Whether you're talking to friends or your teacher or your boss, it never hurts to look your best.
To that end, Zoom has a built-in beautification filter, which is one of several relatively silly little details about the service that help it stand out.
Zoom's virtual backgrounds are another crucial detail: You can swap out whatever is behind you in the video for, say, the Milky Way galaxy, or the top of the Burj Khalifa, or the interview area from "The Office."
But more important than any of that stuff, according to the users I spoke with, is functionality.
"I prefer the [user experience] and find call quality consistently better," one user who operates a small business said. "You can record the meeting," another user pointed out.
An associate who works in video game development said, "You can stream much higher quality video via Zoom than Hangouts. Trying to view a video clip (or live gameplay) over Hangouts was impossible. Zoom is much higher quality than Hangouts by a long shot."
It's easy to see why this stuff — better call quality, the ability to record meetings, and being able to share high-quality video over that call — help to set Zoom apart from the competition.