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.

From the floor. The threshold that decides the build is roughly 3 metres from the bar to the back seat. Inside that, an integrated bar picks up voices cleanly and the call sounds natural. Past it, the same bar starts to drop the back row into the noise floor and the room sounds quiet on the remote end even though it feels fine in the space. Measure the table, not the room. — David Corker, Technical Sales Director

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.