These two get compared constantly and they are not competitors. Zoom puts people in a room at the same time. Loom lets one person record something and everyone else watch it later. The reason the comparison keeps getting made is that a lot of what currently happens in a Zoom room does not need a room at all — and if that is the question you are actually asking, the answer is not simply “use Loom”.
Here is what each one is for, when a meeting genuinely earns the calendar slot, and what to look at if you are trying to hold fewer of them.
The short answer
Zoom is synchronous: everyone shows up at once and talks. Loom is asynchronous: you record once, and people watch on their own time. Neither replaces the other outright. The useful question is which of your recurring meetings are really one person explaining something to several — because those are the ones that convert to video cleanly, and they are usually most of the calendar.
What a live meeting is actually good at
It is worth being straight about this, because “replace every meeting with video” is bad advice. A live call is the right tool when the outcome depends on the conversation rather than on the information.
- Decisions with disagreement in them, where people need to hear each other change their minds
- Anything sensitive — feedback, difficult news, negotiation, anything where tone carries meaning
- Genuine brainstorming, where the value is the interruption
- First contact with someone, where the relationship matters more than the agenda
- Live troubleshooting where you need to try things and react in real time
What does not need a meeting
Everything below is one person conveying information to several, with questions arriving afterwards. Those are the ones that turn into a recording without losing anything.
- Status updates and weekly reporting
- Walkthroughs and demos of something you can show on screen
- Onboarding and training that gets delivered more than once
- Design and code review where the reviewer needs to see the thing
- Handovers, and anything that starts “let me just show you where that is”
Where the async tools differ from each other
If you have decided some meetings should be recordings, the next question is what the recording has to do. Loom records your screen and camera and gives you a link, and it is good at that. Where async tools diverge is everything around the recording: whether it also handles screenshots and GIFs, whether it writes the recording up for you, and whether it can collect a recording from someone else rather than only sending yours out.
The part most comparisons miss: asking
Replacing a meeting with a video only solves half the problem. Plenty of meetings exist because you need to see what is happening on somebody else’s screen — a customer’s bug, a colleague’s setup, the thing that only breaks on their machine. A one-way recording cannot do that, so the meeting stays in the calendar. A request link can: you send a URL, they record their own screen in the browser with no account and no install, and it comes back to you with console logs attached. That is the category of meeting most teams never manage to remove.
How to actually hold fewer meetings
The teams that make this stick do not announce an async policy. They pick one recurring meeting and stop holding it.
- Choose the meeting that is most one-directional — usually a status or update call
- Record it instead, the same week, at the same length it would have been
- Put the link where the meeting invite was, so nobody has to look for it
- Give people somewhere to reply — a thread, comments, whatever they already use
- Leave a shorter live slot on the calendar for the questions that come back
- Repeat with the next meeting once the first one has stopped being missed
Which to use, in one line each
- Use Zoom when the conversation is the point — decisions, disagreement, difficult news, first meetings
- Use async video when one person is explaining something to several and questions can wait
- Use a request link when the thing you need to see is on somebody else’s screen
- Use a screenshot when it fits in one frame, which is more often than people expect
Where Zight fits
Zight is the async side of that list, with the collecting side built in. Record your screen, camera or both and share a link; capture and annotate a screenshot when the video would be overkill; make a GIF when three seconds will do; and send a request link when what you need is on someone else’s machine. Every recording comes back with a transcript, a summary, chapters and a step-by-step guide, so the meeting you did not hold leaves something behind that the next person can search — which a meeting never does.