How to Join & Host Zoom Meetings on Mac

Want to host a Zoom meeting yourself, right from your Mac? How about joining a Zoom meeting? If you’ve been using video calling services to work from home, collaborate with colleagues, or stay in touch with your loved ones during this quarantine period, you’ve probably heard of Zoom already, and you might be interested in trying out hosting meetings yourself, or perhaps you’re just curious how to join an existing Zoom meeting in the first place.

If you’re already familiar with the process of joining and hosting Zoom meetings on iPhone and iPad, you’ll find the structure for the Mac is quite similar. If you’re looking to checkout Zoom on the Mac, read on to learn how to host meetings, and to join them too.

There are a whole variety of video chat and video conference services nowadays on the Mac and other platforms, from Group FaceTime, Skype, Google Hangouts, and more, but Zoom is perhaps the most prominent for many institutions, businesses, schools, and medical offices. Even the free Zoom plan offers up to 100 participants for 40 minutes.

How to Host Zoom Meetings on Mac

Zoom isn’t available on the Mac App Store, but you can download the desktop client from their website. Just follow the steps below to get started.

1. Open Safari on your Mac and head over to zoom.us. Now, click on “Resources” at the top-right corner of the page and choose “Download Zoom Client” from the dropdown menu.
   
   
2. Once the download begins, you’ll be able to see the progress in the Download Manager. Click on “Zoom.pkg” as shown below to begin the installation of the client.
   
   
3. Once the installation is complete, launch “Zoom” from the Dock.
   
   
4. Click on “Sign In” and enter your login credentials to proceed further.
   
   
5. Once you’re in the main menu, you’ll be able to start or join a meeting. Click on “New Meeting” to create a new video conference session.
   
   
6. This will launch a new window on your screen. Your Meeting ID will be shown right at the top. If you want someone else to join the meeting, simply share this meeting ID with them. You can stop your webcam feed at any time by clicking on “Stop Video” at the bottom-left corner of the window. Or, if you want to leave the call, click on “End”.
   
   

So that’s how you host a Zoom meeting, pretty simple all things considered, right? Of course hosting is only half the equation, you probably also want to know how to join Zoom meetings too.

How to Join Zoom Meetings from Mac

1. To join an ongoing Zoom meeting, launch the Zoom app on Mac if you haven’t done so already
2. Click on “Join” from the main menu and enter the meeting ID that was given to you.
3. Type in the name you want to use for the meeting. You also have the option to join the meeting with audio or video turned off.
   
   

That’s pretty much all there is to it for joining and attending Zoom meetings from the Mac.

Now you know how easy it is to host and join a Zoom meeting from your Mac.

Zoom has various fun features too, like Touch Up My Appearance to look a bit better on Zoom, and you can use virtual backgrounds if you want to have a little fun on a Zoom call too.

In addition to video conferencing, Zoom also allows you to share your Mac’s screen with all the participants in the meeting. This can prove to be useful for handling presentations, online classrooms, sharing stuff with friends, family or colleagues, and much more.

It’s worth pointing out that Zoom offers both free and paid subscription plans. It’s always free to join Zoom meetings, so if you’re just joining you don’t need to worry about that. If you’re a host, the free plan has a 40-minute limit on group meetings and capable of hosting up to 100 participants. If you want a longer time duration limit on your Zoom meetings, you’ll need to subscribe to the Pro plan that costs $14.99 a month, which allows you to host 24-hour meetings (just in case you want to be on Zoom all the time). The $19.99/month business plan goes even further, letting you host up to 300 participants in a single meeting.

Do you use an iPhone or iPad as your mobile device? If so, you may want to learn how you can set up, host, and join Zoom meetings on your iOS device as well. You also have the option to share your device’s screen during a Zoom meeting, thanks to the built-in screen recording feature in iOS.

We hope you managed to host or join a Zoom meeting on your Mac without any issues. Have you tried other popular video conferencing solutions like FaceTime, Skype, Slack, Hangouts, etc.? What do you think of Zoom? Let us know your thoughts, experiences, and opinions in the comments section down below.