Hosting video conferences alone is not enough Zoom has rolled out its own version of Google Docs to up to 1 million users. If you’re looking for another way to write on digital paper in your web browser, Zoom has you covered (Proton recently released something similar). too).
Zoom promotion The benefit of having everything in one workspace: Independent research has shown that by “limiting the distractions in your workflow,” you can save hours per week. You can integrate Zoom video calls with Google Docs in your browser.
It might not have enough features to entice seasoned Google Drive users to switch (yet?), but if you’re already spending a lot of time in the Zoom ecosystem, Zoom Docs might be a more convenient alternative. If you’re interested in what the app has to offer, read on.
Basic features of Zoom Docs
If you have a free Zoom account, you can use all the basic features in Zoom Docs, but you’re limited to sharing 10 documents at a time. If you’re an individual user, that’s probably fine. If you subscribe to a paid plan for $14.99/month or more, you’ll get unlimited sharing and access to an AI companion to help you write.
When you load the Zoom Docs interface in your browser, it will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has used tools like Notion before. Each document is a blank canvas for your text and images, so you can start typing right away. Various context menus and toolbars appear as you type. Highlight text to reveal the formatting toolbar.
Markdown is supported, as are tables, lists, code, image and other embeds. Overall, everything is very slick. For example, you can paste a YouTube video URL and it will play right in the document (if you want). In this and other ways, it’s more like a blog post authoring tool. Google Docs, on the other hand, is a replacement for traditional Word.
The interface is simple and minimalist, but dig deeper and you’ll find some useful features: you can instantly translate text in your document, for example, you can roll back to a previous version of your document with just a few clicks, and it also includes basic spelling and grammar checking.
As for features that Google Docs has that Zoom Docs doesn’t, Zoom currently doesn’t have a word count feature, which may be an issue for some writers, and it doesn’t have tools like document comparison, offline editing, or voice-to-text, nor do it have more common features like a table of contents or support for headers and footers.
As you edit, everything is saved instantly and the main list of documents is clear and easy to use. Zoom Docs lets you set up your own templates or choose from a wide range of pre-made templates to get started faster. There’s also the option to import and convert Word files (but not the other way around).
Advanced Zoom Docs Features
We’ve already mentioned the AI companion, and its features are as good as you’d expect: it summarizes text, rewrites it in a different tone, and generates loads of generic artificial blocks of text based on prompts. This will all be familiar to anyone who’s used tools like OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Gemini.
As expected, there’s a tight integration with Zoom here: you can start or schedule meetings from the document, and conversely, you can summarize your video meetings in text format with AI-powered transcription, as well as start frameworks for reports, agendas, etc.
You can embed the Zoom whiteboard directly into documents, create documents directly from within a Zoom meeting, and it also has some pretty slick tagging and notification features built in.
Collaboration is a key feature here — this is a Zoom product after all. Sharing documents, revising, leaving comments, and all related tasks are handled well by the software. Up to 100 people can work on a single document, and you can manage viewing and editing permissions as needed. At the same time, it never feels cluttered or too busy.
As mentioned above, Zoom Docs is in many ways more of a wiki editor than a document editor, and the combination of modular layouts gives it great flexibility. Check out the included templates for inspiration. Documents and pages can be easily linked together, and the interactive element you get with tables makes the software suitable for project planning or even simple spreadsheet work.
Google Docs has been around for decades and offers many more features, especially those associated with traditional word processing programs. But if you use Zoom a lot in your daily work, you’ll likely find Zoom Docs a slick and useful add-on, especially if you can take full advantage of its AI features.
