Not satisfied with the conduct of video conferences for up to a million people, Zoom has now launched its own version of Google Docs, so if you are looking for another way to write your words down on digital paper in a web browser, Zoom is for you (Proton recently launched something similar, to).

Zoom advertising the benefits of doing everything you do in a single workspace: According to our own research, you can save yourself a few hours a week by “limiting distractions from the workflow,” which we believe means that you between Zoom video calls and Google Docs in your browser.

While there’s probably not enough here (yet?) to make experienced Google Drive users jump ship, if you already spend a lot of time in the Zoom ecosystem, you may find Zoom Docs a more convenient alternative. If you’re curious about what the app offers, read on to learn more.

Basic features of Zoom Docs

If you have a free Zoom account, you can use all of Zoom Docs’ basic features, but you can only share a maximum of 10 documents at a time—and for individual users, that’s probably fine. If you have a paid plan, which starts at $14.99 per month and up, this sharing limit is waived and you also get access to the AI ​​companion to help you write.

Load the Zoom Docs interface into your browser and you’ll feel right at home if you’ve ever used tools like Notion. Each document is a blank canvas for text and images; you can start typing right away. Various context menus and toolbars guide you along the way. Highlight text and you’ll see a formatting toolbar in the view.

Markdown is supported, as are tables, lists, code, images, and other embedded elements. In general, it’s all pretty slick: for example, paste the URL of a YouTube video and it can play right in the document (if you want it to). In this and other ways, it’s more like a blog post creator – whereas Google Docs is more of a traditional Word alternative.

As simple and minimalistic as the user interface is, if you take a closer look there are some useful features: you can translate text directly in the document, for example, you can go back to previous versions of a document with just a few clicks, and basic spelling and grammar checkers are also included.

As for the features that Google Docs has and Zoom Docs doesn’t, Zoom doesn’t currently have a word count feature, which could be a problem for some writers. It also lacks tools like document comparison, offline editing, and speech recognition. It also lacks more conventional features, such as support for a table of contents and headers and footers.

Everything is saved instantly as you make your changes, and the master list of documents is straightforward and easy to use. Zoom Docs lets you set up your own templates or choose from a variety of pre-made templates to get you started faster. There’s also the option to import and convert Word files (you can’t convert them the other way, though).

Advanced Zoom Docs features

We’ve already mentioned the AI ​​Companion and its features are as good as you’d expect. It summarizes texts, rewrites them for you in a different tone, and even generates some generic, artificial blocks of text based on a prompt. This will all be familiar if you’ve used tools like OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Gemini.

As you’d expect, there are some tight Zoom integrations here. You can start or schedule meetings from a document, and conversely, your video meetings can be summarised into text through AI-powered transcription. It also gives you an introduction to frameworks for reports, agendas, etc.

You can embed Zoom whiteboards directly into your documents, create documents directly from Zoom meetings, and also have quite sophisticated built-in tagging and notification features.

Collaboration is a key feature here—it is a Zoom product, after all—and sharing documents, making revisions, leaving comments, and all the associated tasks are well handled by the software. Up to a hundred 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 modular layouts you can put together give you plenty of scope for flexibility – check out the included templates for inspiration. Documents and pages can be linked together easily, and the interactive elements you get with tables make the software suitable for project planning and simple spreadsheet work too.

Google Docs has been around for decades and offers more features—particularly those related to more traditional word processors. However, if you use Zoom a lot for your daily work, Zoom Docs is a slick and helpful add-on that you’ll likely find useful, especially if you can make the most of its AI features.