Huddle room vs meeting room: what's the difference?

A huddle room is a 3 to 5 person space with an integrated video conferencing bar and a single display, while a meeting room is a 6 to 12 person space with separate components: ceiling microphones, dedicated camera, distributed speakers and a touch panel control system. The split is mainly driven by capacity, but it has knock-on effects on cost, install time and what kinds of meetings the room supports well.

Huddle rooms work when the brief is "quick standups, 1:1s and small team check-ins". They favour repeatability across an estate: identical kit in every room, short install cycle, low support burden. The trade-off is that integrated VC bars start to struggle above 5 people because the camera framing tightens and the microphones miss heads more than 3 metres from the bar.

Meeting rooms earn their cost when the room runs longer sessions, more participants, or higher-stakes calls (client meetings, leadership reviews). The separate ceiling mics and DSP deliver clean audio across a 6 metre table where a huddle bar can't, and the larger display sized for the room means content stays legible from the back.

The pragmatic approach for most office estates is a tiered standard: 60 to 70 percent huddle rooms for daily use, the rest standard meeting rooms and a small number of boardrooms. Standardising the build at each tier through consultation and design makes the meeting room AV estate cheaper to install and far cheaper to support across a 5 to 7 year lifecycle.

Quick reference: huddle room (3-5 people) for quick standups, 1:1s and small team check-ins with an integrated VC bar at £4k-£8k; meeting room (6-12 people) for longer sessions and higher-stakes calls with ceiling mics, dedicated camera and DSP-driven speakers at £12k-£25k.