Zoom Phone vs Microsoft Teams Phone (2026): the real cost of each

Most head-to-head phone comparisons pit two products that do roughly the same thing in roughly the same way. This one does not. Zoom Phone is a finished telephone system you buy per seat and switch on. Microsoft Teams Phone is a calling capability you graft onto Microsoft 365, and it does not actually place a call to the outside world until you also buy a way to reach the public phone network. That single structural difference drives almost every decision in this comparison, so we are going to spend real time on it rather than pretending the two products line up tier for tier.

The reason the pairing comes up at all is that both companies are trying to win the same argument: your phone system should live inside the collaboration app your team already opens every morning. For Zoom, that app is Zoom Meetings and Team Chat. For Microsoft, it is Teams, which sits on an installed base measured in the hundreds of millions of seats. If your staff already lives in one of those two apps all day, the sales pitch writes itself, and the temptation is to just take the phone option attached to the software you own. We are here to check whether that instinct actually saves you money and headaches, or whether it quietly costs more once the invoices arrive.

Everything below is priced as of mid-2026. Microsoft publishes its Teams Phone add-on prices openly, which helps, but the total you pay depends heavily on the underlying Microsoft 365 license you already hold and on which route to the public network you choose. Zoom renders its phone pricing through JavaScript, so the exact cents we quote come from reputable secondary reporting and should be read as close approximations rather than to-the-penny quotes. Prices move constantly in this category, so treat every dollar figure here as a starting point and confirm the live number on each vendor's site before you commit budget.

How we compared them

We approached this the way a buyer with a spreadsheet and a skeptical finance team would. We priced every plan tier for both products, including the three separate ways Microsoft sells PSTN calling, and we did the arithmetic on what a Teams Phone seat actually costs once you add the underlying Microsoft 365 license it depends on. We read the fine print on calling minutes, metered rates, and the fees that never show up on the headline pricing card. We looked at how each system connects to the outside phone network, how you get numbers ported in, and how the apps behave day to day. Where a vendor's pricing was rendered in a way we could not read directly, we cross-checked it against multiple 2026 sources and flagged it as approximate rather than guessing. Our full methodology, including how we weight price against reliability and support, lives on our how we test page.

At a glance

Here is the short version before we get into the weeds. Every price is per user per month unless noted, and the Teams Phone figures are the add-on cost before the Microsoft 365 license underneath it, which we account for further down.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

This is the section that matters most, because the two products are priced on completely different logic and the sticker prices are not comparable until you normalize them. Let us take each side on its own terms first, then put them next to each other honestly.

What Zoom Phone actually costs

Zoom Phone is refreshingly literal. You pick a plan, you pay per seat, and you have a working phone. The US & Canada Metered plan lands around $10 to $10.50 per user per month on an annual term and charges you roughly three cents a minute for outbound calls on top of the seat fee. For a receptionist-light office where half your people barely dial out, this is one of the cheapest legitimate business phone options in the whole market. The US & Canada Unlimited plan runs about $15 to $16 and drops the per-minute meter, adding unlimited domestic calling plus SMS and MMS and a layer of basic call AI. Global Select, around $20, gives a seat unlimited calling within one of 48 supported countries and a local number there, which is the plan for a genuinely international office.

Above those standalone plans sit the Zoom Workplace bundles, where phone is folded in with Meetings, Team Chat, and the AI Companion. Workplace Pro Plus lands in the $18 to $20 range and Business Plus around $22 to $24, the latter adding single sign-on, a Salesforce integration, and larger meeting capacity. The bundles are the smart buy if you were going to pay for Zoom video anyway, because you are effectively getting the phone for the delta rather than as a separate line item. The honest catch with Zoom is add-on creep: the Power Pack (advanced call handling and analytics) runs about $25 per user, and extra direct numbers are roughly $5 each per month, so a heavy-feature deployment costs more than the entry price implies. There is also no free trial on the phone plans, which is a small annoyance when you want to test before you buy.

What Microsoft Teams Phone actually costs

Here is where buyers get surprised. The number Microsoft advertises, roughly $10 per user per month for Teams Phone Standard, is not the price of a phone. It is the price of the calling brain: voicemail, call transfer, auto attendants, call queues, the cloud PBX plumbing. Standard includes exactly zero minutes to the outside world. To make an actual call to a customer's cell phone, you have to add one of three things on top:

• Teams Phone with Calling Plan at about $17 per user per month, which bundles the Standard license plus roughly 3,000 domestic outbound minutes and a phone number. This is the closest thing to a turnkey Zoom-style seat.
• Teams Phone with Pay-As-You-Go Calling at about $13, which is the Standard license plus metered calling where you pay per minute used, comparable in spirit to Zoom's Metered plan.
• Teams Phone with Domestic & International Calling at about $34, which adds a bundle of international minutes on top of domestic.

And even those prices assume a piece most comparisons quietly omit: Teams Phone requires an underlying Microsoft 365 or Teams license to run at all. The Teams Phone add-on cannot exist on its own; it attaches to a base subscription. If your company is already on Microsoft 365 E5, you are in luck, because E5 includes the Teams Phone Standard license already, so you only pay for the calling piece (a calling plan, or the routing options below). If you are on a cheaper plan like Business Standard or E3, you are paying that base license plus the Teams Phone add-on plus a calling route. That is three line items to get one working phone.

The other route Microsoft pushes, and the one that changes the economics for larger firms, is bringing your own carrier. Operator Connect lets you keep or choose a telecom operator that plugs directly into Teams through Microsoft's portal, so you buy minutes from that carrier rather than from Microsoft. Direct Routing goes further, letting you connect your own Session Border Controllers and carrier contracts to Teams. Both mean you skip Microsoft's calling plans entirely and often pay far less per minute, but both require either a competent IT team or a managed partner to set up and maintain. This is the escape hatch that makes Teams Phone cheap for enterprises and impractical for a five-person shop.

Putting the two side by side

Now the honest comparison. If you are a small business not already on E5, a real Teams Phone seat that can call the outside world is the base Microsoft 365 license (call it $12.50 for Business Standard) plus roughly $17 for Teams Phone with Calling Plan, landing you near $29 to $30 per seat for phone-plus-productivity. A comparable Zoom Phone Unlimited seat is about $15 to $16, and if you already pay for Microsoft 365 for email and Office, that $15 Zoom seat sits neatly alongside it. On that math, Zoom is dramatically cheaper for the small buyer.

Flip it around. If you are a mid-market or enterprise firm that already standardized on Microsoft 365 E5 for security and compliance reasons, the Teams Phone Standard license is already sitting in your subscription doing nothing. Wire up Operator Connect with a carrier you negotiate directly, and your incremental cost per seat can drop to the price of minutes alone, often just a few dollars. In that scenario Zoom Phone would be pure new spend, and Teams Phone is close to free money you already bought. Same two products, opposite conclusions, entirely because of what license you already hold.

Two universal cautions apply to both. Headline prices assume annual commitment; month-to-month runs meaningfully higher. And taxes plus regulatory fees add roughly 15 to 25 percent on top of either provider, everywhere, so budget above the sticker.

To make this concrete, picture a 25-person team that calls out a normal amount and is not already on E5. On Zoom Phone Unlimited at roughly $15.50 a seat, your phone line is about $4,650 a year before tax. To match that with Teams Phone you would pay Microsoft 365 Business Standard at about $12.50 a seat (roughly $3,750 a year) plus Teams Phone with Calling Plan at about $17 a seat (roughly $5,100 a year), so around $8,850 a year for the same 25 seats, and that Business Standard spend also buys you Office and email you may or may not already have. If you strip out the productivity value and compare only the phone portion, Teams Phone with Calling Plan at $17 versus Zoom Unlimited at $15.50 is close, but the moment Microsoft's base license is a new purchase rather than something you already own, Zoom pulls clearly ahead. Now run the same 25 seats assuming you already hold E5: the Teams Phone Standard license is already paid, you attach Operator Connect with a carrier charging, say, a few dollars of minutes per seat, and your incremental phone cost can fall under $1,500 a year. Same team, and Teams Phone goes from the expensive option to the cheapest one purely on the strength of a license you already bought. That flip is the entire story of this comparison.

Setup and onboarding

Setup is where the structural difference stops being abstract and starts costing you a week of someone's time. Zoom Phone, if you already run Zoom, is close to trivial: you assign seats in the Zoom admin console, order or port numbers, build your auto attendant with a visual editor, and users get calling inside the Zoom app they already have installed. A small business can be live in a day or two, and Zoom's provisioning flow is genuinely one of the smoother ones we have used. Number porting is supported, and the admin experience is aimed at generalists, not telecom specialists.

Teams Phone splits into two very different onboarding experiences depending on the calling route you chose. If you buy a Microsoft Calling Plan, setup is comparable to Zoom in effort: assign licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin center, acquire numbers from Microsoft, assign them, and users call from within Teams. That path is fine for a small team. But the moment you choose Operator Connect or especially Direct Routing to save money, onboarding becomes a real project. Direct Routing means standing up or contracting Session Border Controllers, configuring voice routes and dial plans in PowerShell, coordinating with a carrier, and testing failover. It is powerful and cost-effective at scale, but it is not a self-serve afternoon. Many companies bring in a Microsoft partner precisely for this, which is a real cost you should price in.

The through-line: Teams Phone is easy to turn on and harder to turn on cheaply. The configuration that makes it affordable at scale is the same configuration that requires expertise. Zoom Phone gives you one path, and that path is straightforward for the person who also runs your email.

One onboarding detail buyers underestimate is emergency calling. Because Teams Phone can route calls through your own carrier or SBCs, configuring reliable 911 with accurate location information is your responsibility to get right during setup, and it is a compliance item you cannot skip in the United States. Zoom Phone handles emergency address registration through its own admin flow, which is one fewer thing for a small team to reason about. Neither approach is wrong, but the Direct Routing path puts more of the safety-critical plumbing on your side of the fence, and that should factor into whether your team is ready to own it.

Voice and video quality

Both of these companies know how to move audio and video reliably, so this is less a fight than a nuance. On voice, both deliver high-definition calling over well-provisioned networks, and both are mature enough that call quality is far more a function of your own internet and firewall than of the vendor. Zoom's media stack is the same one that carries its meetings, widely regarded as best in class for holding up on shaky connections, and that resilience carries into Zoom Phone. Microsoft routes Teams calls over its own global backbone, which is genuinely excellent, though some organizations report that call quality on Teams can be sensitive to how Direct Routing and local network configuration are set up, which loops back to the setup point above.

On video, this comparison is a little lopsided in an interesting way, because video is not really part of a phone product for either vendor, it is part of the collaboration suite the phone attaches to. Zoom Phone users get Zoom Meetings, the product that arguably set the modern bar for video conferencing, with capacity scaling up to 300 participants on the Workplace bundles and larger with webinar add-ons. Teams Phone users get Microsoft Teams meetings, which are strong and deeply woven into calendar and file workflows, with capacity up to 300 on many plans and up to 1,000 interactive participants on higher Microsoft 365 tiers. Practically, both give you excellent video; the tiebreaker is which meeting app your people prefer, and that is a matter of taste and habit more than raw capability.

One quality dimension worth calling out is reliability guarantees. Zoom backs its platform with a 99.99 percent uptime commitment, a notch above Microsoft 365's standard 99.9 percent financially-backed SLA. On paper that difference is about four extra hours of allowable downtime a year in Microsoft's favor, a small but real gap for a business that lives on the phone.

AI features

AI is where both vendors want to sell you the future, and where both quietly move the best stuff to a higher price tier. Zoom builds AI into the product under the AI Companion banner, which handles call summaries, voicemail transcription, and meeting recaps. A layer of basic call AI shows up on the Unlimited phone plan, but the richer AI Companion capabilities live in the Zoom Workplace bundles rather than the bare-bones standalone phone tiers. The upside is that Zoom has, at various points, included AI Companion at no extra charge for paid Zoom accounts, which makes its AI story feel less like a shakedown than some competitors.

Microsoft's AI story runs through Copilot, and Copilot is genuinely impressive inside Teams: it can summarize a call you joined late, pull action items out of a conversation, and draft follow-ups against your actual documents and email. But Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a separate paid add-on, historically around $30 per user per month, and it is not part of the Teams Phone license at all. So the honest framing is that Microsoft's best-in-class AI is real and powerful, but it is a substantial extra line item on top of an already-stacked bill, whereas Zoom's AI is more likely to already be included in the plan you are buying.

For a buyer choosing purely on AI value received per dollar, Zoom currently offers more capability inside the price you are already paying, while Microsoft offers arguably deeper AI if you are willing to pay the premium for Copilot and you have the document ecosystem for it to reason over. If you are the kind of organization that will genuinely use Copilot across email, documents, and calls, its integration is unmatched. If you just want call summaries without a new subscription, Zoom gets you there for less.

Integrations

This is the one dimension where Teams Phone has a structural advantage that Zoom simply cannot match, and it comes down to gravity. Microsoft Teams Phone lives inside Microsoft 365, which means it is natively wired into Outlook, the Microsoft 365 calendar, SharePoint, OneDrive, Azure Active Directory for identity and single sign-on, and the whole Microsoft Graph. If your organization runs on Microsoft, your phone system inherits your directory, your security policies, and your compliance tooling for free, without a connector. For a large regulated enterprise, that inheritance, retention policies, e-discovery, conditional access applied to calling, is worth more than any third-party integration catalog.

Zoom Phone integrates broadly and well through its App Marketplace, with connectors for Salesforce, major CRMs, help desks, and the usual business stack, plus the tight in-house links between Zoom Phone, Meetings, and Team Chat. It is a genuinely good integration story, and for most small and mid-size teams it covers everything they need. But it is a catalog of connections you switch on, not the native identity-and-compliance fabric that Teams Phone gets by virtue of being a Microsoft product. If your deciding factor is deep, native Microsoft 365 integration, nothing beats Teams Phone, because it essentially is Microsoft 365.

If you want to see how these two stack against other integration-heavy platforms, our RingCentral vs 8x8 comparison covers two providers that compete hard on connector depth from a different angle.

Support and reliability

Support is a genuine differentiator here, and it is not obvious until you have needed it. Zoom Phone is a single product from a single vendor with a support organization whose whole job is Zoom. You get chat, ticketing, and phone support, with 24/7 coverage on higher tiers, and reviewers generally rate Zoom Phone well, around 4.5 out of 5 on G2 and a similar mark on Capterra. When something breaks, there is one throat to choke.

Teams Phone support is more complicated precisely because the product is more complicated. Your calling brain is Microsoft, your Microsoft 365 base is Microsoft, but your actual PSTN connectivity might be Microsoft's calling plan, or an Operator Connect carrier, or your own Direct Routing setup managed by a partner. When a call fails, the diagnostic question, is this Microsoft, the carrier, or our SBC configuration, does not have an obvious answer, and finger-pointing between vendors is a real risk. Microsoft's own support is enterprise-grade but famously tiered and sometimes slow for smaller customers, and much of the practical day-to-day support burden lands on your IT team or your implementation partner rather than on a phone company.

On raw reliability the two are close, with Zoom's 99.99 percent SLA edging Microsoft 365's 99.9 percent as noted earlier. But reliability is not just uptime, it is how fast you get unstuck when something goes wrong, and there the single-vendor simplicity of Zoom Phone is a quiet advantage for teams without a dedicated telecom-savvy IT function.

Which should you choose?

There is no universal winner here, there is a winner for your specific situation, and the deciding variable is almost always what Microsoft license you already own and how many people can be bothered to configure telecom. Here is how it shakes out by company size.

• 1 to 5 people: Zoom Phone, and specifically the Metered plan if your calling is light. At roughly $10 a seat plus a few cents a minute, it is one of the cheapest real phone systems available, and it works the day you buy it. Stacking a Microsoft 365 license plus a Teams Phone add-on plus a calling plan to reach the same place makes no sense at this size unless you are already on E5 for other reasons.
• 6 to 20 people: Still Zoom Phone for most, on the Unlimited plan at about $15 to $16, unless your whole team already lives in Teams and pays for Microsoft 365 anyway. If you do, price Teams Phone with Calling Plan against Zoom carefully, because the convenience of one login and one bill starts to matter at this size.
• 21 to 50 people: This is the genuine crossover zone. If you are on Business Standard or E3, Zoom Phone usually still wins on total cost. If you are on E5, Teams Phone with Operator Connect starts pulling ahead because the license is already paid and you can negotiate carrier minutes. Decide based on your existing Microsoft contract, not on the phone product in isolation.
• 51 to 200 people: Increasingly Microsoft Teams Phone if you are a Microsoft shop with any IT capacity, because Operator Connect or Direct Routing at this scale delivers real per-minute savings and the native identity, security, and compliance integration becomes valuable rather than nice-to-have. Zoom Phone remains the pick for organizations built around Zoom or those wanting the simplest possible operation.
• 200+ people: Microsoft Teams Phone is the default recommendation for any enterprise already standardized on Microsoft 365 E5, full stop. The calling license is sunk cost, Direct Routing lets you optimize carrier spend aggressively, and the compliance inheritance is a genuine advantage for regulated industries. Zoom Phone is the counter-pick only where the company runs on Zoom or where a subsidiary needs to stand up phones without a Microsoft project.

By use case: choose Zoom Phone if your team already meets in Zoom, if you have light or uneven calling volume that suits metering, or if you simply want a phone system that works without a telecom project. Choose Microsoft Teams Phone if your organization runs on Microsoft 365 (especially E5), if native compliance and identity integration are non-negotiable, or if you have the IT capacity to bring your own carrier and want to minimize per-minute cost at scale.

Want a recommendation tuned to your headcount, your existing Microsoft contract, and your must-have features rather than a general verdict? Get matched in about a minute, free, with no sales calls.

Switching and number porting

Bringing your existing numbers along is the step most buyers worry about, and here the two products diverge in a way that follows the same structural split as everything else on this page: Zoom Phone is one company handling one port, while Teams Phone hands the job to whichever calling route you chose. Understanding that before you sign saves you from discovering mid-migration that the entity releasing your number is a carrier you have never spoken to.

With Zoom Phone the port is a single, self-contained transaction. You submit the numbers you want to move inside the Zoom admin portal, attach a signed Letter of Authorization and a recent invoice from the carrier you are leaving, and Zoom drives the request to completion from there. Because Zoom is both your calling platform and your porting agent, there is exactly one place to check status and one support queue to call if the losing carrier flags a mismatched service address. Zoom issues temporary numbers up front so every seat can dial and receive on day one, and the published numbers swap in once the release clears, typically inside a couple of weeks for a clean local block and longer for toll-free ranges or a large estate with tangled billing records.

With Microsoft Teams Phone the porting experience is defined by the calling route underneath it, and that is the wrinkle nobody warns you about. If you bought a Microsoft Calling Plan, Microsoft is your porting agent and the flow resembles Zoom's: raise a port order in the Microsoft 365 admin center, supply the authorization and a bill, and let Microsoft coordinate the release. If you went with Operator Connect, the telecom operator you selected owns the numbers and runs the port through its own process, so your point of contact is that carrier rather than Microsoft. And if you chose Direct Routing, porting is entirely between you (or your managed partner) and your carrier, with Microsoft merely receiving traffic once the numbers land. Three routes, three different parties holding the pen, which is why a Teams Phone migration for a larger firm is usually scheduled as a coordinated project rather than a portal click.

The practical guidance is the same regardless of which you pick, and it is worth stating plainly: keep the old service fully paid and live until every number has confirmed on the new platform and a test call in each direction has actually connected, because cancelling early can drop a number back into the carrier pool where you may lose it for good. Get the authorization details, account name, service address, account number, matched character-for-character to what your current carrier has on file, since a single stale field is the most common reason a release stalls. On the Teams side specifically, pin down in writing who your porting contact actually is under your chosen route before the order goes in, so nobody is hunting for the responsible party the week of cutover.

The real 12-month cost

A per-seat sticker tells you almost nothing here, because the twelve-month total for Teams Phone is dominated by a license you may or may not already own. To show how wide that swings, price a single team three ways over a full year: a 40-person company that calls a normal domestic amount, once as a Zoom Phone shop, once as a Teams Phone shop buying everything fresh, and once as a Teams Phone shop that already holds Microsoft 365 E5. The three totals are far enough apart that they barely look like the same purchase.

Zoom Phone, standalone and unlimited. Forty seats on the US and Canada Unlimited plan at roughly $15.50 each is about $620 a month, which comes to roughly $7,440 a year before tax. That figure is the whole phone bill, no underlying suite license required, and it sits neatly beside whatever you already pay for email and documents. Add the usual 15 to 25 percent in taxes and regulatory fees and the all-in year lands somewhere near $8,550 to $9,300, with no per-minute modelling to do because the seats are flat-rate.

Teams Phone, bought fresh (not already on a premium suite). Here the phone cannot stand alone. A working seat is the base productivity license, call it Microsoft 365 Business Standard at about $12.50, plus Teams Phone with Calling Plan at about $17 for the license and roughly 3,000 domestic minutes. That is $29.50 per seat before tax, so forty seats run about $1,180 a month, or roughly $14,160 a year, landing near $16,300 to $17,700 all in after fees. Some of that spend also buys Office and email you might have needed anyway, but measured purely as the cost of adding phones to a company that was not already paying Microsoft, it is close to double the Zoom route.

Teams Phone, already standardized on E5. Now the arithmetic inverts. E5 already bundles the Teams Phone Standard license, so it is sunk cost sitting in a subscription you bought for security and compliance reasons. Wire up Operator Connect with a carrier you negotiate directly, pay only for minutes at, say, a few dollars a seat, and the incremental phone cost across forty seats can fall under $1,500 for the year before tax. Same forty people, same calling, and Teams Phone goes from the most expensive of the three builds to comfortably the cheapest, purely because the expensive license was already on the books.

Cheapest over 12 months: it depends entirely on one question, are you already paying for E5? If yes, Teams Phone is the runaway winner and Zoom Phone would be pure new spend. If no, Zoom Phone is dramatically cheaper than stacking a base suite, a phone license, and a calling plan to reach the same dial tone. The middle build, Teams Phone bought fresh, only makes sense when you genuinely wanted the Microsoft 365 productivity apps regardless of the phone. As always, headline rates assume annual commitment and taxes add 15 to 25 percent on top, so confirm both against a live quote before you budget.

Alternatives worth a look

If neither of these fits cleanly, a few other providers deserve a spot on your shortlist. RingCentral is the feature-deep, integration-heavy option for teams that want the widest app catalog and a mature contact-center path, without tying themselves to a single collaboration suite. Nextiva is the value-and-support pick, with a low entry price and a customer-service reputation that consistently outscores the field. Dialpad is the one to watch if built-in AI is your top priority, since it bakes real-time transcription and call summaries into its entry tier rather than charging Copilot-style extra. Our Nextiva vs Ooma and RingCentral vs Dialpad comparisons are good next reads if any of those names catch your eye.

Frequently asked questions

Is Zoom Phone or Microsoft Teams Phone cheaper?

For most businesses, Zoom Phone is cheaper. As of mid-2026, a Zoom Phone Unlimited seat runs about $15 to $16 per user per month and works on its own. Microsoft Teams Phone Standard is about $10 per user per month but includes zero calling minutes, requires an underlying Microsoft 365 license to run, and needs a calling plan (about $17 for Teams Phone with Calling Plan) to reach the outside phone network. Stacked up, a working Teams Phone seat for a company not already on premium Microsoft 365 often lands near $29 to $30, well above Zoom. The exception is organizations already paying for Microsoft 365 E5, which includes the Teams Phone license, making it much cheaper to add. Verify current pricing before you buy.

Does Microsoft Teams Phone include calling minutes?

Not in the base license. Teams Phone Standard, about $10 per user per month, provides the cloud PBX features (voicemail, transfers, auto attendants) but no minutes to the public phone network. To actually place external calls you add one of three options: Teams Phone with Calling Plan (about $17, includes roughly 3,000 domestic minutes), Teams Phone with Pay-As-You-Go Calling (about $13, metered), or Teams Phone with Domestic and International Calling (about $34). Alternatively, you can bring your own carrier through Operator Connect or Direct Routing and buy minutes separately.

Do I need Microsoft 365 to use Teams Phone?

Yes. Teams Phone is an add-on that attaches to an underlying Microsoft 365 or Teams subscription, so you cannot buy it entirely on its own. If you already hold Microsoft 365 E5, the Teams Phone Standard license is included in that plan, and you only need to add a calling route. On lower plans like Business Standard or E3, you pay for the base license plus the Teams Phone add-on plus a calling plan, which is what makes the total cost higher than the $10 sticker suggests.

What are Operator Connect and Direct Routing?

They are two ways to connect Teams Phone to the public telephone network without buying Microsoft's own calling plans. Operator Connect lets you choose a participating telecom carrier that plugs into Teams through Microsoft's admin portal, so you buy minutes from that carrier. Direct Routing goes further, letting you connect your own Session Border Controllers and existing carrier contracts to Teams for maximum control and often the lowest per-minute cost. Both can save money at scale but require IT expertise or a managed partner to set up, which is why they suit larger organizations more than small teams.

Should I pick Teams Phone if my company already uses Microsoft 365?

Often yes, especially if you are on Microsoft 365 E5, which already includes the Teams Phone license. In that case adding calling can be nearly free beyond the minutes themselves, your staff calls from the Teams app they already use, and you inherit Microsoft's identity, security, and compliance tooling natively. If you are on a cheaper Microsoft 365 plan and would need to add the Teams Phone license plus a calling plan, the math is closer, and Zoom Phone may still be cheaper and simpler.

Does Zoom Phone include AI features like call summaries?

Yes, to a degree. Zoom includes a layer of basic call AI on its Unlimited phone plan, and richer AI Companion features (call summaries, voicemail transcription, meeting recaps) come with the Zoom Workplace bundles, which Zoom has often included at no extra charge for paid accounts. Microsoft's comparable AI runs through Copilot, which is more powerful but is a separate paid add-on rather than part of the Teams Phone license, so Zoom generally delivers more AI inside the price you are already paying.

Can I keep my existing phone number with either provider?

Yes. Both Zoom Phone and Microsoft Teams Phone support number porting, so you can bring your existing business numbers across. With Teams Phone, the porting process depends on whether you are using a Microsoft Calling Plan, Operator Connect, or Direct Routing, and a carrier or partner may handle it. Specific porting fees are not always published, so confirm any one-time porting or setup charge directly with the provider before you commit.

Which is better for a fully remote team?

Both work well for remote teams since both are app-first and location-independent. The deciding factor is which collaboration app your remote staff already opens all day. If they live in Zoom Meetings and Team Chat, Zoom Phone keeps everything in one place. If they live in Microsoft Teams for chat, files, and meetings, Teams Phone adds calling to a tool they never close. For a remote team not yet committed to either ecosystem, Zoom Phone is usually the cheaper and simpler starting point.