Zoom

Overview

Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former Cisco WebEx engineer, and publicly launched its first product, Zoom Meetings, in 2013. The company, then named Zoom Video Communications, went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker ZM in 2019. It saw extraordinary growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, with daily meeting participants increasing roughly 30-fold between December 2019 and April 2020, which turned Zoom into a household name for remote work, online education, and virtual events.

Since then Zoom has expanded beyond video meetings into a broader collaboration platform covering team chat, cloud phone service, webinars, and virtual events, and rebranded as Zoom Communications, Inc. in 2024 to reflect that wider scope. It remains closed-source, proprietary software: the client applications are free to download, but full functionality depends on a paid subscription, and the service runs entirely on Zoom’s own infrastructure rather than software users can self-host.

Key Features

• Video meetings — HD video and audio; standard plans support up to 300 or 500 participants depending on tier, with a Large Meeting add-on extending capacity to 1,000
• Screen sharing — Share entire screen, specific window, or whiteboard
• Recording — Cloud and local recording of meetings
• Breakout rooms — Split meetings into smaller groups
• Webinars — Standard webinar licenses support up to 1,000 view-only attendees, with add-on licenses scaling to 10,000 and beyond for large-scale virtual events
• Whiteboard — Collaborative whiteboard with sticky notes and drawing
• Team chat — Persistent chat channels alongside meetings
• Zoom Phone — Cloud PBX phone system

Use Cases

• Remote teams — Daily standups, team meetings, and presentations
• Education — Online classes, lectures, and office hours
• Webinars — Marketing webinars and large-scale presentations
• Customer support — Video support calls and demos

Who It’s For

Zoom is used by businesses of all sizes, educational institutions, and individuals. The free Basic plan supports meetings with 3+ participants for up to 40 minutes; paid tiers remove this limit and add features. It is the default choice for many organizations for video communication.