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- 1Zoom
Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former Cisco WebEx engineer who left the company after growing frustrated that WebEx's aging technology couldn't keep pace with a rapidly changing video conferencing market, and he set out to build a simpler, more reliable alternative from scratch. The company grew steadily through the 2010s before experiencing extraordinary, unprecedented growth in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced widespread remote work and remote schooling, causing Zoom's daily meeting participants to increase from roughly 10 million to over 300 million within just a few months. Zoom's name became so closely associated with video calling during the pandemic that "to Zoom" briefly entered everyday vocabulary as a generic verb for video conferencing broadly, similar to how "Google" became synonymous with web searching, regardless of which specific platform someone actually used. Zoom's combination of founder Eric Yuan's frustration with his former employer's outdated technology and its extraordinary pandemic-driven growth has made it one of the most consequential technology companies to emerge from the 2020s remote-work era.
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0 - 2Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams launched in 2017 as part of the Microsoft 365 (then Office 365) productivity suite, built to combine video conferencing, chat, and file collaboration in a single application deeply integrated with Microsoft's existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint software. The platform saw a massive surge in adoption during the 2020 pandemic, benefiting significantly from its bundled inclusion in Microsoft 365 business subscriptions that many companies already held, giving Teams a built-in distribution advantage over standalone video conferencing competitors. Microsoft positioned Teams as a direct successor to its earlier Skype for Business enterprise product, eventually retiring Skype for Business entirely in favor of Teams, and the platform has continued expanding into broader workplace collaboration features beyond pure video calling. Microsoft Teams's combination of its deep integration with the broader Microsoft 365 productivity suite and its pandemic-era surge fueled by existing enterprise licensing has made it one of the most widely used video conferencing platforms in corporate environments.
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0 - 3Google Meet
Google Meet launched in its current form in 2017 as "Hangouts Meet," an enterprise-focused successor built from Google's earlier Hangouts video chat product, before Google rebranded it simply as Google Meet in 2020 and significantly expanded free access amid surging pandemic-era demand. The platform benefits from tight integration with Google Workspace, letting users launch video meetings directly from Google Calendar invites and Gmail with minimal setup, an integration advantage particularly valuable for schools and businesses already using Google's broader productivity suite. Google made Meet's premium features temporarily free to all users during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a move specifically aimed at competing directly against Zoom's rapidly growing user base during that critical period of remote work and remote schooling adoption. Google Meet's combination of its deep Google Workspace calendar and email integration and its pandemic-era free access expansion has made it one of the most widely adopted video conferencing tools in both education and business settings.
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0 - 4Skype
Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the same entrepreneurs behind the earlier peer-to-peer file-sharing service Kazaa, and it became one of the first widely popular consumer applications offering free voice and video calls over the internet. Skype's early peer-to-peer technology architecture, routing call data directly between users' computers rather than through centralized company servers, was a genuinely novel approach at the time that helped the service scale efficiently to millions of simultaneous users worldwide. Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, one of Microsoft's largest acquisitions at the time, and the company eventually shifted focus toward its newer Teams product for both business and consumer video calling, officially retiring the original Skype consumer app in 2025. Skype's combination of its pioneering peer-to-peer internet calling technology and its historic role as one of the first mainstream consumer video calling applications has made it one of the most foundational products in the history of internet communication.
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0 - 5Cisco Webex
Webex was founded in 1995 as a web conferencing startup before being acquired by networking giant Cisco Systems in 2007 for approximately $3.2 billion, becoming Cisco's flagship enterprise video and web conferencing product under the Webex brand. The platform built a long-standing reputation specifically within large enterprise and corporate IT environments, often integrated closely with Cisco's broader networking and telephony hardware infrastructure that many large companies already relied on for internal communications. Webex faced significant competitive pressure during the 2020 pandemic video conferencing boom, losing meaningful market share to newer, more consumer-friendly competitors like Zoom, prompting Cisco to invest heavily in redesigning and modernizing the Webex platform and interface in subsequent years. Cisco Webex's combination of its status as one of the earliest web conferencing platforms ever created and its deep integration within Cisco's broader enterprise networking ecosystem has made it one of the most historically significant video conferencing tools in corporate technology.
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0 - 6FaceTime
FaceTime was introduced by Apple in 2010 alongside the launch of the iPhone 4, which was the first iPhone to include a front-facing camera specifically enabling the video calling feature, and it became one of the earliest mainstream mobile-native video calling applications. The service comes pre-installed on every Apple device, including iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers, giving it guaranteed built-in distribution across Apple's entire device ecosystem without requiring a separate app download, a significant advantage among Apple's own user base specifically. Apple later expanded FaceTime with a web-based link-sharing feature in 2021, allowing non-Apple device users on Android and Windows to join FaceTime calls through a browser for the first time, a notable shift from the platform's original Apple-exclusive design. FaceTime's combination of its historic role introducing mainstream mobile video calling alongside the original front-camera iPhone 4 and its guaranteed pre-installed presence across every Apple device has made it one of the most widely used video calling tools among consumers.
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