European alternatives to Zoom Meetings

Zoom Meetings is the video conferencing product that made “a Zoom” a generic verb for a video call. A meeting is a persistent ID plus a join link that works in a browser or a native client, with host controls, breakout rooms, cloud recording and, on paid plans, live transcription and AI meeting summaries.

What makes it hard to leave is rarely the call quality. It is the join link: Zoom IDs are embedded in thousands of past and recurring calendar invitations, pasted into documents and shared with customers and suppliers who have the client already installed and no reason to install another. Add the room hardware certified against Zoom Rooms, the SSO and provisioning wiring, and the archive of recordings and transcripts that sit in Zoom’s cloud rather than yours, and the switching cost lands on everyone you meet with rather than on your own team.

Zoom Communications is US-headquartered in San Jose. European alternatives below compete on EU data residency and on browser-first joining that asks nothing of the other side.