Amazon-chime-vs-zoom

Both Amazon Chime and Zoom are unified communication solutions that offer audio and video conferencing, business calling, and other collaboration features like team messaging and screen sharing. Zoom and Amazon Chime are both available on most major platforms, including iOS, Android, Web, and Mac. On TrustRadius, both products are in the web and video conferencing software category. 

Features 

Both Amazon Chime and Zoom provide standard online communication features like video and audio conferencing, online meeting recording, business phone calling, screen sharing, personalized meeting links, and the ability to see meeting participants. However, each platform has a few unique features as well. 

Amazon Chime allows users to join meetings by using Alexa and start meetings directly from Slack. Users can also utilize chatbots within Amazon Chime chat rooms and can select a ‘running late’ option that notifies other meeting attendees. All Amazon Chime meetings are also fully encrypted with AES 256-bit standards, which protect audio and video calls, chat messages, and shared files from data breaches. 

Zoom is widely regarded as one of the most user-friendly video conferencing platforms, which can help increase adoption of the platform across your team or business. Zoom also offers features like the ability to set up virtual backgrounds, the ability to mute yourself or turn off your video feed, a virtual ‘hand-raising’ feature, and advanced collaboration features like a whiteboard and breakout rooms for online meetings.

Limitations 

While Amazon Chime and Zoom are true alternatives and serve the same use cases, each platform has a few limitations to be aware of. 

For example, Amazon Chime’s free plan doesn’t allow users to host group meetings, users can only make one-on-one video or voice calls. In contrast, Zoom’s free plan provides users with a much wider array of features, including the ability to host group meetings. However, Zoom’s free plan limits meetings with more than two participants to 40 minutes. 

Amazon’s Chime’s paid plan also limits group meetings to 250 participants, while Zoom’s paid plans accommodate up to 1,000 meeting participants. Only 16 users can show their video feeds at one time with Amazon Chime, while Zoom allows up to 49 users to show their video feeds simultaneously. 

Two advantages Amazon Chime has over Zoom is that it’s built on top of Amazon’s AWS service and has more robust communication data encryption. Zoom, on the other hand, has faced scrutiny for its lack of strong security measures and data breaches. 

Pricing 

Both products have a free plan, but after that Zoom offers three different plan tiers while Amazon has one paid plan. Zoom’s pricing structure is based on how many meeting hosts are using its services per month, while Amazon’s pricing depends on which features users are actively using per day. 

Amazon Chime’s free plan normally doesn’t allow users to host group meetings. However, due to the circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon has made Pro plan features free for new users between March 4th, 2020 and September 30th, 2020. Typically, the group meeting costs $3 per user per day, up to $15 per user per month. 

Zoom free plan provides users with access to more features than Amazon Chime’s free plan usually does. These include video and web conferencing, breakout rooms, screen sharing, meeting waiting room, and the ability to host meetings with up to 1,000 participants. Zoom’s highest-priced plan costs $19.99 per meeting host per month.