where your calendars, identities and internal meetings already live. Teams Rooms is the natural fit, and it ties into the management tools (Intune, Entra) you already run.
• Zoom is your default meeting platform — Zoom Rooms gives the cleanest experience, and the per-room licence is simple to reason about.
• You run a genuinely mixed environment — internal on Teams, external client calls on Zoom (or vice versa). This is common in Hong Kong professional services. Here the deciding factor is interoperability — covered below — and the answer is usually still “standardise on your internal platform, and rely on cross-platform join for the rest.”

What you should not do is choose on a feature-by-feature spec sheet alone. A room that runs the platform your people use every day, reliably, beats a marginally better-specified room running the platform they have to think about.

How each one works

Both replace the “plug your laptop in and hope” model with a fixed appliance that owns the room’s display, camera and audio and joins meetings with one tap on a table console.

Microsoft Teams Rooms comes in two flavours, and the difference matters:

• Teams Rooms on Windows runs on a dedicated mini-PC paired with a separate camera, audio and touch console. It offers the broadest feature support, the deepest management integration, and the most flexibility for custom peripherals — the right choice for standard rooms, boardrooms and large or divisible spaces.
• Teams Rooms on Android runs natively on a certified all-in-one bar with the compute built in. Fewer components, easier to deploy and support — ideal for huddle and small-to-medium rooms.

Zoom Rooms runs on a small Mac or PC appliance (or a certified Zoom Rooms appliance) driving the display, camera and audio, with an iPad or Android tablet as the controller. One software model across all room sizes.

We cover which specific certified hardware suits which room in the companion Teams Rooms certified devices buyer’s guide.

Licensing and cost compared

This is where the two diverge most. Figures below are list prices in USD per month (with indicative Hong Kong dollar equivalents at roughly HK$7.8/US$1); your actual price depends on agreement and reseller.

	Microsoft Teams Rooms	Zoom Rooms
Licence tiers	Basic (free) and Pro	Single tier
Price	Basic: free for up to 25 rooms · Pro: ~US$40 (≈HK$310) per device/month	~US$49 (≈HK$380) per room/month
What the paid tier adds	Pro Management Portal, remote monitoring & alerting, advanced layouts (Front Row, dual screen), intelligent camera framing (IntelliFrame), Intune management, conditional access	Full feature set included at the single price — one-touch join, wireless sharing, scheduling display, digital signage, Zoom Device Management
AI features	IntelliFrame included with Pro; Copilot meeting summaries require a separate Microsoft 365 Copilot licence (~US$30/user/month)	AI Companion (summaries, smart recording) included at no extra cost
Best free/low-cost path	Teams Rooms Basic is genuinely free for ≤25 rooms — attractive for smaller estates	No free tier

Two things to take from the table:

1. Teams Rooms Basic is free for up to 25 rooms. For a small Hong Kong office with a handful of meeting rooms, this is a real cost advantage — you pay for the hardware and the installation, not a recurring per-room software fee. The catch is that Basic omits the Pro management portal and the advanced layout/AI features, and once you exceed 25 rooms (or want centralised monitoring), you need Pro.
2. Zoom bundles its AI for free; Microsoft charges separately for Copilot. Zoom’s AI Companion is included; Microsoft’s room-meeting AI summaries sit behind a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. If AI meeting notes are a priority and you are not already buying Copilot, factor that in.

Over a five-year hardware life, the recurring licence difference across a large estate is material — at 100 rooms, the annual list-price gap runs to roughly US$10,800, or about US$54,000 over five years. For most Hong Kong businesses with a handful to a few dozen rooms, the licence cost is a minor line next to hardware and installation — see how much meeting room AV costs in Hong Kong for the full picture.

Hardware and ecosystem

Teams Rooms has the broader certified-hardware ecosystem — Logitech, Poly, HP, Yealink, Neat, Crestron, Cisco, Lenovo, Jabra and others all ship Microsoft-certified systems, across both Windows and Android. That breadth means more choice by room size and budget, but it also means you have to choose well; not every certified bar suits every room.

Zoom Rooms also has a wide certified-appliance range (Poly, Logitech, Neat, Yealink, DTEN and more), and because Zoom Rooms runs on standard Mac/PC hardware it can be flexible on compute. The ecosystem is slightly narrower than Teams’, but more than adequate.

In practice, much of the same physical hardware — the cameras, the ceiling microphones, the displays — is identical regardless of platform. What changes is the compute appliance and the room licence.

AI and in-meeting experience

Both platforms have invested heavily in AI-assisted meetings:

• Teams Rooms offers intelligent camera framing (IntelliFrame), speaker recognition, Front Row and dual-screen layouts (with Pro), and — with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence — meeting summaries and action items generated from the room.
• Zoom Rooms offers smart framing, and AI Companion meeting summaries and smart recording included with the room licence.

For the people in the room, the experiences are now broadly comparable. The meaningful difference is commercial: Zoom includes its AI; Microsoft’s room AI summaries depend on Copilot licensing you may or may not already have.

Management at scale

If you are running more than a few rooms, day-two management matters more than any in-meeting feature:

• Teams Rooms Pro includes the Pro Management Portal — real-time device health, automated alerting, remote restart and configuration, usage and call-quality analytics — and integrates with Microsoft Intune and Entra conditional access. For an organisation already standardised on Microsoft management tooling, this is a strong pull.
• Zoom Device Management (ZDM) provides remote monitoring, configuration and alerting across the Zoom Rooms estate from a single console.

Both are capable. The tie-breaker is usually which management stack your IT team already operates.

Interoperability — can a Teams Room join a Zoom meeting?

This is the question that decides it for mixed environments, and the answer in 2026 is increasingly “yes, either way”:

• Zoom Rooms can join Microsoft Teams meetings via Zoom’s Direct Guest Join (a mix of SIP and WebRTC), once an administrator enables it.
• Teams Rooms can join Zoom and Webex meetings through built-in Direct Guest Join — software-enabled, no extra hardware required.
• Coming in 2026: Teams Rooms on Android is gaining native SIP join for Zoom, Webex and Google Meet, with general availability targeted for around mid-August 2026 — extending cross-platform join beyond the Windows estate.

Direct Guest Join is good, but it is not always a perfect substitute for the native experience — content sharing and some controls can be more limited. The practical guidance stands: standardise rooms on your primary platform, and treat cross-platform join as the reliable fallback for the occasional external meeting, not the everyday path.

Hong Kong–specific considerations

• Microsoft 365 prevalence. Most Hong Kong SMEs and regional offices already run Microsoft 365, which tilts the default toward Teams Rooms and lets you reuse existing identity, calendar and Intune management. If you are weighing the wider Microsoft estate, our note on Microsoft 365 in China is relevant for businesses with mainland operations.
• Mixed client base. Professional services firms in Central and Admiralty routinely meet clients on whichever platform the client uses. This is the textbook case for relying on interoperability rather than buying two room systems.
• Network readiness. Both platforms are only as good as the network behind them. Reliable video conferencing needs adequate bandwidth and quality-of-service on the office network and Wi-Fi — see why your business has Wi-Fi performance issues.
• Procurement and lead times. Certified hardware is imported; lead times and warranty terms vary by vendor. We cover this in the certified devices guide and in our approach to IT procurement in Hong Kong.

Teams Rooms vs Zoom Rooms FAQs

Is Microsoft Teams Rooms free?

Teams Rooms has a free Basic licence for up to 25 rooms per organisation, which covers the core one-touch join experience. The paid Pro licence (around US$40 per device per month) adds centralised management, advanced layouts, intelligent camera framing and Intune integration, and is required beyond 25 rooms. You still pay for the room hardware and installation regardless of licence tier.

How much does Zoom Rooms cost?

Zoom Rooms is licensed at a single tier of around US$49 (roughly HK$380) per room per month, which includes the full feature set: one-touch join, wireless content sharing, device management and AI Companion meeting summaries. As with Teams Rooms, this is on top of the room hardware and installation cost.

Can a Zoom Room join a Microsoft Teams meeting?

Yes. Zoom Rooms can join Microsoft Teams meetings using Zoom’s Direct Guest Join once an administrator enables it, and Teams Rooms can likewise join Zoom and Webex meetings via built-in Direct Guest Join with no extra hardware. The experience is good but can be slightly more limited than joining a meeting on its native platform.

Should we choose Teams Rooms or Zoom Rooms?

Choose the platform your business already uses internally. If you run Microsoft 365, Teams Rooms is the natural fit and reuses your existing identity and management tooling. If Zoom is your default, Zoom Rooms gives the cleanest experience. For mixed environments, standardise rooms on your primary platform and rely on cross-platform join for external meetings.

Can the same hardware run both Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms?

Some certified appliances are dual-certified and can be switched between Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms, but a given room runs one platform at a time and switching is an administrative change, not a per-meeting toggle. In practice most organisations pick one platform per room. The cameras, microphones and displays are often the same parts; the compute appliance and licence are what differ.

How PTS approaches room platform decisions

PTS designs and installs meeting room and video conferencing systems for businesses across Hong Kong, and we are platform-neutral — our job is to fit the room to how you actually work, not to push one vendor. We have rolled out standardised Teams Rooms estates at scale, including more than 290 Microsoft Teams Rooms across nine cities in ten months, and we design Zoom Rooms and dual-platform spaces to the same standard.

We handle the whole room end to end — survey, design, certified hardware, structured cabling, platform configuration, testing and user training — and we integrate it with your Microsoft 365 or Zoom environment so it works the first time and every time after.

Contact PTS Consulting at ptsconsulting.com.hk

PTS Consulting provides managed IT support, structured cabling, audiovisual design and installation, and IT consultancy services for businesses across Hong Kong.