Maximizing Monetary Savings: Migrating from Zoom to Microsoft Teams with E-Migrator

Seattle WA, USA– July 3, 2025.

With the proliferation of remote work and virtual communication platforms, and the rapid acceleration brought in part by the pandemic, businesses must prioritize efficiency without compromising their financial health. In the IT world, one compelling way to achieve this is to deduplicate applications and services that provide the same basic functionality, such as migrating from Zoom to Microsoft Teams—a transition that can lead to significant monetary savings, while enhancing productivity.

Understanding the Cost Landscape

Many organizations that we work with tell us a similar story: they needed to respond quickly to the changing working conditions brought about in early 2020 and deployed Zoom to facilitate their collaboration and meeting scenarios. Oftentimes, the speed of that deployment did not allow the organization to properly plan their implementation or to take a long-term, strategic view of their platform. Now, years removed from this inciting event, organizations are questioning whether this still matches business needs or fits their evolving strategy.

Zoom’s pricing tiers range from basic free plans to advanced business offerings that include webinars, larger meeting capacities, and additional features. These subscription costs can accumulate quickly!

Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, is bundled with Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which most organizations already use for their office productivity tools. By adopting Teams, businesses can leverage a comprehensive collaboration platform without incurring separate software expenses, resulting in immediate cost synergies. The integration of Teams with other Microsoft applications such as Word, Excel, and SharePoint further enhances its value proposition.

To understand the monetary savings, let’s delve into a simple cost comparison:

Meanwhile, since Teams is already included in the Microsoft 365 subscriptions most organizations have purchased, licensing Teams is effectively free.

Understanding the Cost Landscape

One of the most significant advantages of migrating to Microsoft Teams is the reduction of redundancy. Businesses using Zoom often find themselves juggling multiple platforms for collaboration, meetings, file sharing, and project management. This fragmentation incurs additional costs and hinders workflow efficiency.

Microsoft Teams consolidates these functionalities into a single platform. Video conferencing, chat, file storage, and app integrations are seamlessly unified within Teams, minimizing the need for external tools. This streamlining of operations reduces software expenditure and frees up valuable employee time, further enhancing the cost-effectiveness of the platform.

Microsoft Teams offers exceptional integration capabilities. For businesses already embedded in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Teams becomes an extension of their existing workflows. This integration brings several monetary savings:

Storage Costs

Teams integrate with OneDrive and SharePoint, providing extensive cloud storage without additional charges.

Application Costs

Third-party integrations such as task management, analytics, and CRM tools are often embedded within the Microsoft ecosystem, reducing the need for external subscriptions.

IT Overhead

Centralized software reduces the complexity and cost of IT support and management.

From licensing to operations to maintenance, Teams presents a significant cost savings opportunity for most organizations.

Automate Migration using E-Migrator

Once you have decided to make the switch from Zoom to Teams, it’s time to evaluate your options. App migrations are rarely straightforward, especially when that app is such an integral part of most users’ daily work. Every one of our customers has been happy they made the switch to Microsoft Teams, but there’s no sugarcoating it: it’s a journey to get from one to the other.

That’s where E-Migrator comes into play: we help automate the migration of Zoom to Microsoft Teams. I won’t delve into all the details of E-Migrator features and processes here, see our X blog post for that, but imagine two migration scenarios:

Manual migration

The organization asks each individual meeting organizer to manually cancel existing Zoom calls and recreate them in Teams. To achieve compliance requirements and business continuity, users also must go back through their historical meetings and copy meeting files, such as recordings, meeting chat, files shared along the call, and more.

Automated migration

E-Migrator discovers and migrates Zoom meetings to Teams in a seamless manner. Post migration, your users review their calendar and see their same meetings, now with Zoom links and phone numbers. Previous meeting files are safely secured in their OneDrive (or other M365 location).

Imagine the average user experience in the manual migration described above. Think of their morale as they continue to execute these highly monotonous tasks. How many hours will they spend manually copying files and meetings that they could be using on their job duties? How many errors will they make during this process? How many files will they neglect to migrate or permission incorrectly, putting your sensitive information and compliance posture at risk? What will their initial perception of Teams be?

Some of these questions have subjective answers, so let’s refocus on hard numbers, on cost savings. Based on our experience helping organizations migrate to Teams, we’ve created a tool to help you estimate the monetary productivity costs associated with a manual migration. Our architects work with you to prove out the cost savings of an automated migration, based on your use cases and all the nuances of your unique organizational culture. However, for the purposes of this post, let’s use a generic example.

We return to our organization of 5,000 users and assume they need to migrate their future meetings and artifacts from past meetings (such as recordings, meeting files, meeting chats, etc.) for all meetings up to 3 years ago to adhere to compliance regulations and ensure business continuity. We will also assume that each user creates an average of 32 meetings a month, or a little over 1.5 meetings per day. Each meeting takes on average, 10 minutes to migrate. The organizer must locate the meeting, transfer the files to a new location, permission those files according to meeting participants, respond to inquiries from participants, and more. Let’s factor in a 10% margin of error as well. With those assumptions in place, let’s look at how long this effort will take:

That’s a little less than 2 weeks of work per user, just devoted to meeting migration! And that’s only for one year’s worth of meetings. If we assume an average hourly cost of $50 per user to the organization, this represents a hidden productivity cost of about $3,500 per user per year’s worth of meetings. Scale that up to our entire example organization and the cost balloons to $17.5 million – and again, that monetary cost represents the effort for only a single year.

Add the productivity costs described above to the more qualitative impacts on user morale and it becomes quite clear: automation is the most efficient and cost-effective way to migrate from Zoom to Teams. With E-Migrator, the end user experience is simple: after the migration, a meeting organizer will see no difference in their meetings – E-Migrator retains participants, tracking, invite, and more – except the meeting links and phone information will now point to Microsoft Teams. Clear, simple, and cost-effective. Immediately realize cost savings and ensure a seamless user experience with E-Migrator.

For more information about E-Migrator, see our website and download our datasheet (links). Contact us at email address to chat with one of our architects about how E-Migrator can easily facilitate your migration.