In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (made in 1968), a vision of the future included video conferencing.
And 1989’s Back to the Future’s vision of 2015 included not only video conferencing but also getting fired over it.
While we may scoff at how hoverboards and flying cars still haven’t arrived, it’s now normal for impactful professional and personal conversations to happen on video conferencing.
Now we’re not talking about whether we can have meetings over video conferences, but instead, the discussions are about platform usability and the usefulness of the latest features.
This is our third time benchmarking meeting software in five years, including during the COVID pandemic when the explosion of online meeting software popularity made “Zoom” a verb.
In this article, we present some key findings from our 2025 investigation of the UX of meeting software. For more details, see the full report.
Meeting Software Benchmark Study
In January and February 2025, we conducted a retrospective study with 233 U.S.-based panel participants. This study included metrics from our standard UX and NPS survey.
About two-thirds (63%) were female, and the cohort tended to be younger, with 70% under 45. Participants were asked to reflect on their most recent experiences with the software and answer a number of items, including the NPS, SUS, UX-Lite®, and TAC-10™. The products and sample sizes were:
- Google Meet: 49
- GoToMeeting: 41
- Microsoft Teams: 50
- WebEx: 39
- Zoom: 54
UX Results
Loyalty (NPS)
The NPS is a popular loyalty metric. It’s calculated using an eleven-point (0 to 10) likelihood-to-recommend (LTR) question, computed by subtracting the percentage of detractors (0–6) from promoters (9–10).
Figure 1 shows the current NPS for the five meeting software products.
Figure 1: NPS with 95% confidence intervals.
This was the first time we collected data for Google Meet, which had the highest NPS, and Microsoft Teams, which had the lowest. The only significant difference among the products was the that NPS for Google Meet was significantly higher than the NPS for Microsoft Teams (based on inspection of the confidence intervals). The NPS for all the products we measured in 2022 were higher in 2025, with Zoom rising 10 points from 7 to 17%, WebEx increasing 23 points from −36 to −13%, and GoToMeeting rising 34 points from −32 to 2%.
Perceived Usability (SUS)
We used the popular System Usability Scale (SUS) to compute the perceived usability of the five products (Figure 2). The SUS is a ten-item questionnaire with possible scores ranging from 0 to 100. The average SUS score from over 500 products (including websites and business software) is 68 (a grade of C on the Sauro-Lewis curved grading scale). Google Meet had significantly higher SUS scores than the other products (based on inspection of confidence intervals). The Sauro-Lewis curved grades for the products ranged from C+ to A:
- Google Meet: A
- GoToMeeting: B−
- Microsoft Teams: B−
- WebEx: C+
- Zoom: B
Figure 2: SUS with 95% confidence intervals (Google Meet significantly higher than the others).
Figure 3 shows the current and historical mean SUS scores of the meeting software products for which we have historical data.
Figure 3: Mean SUS scores for three meeting software products (data reported in 2020 were collected in late 2019; the 2020b data were collected in April 2020).
The changes in SUS scores from 2022 to 2025 were less volatile than the NPS changes; from 76 to 74 for Zoom, 70 to 74 for GoToMeeting, and 68 to 72 for WebEx. The NPS has higher volatility than the SUS because the NPS uses two paired proportions (inherently high variability) versus the mean of 10 items (inherently lower variability).
Perceived Usefulness and Ease (UX-Lite)
Research on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in the mid to late 1980s revealed the joint importance of measuring both ease of use and usefulness as key drivers of the intention to use a product, which is in turn a significant driver of actual use.
We use the two-item UX-Lite as a mini-TAM because it has one item to rate perceived ease of use (“This product is easy to use”) and one to rate usefulness (“This product’s features meet my needs”). UX researchers can use it in aggregate as a measure of acceptance or, even more broadly, of satisfaction or product quality.
As shown in Figure 4, it’s also possible to analyze its ease and usefulness components separately. The dotted red lines indicate the overall means for these five products.
Figure 4: Scatterplot of UX-LITE subscales for five meeting software products.
Google Meet had the highest UX-Lite score (82.9) with Zoom and GoToMeeting tied (75). WebEx had the lowest UX-Lite (71.8). Relative to the group means for ease (77.5) and usefulness (74), Google Meet was above average for both, and WebEx was below average for both.
For users who do not need more advanced functionality (e.g., break-out rooms, webinar presentations), the reduced functionality of Google Meet seems to have increased its ease ratings without affecting its usefulness ratings. That might seem counterintuitive at first, but Google seems to have selected a set of functions that, consistent with the wording of the UX-Lite’s usefulness item, meets those users’ needs. For example, there is relatively little difference in the Zoom and Google Meet usefulness ratings, but a large difference in their ease ratings.
Analysis of Verbatim Comments
To dig into the “why” behind the current numbers, we asked participants to name one thing they disliked about the product they rated. Table 1 shows the top three issues for each product (with sample participant quotes).
| Product | Top Three Issues | Sample User Quote |
|---|---|---|
| Google Meet | Inconsistent Audio/Video Quality | "One downside of Google Meet is inconsistent video and audio quality, especially with slower internet connections, leading to lag or dropped calls." |
| Limited Integration/Functionality | "I dislike that it is not more well integrated with my Google contacts or regular phone calling functions." | |
| User Experience and Accessibility Issues | "Sometimes people end up in a weird limbo when waiting to be added to the meeting." | |
| GoToMeeting | Performance Issues | "One thing I particularly dislike about using GoToMeeting is the occasional connectivity and performance issues." |
| Outdated User Interface | "I find it a bit clunky or outdated compared to other video conferencing tools." | |
| Difficult Setup and Navigation | "Setting up a meeting and figuring out how to get people invited seemed like it had unnecessary steps and took a little longer than expected." | |
| Microsoft Teams | Performance Issues | “I find the meetings can be more buggy than Zoom, which I personally use.” |
| Unintuitive Interface | “I don’t like the interface, I find it visually cluttered.” | |
| Notifications and Status Issues | “Too many notifications.” | |
| WebEx | Usability Issues | "Very clunky and was difficult to open Q&A and chat functions. Hard to adjust window sizes." |
| Performance Issues | "Sometimes it takes a bit to connect." | |
| Comparison to Competitors and Modernization | "It feels old and antiquated compared to modern solutions like Zoom or Teams." | |
| Zoom | Performance Issues | "Sometimes the chat process can lag, which makes things awkward sometimes." |
| Usability Issues | "It can be hard for less tech-savvy people to operate it successfully. I have had to help library patrons and relatives who have struggled with it." | |
| Privacy and Security Concerns | "I don't trust the company with my and my coworker's information.” |
Table 1: Top issues for five meeting software products.
The top improvement area for Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Teams was performance. For WebEx, the top improvement area was usability, and for Google Meet, it was audio/video quality. Respondents also noted that GoToMeeting and WebEx had outdated user interfaces.
Several respondents favorably compared their Google Meet experience with other meeting software, in particular citing its relative ease of use and integration with other Google services:
“I like its simplicity compared to Zoom.”
“Compared to Zoom or Microsoft Teams, I feel like Google Meet is easier to send links and share information with other people. It is easy to get people to join a call and be able to set up video, backgrounds, and settings without a lot of UI things to click.”
“I can enter and join meetings a lot more quickly than I generally can using other platforms. The loading time is less than Microsoft Teams or Zoom, in my experience.”
“What I like about Google Meet is its integration with other Google services, like Google Calendar and Gmail. It makes scheduling and joining meetings super seamless.”
Does Tech Savviness Drive Differences in Scores?
How do we know that the high scores for Google and lower scores for Webex aren’t just due to differences in the tech savviness of the users? To find out, we looked at tech-savviness scores using our TAC-10 measure. The TAC-10 (Technical Activity Checklist with ten items) is a reliable (consistent) and valid (predictive) measure of tech savviness. The TAC-10 score for a person is the number of items selected from the checklist.
Across the five groups of participants (Figure 5), the range of mean TAC-10 scores was from 5.6 for WebEx users to 6.7 for Microsoft Teams users; a nonsignificant difference of 1.1. This indicates that, at the product level, any large differences in UX ratings were not due to differences in the tech savviness of the different groups of participants.
Figure 5: TAC-10 scores by product.
Summary
Results of our meeting software benchmarks based on 233 participants revealed:
Google Meet had top UX scores (NPS, SUS, UX-Lite). This was the first time we included Google Meet in the product set for this report, and it came ahead of the other four products in key UX metrics. The other first-time product for this report was Microsoft Teams, which had the lowest NPS score and was next-to-last for SUS and UX-Lite.
NPS scores for the products measured in 2022 improved in 2025. Consistent with its history, Zoom’s NPS scores were relatively stable but still rose 10 points. WebEx and GoToMeeting significantly improved from their historic lows in 2022, rising 23 points for WebEx and 34 points for GoToMeeting.
Perceived usability ratings for the products ranged from average to above average. Using the Sauro-Lewis curved grading scale for the SUS, Google Meet’s grade was A, Zoom’s was B, GoToMeeting and Microsoft Teams’ was B−, and WebEx’s was C+.
Google Meet had the best UX-Lite ratings. Google Meet had the highest overall UX-Lite rating and was the only product above the group average for both ease and usefulness. WebEx was below average for both and had the lowest overall UX-Lite rating.
Reported issues included performance, usability, and dated UIs. Respondents reported issues with performance and usability for all five products. They also noted that GoToMeeting and WebEx had outdated user interfaces.
Differences in UX ratings were not due to differences in average tech savviness across groups. TAC-10 scores differed little across the product groups, so we do not attribute the differences in our key UX ratings (NPS, SUS, UX-Lite) to differences in levels of tech savviness.
For more details, see the full report.