Zoom Rooms

Selecting the right Zoom Rooms hardware

A Zoom Rooms system turns a meeting space into a dedicated Zoom environment — the room account hosts the meeting, the touch controller manages calls and content sharing, and participants walk in and join with a single button press. Unlike a standard BYOD setup where someone brings a laptop and shares their screen, a Zoom Rooms deployment means the room is always ready, always consistent, and always managed through the Zoom web portal. Many modern Zoom Rooms Appliance solutions from Logitech, Poly, and Yealink run Zoom Rooms natively on Android without requiring a separate Windows compute device — simplifying deployment, reducing cabling, and lowering the total cost per room.

Zoom-certified hardware covers a broad range of form factors. Logitech's Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini are all-in-one Zoom-certified video bars that integrate camera, compute, and audio into a single unit — straightforward to mount, minimal to cable, and well suited to rooms from huddle spaces through to medium conference rooms. The Rally Bar Huddle is specifically optimised for smaller spaces, with a compact form factor and wide-angle optics for close-range group coverage. Poly's Studio X series — including the Studio X30, X52, and X72 — are Android-based appliances that run Zoom Rooms natively without a separate compute device; the X72 handles larger rooms with dual-camera capability and extended audio processing. Yealink's MeetingBar A series (A20, A30, A40) covers the small-to-medium room range on Android, with native Zoom Rooms integration and beamforming microphone arrays built in. For large rooms and boardrooms where a fixed-angle bar won't provide adequate coverage, a dedicated PTZ camera paired with a Zoom Rooms compute kit gives the flexibility to specify camera position, zoom range, and audio coverage independently.

The Zoom Rooms controller is a separate touchscreen device — typically a tablet running the Zoom Rooms Controller app — that sits on the table and handles meeting controls without anyone needing to walk to the display. Most Zoom-certified all-in-one bars ship with or support a compatible controller; for component-based builds, the controller device needs to be specified separately. As a general guide, a single all-in-one bar handles rooms up to around 6–7 metres in depth; beyond that, camera framing and microphone pickup both degrade enough to justify a more considered component selection.

Zoom Rooms licensing is a per-room subscription, separate from individual Zoom user licences. Each room requires its own Zoom Rooms licence assigned to a room account — this is what enables the always-on, one-touch join behaviour that distinguishes a Zoom Room from a laptop-based Zoom call. Zoom Rooms remains particularly popular in organisations that host external meetings frequently, where Zoom's meeting experience and cross-organisational interoperability are often preferred over a Microsoft-centric workflow. Organisations evaluating both platforms will find that the hardware selection process for Zoom Rooms and Microsoft Teams Rooms is largely parallel — many devices are certified for both, and the room-size and use-case logic is identical.