Comparing MeetingRoomTablet vs Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro
If you have asked Microsoft or a partner how to put screens outside your meeting rooms, the answer often comes back as Teams Rooms Pro at $40 per room per month. That is a real answer, but it is worth understanding what you are buying, because most of it has nothing to do with the screen at the door.
Below, we discuss what Teams Rooms Pro actually covers, where it earns its price, and how to tell which of your rooms need it.
Comparing Teams Rooms Pro and Meetingroomtablet
Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro is a licence for a video meeting room. It covers the in-room system, the camera and microphones, the front-of-room display, one-touch meeting join, and Microsoft's management and monitoring of that equipment. A scheduling panel outside the door is included in it. One Pro licence covers both the room system and its panel.
MeetingRoomTablet Professional is software for the door panel alone, at $8 per device per month. It shows availability and the day's schedule, and lets anyone standing there book, start, extend or end a meeting. It reads the room calendars you already run and works on hardware you already have or can buy anywhere. It does not do video conferencing and does not try to.
So these are not competing products. They overlap on one thing, which is the screen outside the room. The question is how many of your rooms should be paying a video licence to get one.
Price
Teams Rooms Pro | MeetingRoomTablet Professional | |
|---|---|---|
Licence price | $40 per room per month | $8 per device per month, billed annually |
What it covers | Video meeting room, in-room system, management, and the door panel | The door panel |
Screen you can use | A certified Teams panel | Any supported Android tablet, a purpose-built panel, or any browser |
Free version to try | No | Yes, a read-only display at no cost |
What the Panel Does
This is where people expect a difference and there mostly is not one.
Teams Rooms Pro | MeetingRoomTablet | |
|---|---|---|
Free or busy at a glance | Yes | Yes |
What is on now and next | Yes | Yes |
The whole day's schedule | Yes | Yes |
Book a room at the door | Yes | Yes |
Check in when the meeting starts | Yes | Yes |
Release the room if nobody turns up | Yes | Yes |
Extend or end a meeting | Yes | Yes |
One-touch join for a video meeting | Yes | No |
Apart from the last row, walk up to either panel and you will not notice which one you are using.
1. How Many of Your Rooms Actually Need Video?
This is the question that decides the budget, and it usually goes unasked.
Most offices have a handful of rooms fitted with cameras and microphones, and a larger number that have a table, a whiteboard and a door. The small huddle rooms, the two-person interview room, the training room, the room next to reception. None of those hold video calls, and none of them need a video meeting licence.
If you licence every room at $40 to get a panel on every door, you are paying video prices for rooms that will never make a video call.
Take fourteen rooms where four have video equipment. Licensing all fourteen on Pro costs $6,720 a year. Licensing the four video rooms on Pro and putting the other ten on MeetingRoomTablet costs $2,880 a year. The four video rooms keep everything Microsoft gives them, including one-touch join. The other ten get a working door panel.
The advantage is that you pay video prices only for rooms that do video, and every other door still gets a display.
2. Who Gets to Change the Rules
Room displays need tuning. The grace period before an unclaimed booking is released is never right first time. Neither are the hours a room can be booked, the smallest slot people can take, or how far ahead they can reserve. You learn the right settings by watching how your people behave for a month and then adjusting.
On the Microsoft side, those settings do not belong to the person who owns the rooms. The check-in and release window sits in the Teams admin centre, the Places portal, or on the device behind admin credentials. Room hours and booking limits sit on the room mailbox in Exchange. Every one of them needs an administrator role over your Microsoft tenant. Your facilities or workplace manager will not have one, and should not be given one just to shorten a grace period from fifteen minutes to ten.
So each adjustment becomes a ticket. In practice that means it does not happen, and the rooms keep running on whatever was configured on day one.
With MeetingRoomTablet, the person who owns the rooms is an administrator of the room system and nothing else. They sign in to the web portal, change the grace period for one room or all of them, adjust opening hours, set booking rules, switch a panel to display only, and it reaches the screens without anyone touching your Microsoft tenant.
The advantage is that the people closest to the problem can fix it the same afternoon, and your IT team does not have to hand out tenant privileges to let them.
3. What You Can Learn About Your Rooms
Teams Rooms Pro reports well on equipment. You can see which room systems are healthy, which are offline, how the hardware is performing, and broadly how busy the spaces are. That is genuinely useful if you are responsible for the AV estate.
It is a different question from the one facilities teams get asked, which is whether the rooms you have are enough.
MeetingRoomTablet is built around that second question. Its reports cover how much of your bookable time is used, how much of that booked time was genuinely occupied, how many bookings were never checked into and what that cost you in room hours, how late meetings really start, when demand peaks across the week, how long meetings are booked for against how long they run, and how much time gets handed back when people end early. Every report filters by building, floor and room, and exports to Excel.
The advantage is that when somebody asks whether you need more meeting rooms, you can point at the four that sat locked and empty every morning.
4. What the Hardware Costs You
Teams Rooms Pro needs a certified Teams panel at the door, typically $500 to $900. On top of the in-room video equipment, that is the right spend for a room where people join calls all day.
For a huddle room with a whiteboard, it is a lot of money for a screen that shows whether the room is free. MeetingRoomTablet runs on a standard tablet in a wall casing, on a purpose-built panel, or in a browser on a screen you already own.
And a tablet stays useful afterwards. Offices consolidate, floors get handed back, meeting rooms become desks. A certified panel does one job and has a thin resale market. A tablet becomes a desk panel, a visitor screen at reception, a shop-floor terminal or a spare, or it goes back into the IT pool.
The advantage is that the doors where the stakes are lower cost less to equip, and the hardware keeps a use if your workplace changes.
Where Teams Rooms Pro Is the Better Choice
Three situations where we would not argue.
1. The room holds video meetings. Pro is a video meeting licence and that is what it is good at. One-touch join, the in-room experience and the front-of-room display are the point, and the panel comes with it. Do not try to save $32 a month on a room that runs client calls.`
2. You want Microsoft managing the equipment. Pro includes proactive monitoring and management of your room systems. For an estate of video rooms across several sites, that is a service worth paying for.
3. Everything must live in the Microsoft admin centre. If your policy is that no workplace system sits outside Microsoft, this is the straightforward answer, and central control is the point rather than the drawback.
Which to Choose
Teams Rooms Pro for every room with video equipment in it. That is what the licence is for.
MeetingRoomTablet for the rooms that do not. Huddle rooms, interview rooms, training rooms, project rooms, and any door where people just need to know whether the room is free and be able to book it.
A mixed estate is the normal answer, and it is what most offices end up with once somebody counts the rooms properly. Your video rooms stay entirely Microsoft. Everything else runs at a fifth of the price, on hardware you choose, managed by the team that owns the rooms.
Wrapping Up
Take a company of around 250 people with fourteen meeting rooms across two floors. Four have cameras and microphones. The other ten have a table and a door.
Quoted at $40 a room for panels everywhere, the project costs $6,720 a year in licensing plus certified panels on all fourteen doors, and the facilities manager still raises a ticket every time she wants to change a grace period.
Licensing the four video rooms properly and putting the other ten on MeetingRoomTablet costs $2,880 a year, uses tablets on the ten low-stakes doors, and lets her tune the rules herself.
Count how many of your rooms actually hold video calls. That number decides most of your budget.
Start free and put a display on one of the rooms that does not.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Teams Rooms Pro cost?
$40 per room per month. It licenses a video meeting room, and a scheduling panel outside that room is included.
Is MeetingRoomTablet a replacement for Teams Rooms Pro?
No. Pro licenses video meeting rooms and MeetingRoomTablet does not do video conferencing. It replaces the door panel portion for rooms that do not need a video licence.
Can I use both?
Yes, and most organisations should. Keep Pro on the rooms with video equipment and use MeetingRoomTablet on the rest.
Do I need Teams Rooms Pro just to put a panel on a door?
Not if the room has no Teams Rooms system in it. Ask your Microsoft partner which of your rooms genuinely require it before licensing them all.
Do both stop no-shows?
Yes. Both ask someone to check in when the meeting starts and release the room if nobody does. The difference is who can adjust the release window afterwards.
Who can change room settings like the grace period?
On a Teams panel, an administrator with rights over your Microsoft tenant. With MeetingRoomTablet, an administrator of the room system, which can be your facilities or workplace manager without giving them any Microsoft privileges.
What reporting do I get?
Teams Rooms Pro reports on room equipment health and broad space usage. MeetingRoomTablet reports on booking behaviour: utilisation, true occupancy, no-shows, check-in punctuality, peak demand, meeting duration and reclaimed time.
Can I try before committing?
MeetingRoomTablet has a free plan that turns a supported tablet into a live read-only display, with no card required.
