User app or admin app?

Last updated: August 23, 2026

RecordFlow ships as two Zoom Marketplace apps. They archive the same recordings to the same destinations in the same folder layout — what differs is whose recordings each one can see, and who has to do something to make that happen. This page compares them, so you can install once and not redo it.

The short answer

• Archiving your own Zoom recordings → the user app. About a minute, no admin rights, nothing to coordinate.
• Archiving other people's recordings, on a Zoom account you administer → the admin app. One install covers everyone you enable, and asks nothing of them.

If you're on the fence: the usual worry about the admin app is that colleagues lose access to their own recordings, and that one doesn't hold — each member gets an ordinary folder you can share with them straight from Drive. See central archive, member access anyway.

Side by side

Everything below the surface — sync timing, file types, deduplication, auto-delete, the folder layout — is identical. See archive destinations for what each destination stores.

Pick the user app when…

• The recordings you care about are your own. It archives the cloud recordings hosted by the Zoom user who installed it — see whose recordings are archived.
• You're not a Zoom admin, or you are but don't want an account-wide install yet.
• You want the files in your own storage, under your own account — your Drive, your OneDrive, your Dropbox, your YouTube channel.
• You're evaluating RecordFlow. It's the smallest thing that proves the archive works end to end, and it doesn't touch anyone else's recordings while you look.

Pick the admin app when…

• Several people's recordings need archiving — a practice, a consulting team, a department, a campus.
• Per-member setup is the obstacle. Members install nothing, connect nothing, and authorize nothing. You enable a toggle; their recordings start arriving.
• New people should be covered without anyone remembering. New hires appear in the dashboard within a day of joining the Zoom account, and Automatically enable new members — on by default in your members list — enrolls them in sync as they arrive. Nobody has to notice the new starter, and the new starter has nothing to learn. (Turn it off if you'd rather add people disabled and opt them in yourself; existing members are unaffected either way.)
• The archive has to survive people leaving. When a member is removed from the Zoom account, sync stops automatically and everything already archived stays in your folder — it doesn't walk out with their Google account.
• One policy has to hold for everyone — the same archive-history window, the same auto-delete decision, the same destination.

It does ask two things of you: you must be an admin or owner on the Zoom account, and you must have the authority to archive those members' recordings. RecordFlow gives members no in-product notice that they're being archived, so telling your team is on you — see what members see (and don't).

Central archive, member access anyway

The most common reason people talk themselves out of the admin app is a false trade-off: "if everything lands in my Drive, my colleagues lose access to their own recordings." They don't have to — and on a Workspace domain, where IT provisions everyone's Drive anyway, the files sit inside the same organization either way.

The admin app archives into one folder you control, and creates one sub-folder per enabled member inside it, named for that member — <your archive folder> → Jane Smith → 2026 → 2026-03-21 – Discovery call. That sub-folder is an ordinary Google Drive folder. Nothing about it is special to RecordFlow.

Sharing a member's sub-folder

Which means you can share it the way you'd share any other folder: right-click Jane Smith in Drive → Share → add Jane, pick Viewer, Commenter or Editor. She now reaches her own recordings under her own Google account, and you still have the one central archive and the one-time setup. Drive permissions are inherited, so every recording RecordFlow files there later is covered too — you share once per member, not once per meeting.

Pick the access level from what they need to do: Viewer is enough to watch and download; Editor lets them rename, tidy and re-file within the folder — and, on a Workspace domain, also governs whether they can share a recording onward to a student or client. Sharing a whole member sub-folder is the usual move, but a single meeting folder shares exactly the same way when only one recording should travel.

OneDrive and Dropbox work the same way: same per-member sub-folders, same ordinary sharing controls. YouTube is the exception — a channel has no folders, so there are no per-member sub-folders to share; see one folder, every admin.

What a member can do with it

Once shared, a member's recordings behave like any other shared Drive content. They can play them, download them, add a shortcut in their own Drive so the folder sits next to their own files, or copy a recording into their Drive to organize it their own way — a copy they own outright. RecordFlow keeps a record of every file it has archived, so none of this causes duplicates or re-uploads on the next sync.

Two things to tell them first

• Leave the member sub-folder where it is. Copies and shortcuts are free; moving or renaming the sub-folder itself isn't. RecordFlow finds it by name under your archive folder, so a renamed or relocated one just means a fresh empty sub-folder appears on the next sync and new recordings go there.
• The originals are yours, and so is the quota. Files RecordFlow archives are owned by the storage account you connected and count against its storage — a member's copy counts against theirs. Removing a member's access, or deleting their sub-folder, removes their access to the originals too.

What sharing doesn't cover

Access, a shared sub-folder gives you. Four things it doesn't — worth knowing before you set the rollout up, and none of them a reason on its own to make ten people install something.

• Members can't choose their own folder. There's one archive root per Zoom account, and each member gets a sub-folder named for their Zoom display name underneath it. You can't point one member at Fall 2026 Lectures in their own Drive and another at a shared drive — see one folder, every admin. Members can of course arrange their own copies however they like.
• Members get no "archive ready" email. Sync notifications go to admins only. If the person who ran the meeting is the one who acts on it — files it, shares it onward, checks the captions — they'll be working from your nudge rather than ours.
• Sharing each sub-folder is a manual step. RecordFlow creates the sub-folder; you share it. One share per member covers everything filed there afterwards, so it's a small job — but it's yours, and it's easy to forget for a new starter who was enabled automatically.
• Settings are one decision for everyone. Archive history, transcript-only sync and auto-delete are account-wide, so a member can't keep two years of history while the rest of the team keeps one month, or opt out of auto-delete on their own.

Everyone installs the user app instead

A team can, of course, just have every member install the user app. It's a legitimate choice, and it's the right one when the recordings are personal and each person should own their own archive — freelancers sharing a Zoom account, say, or a team where nobody wants a central copy.

What it costs, so it's a fair comparison:

• N installs and N storage connections, each one someone else's to do, and each one a place where onboarding stalls.
• Every new hire has to learn it and remember to do it, in a first week already full of accounts to set up. And the failure is silent: someone who skips it looks exactly like someone who did it, until months later when a recording you needed was never archived. The admin app's automatic enabling of new members is the direct answer to this one — nobody has to remember anything.
• N archives. There's no combined view, and no single folder to hand to a client, an auditor, or a colleague covering someone's leave.
• Settings drift. Archive history, transcript-only sync and auto-delete are each person's own call, so "our policy" is whatever nine people separately clicked.
• Departures take the archive. The files live in the leaver's storage account under their name — and offboarding rarely remembers to retrieve them.

Two things make this path go much better if you take it. First, check whether your Zoom account requires an admin to pre-approve apps from the Marketplace — if it does, approve RecordFlow before you ask anyone to install it, or every colleague hits a "request approval" wall on step one. Second, hand people a short written run-through rather than a link to the docs: sign in as a Zoom user, connect the work Google account (not a personal one), pick this folder, turn these settings on. Institutions that have rolled RecordFlow out this way did it with a one-page faculty guide, and that page is what made it stick.

For most teams the admin app plus shared sub-folders gets the upside of both: one install, one policy, new people covered automatically, one archive that stays — and members who can still reach their own recordings.

Can you run both?

Yes. The two installs are independent and don't know about each other, so a member enabled on your admin install who has also installed the user app gets each recording archived twice — once into your archive folder, once into their own storage. Sometimes that's exactly what you want (a central copy for the business, a personal copy for them). If you don't want the duplicate, either don't enable that member on the admin install, or have them uninstall the user app — see removing RecordFlow.

The same goes for one person and two Zoom accounts: a consultant hosting meetings on two accounts can be enabled by both admins, and each admin's archive gets its own copy.

Starting with one and adding the other

Nothing here is a one-way door. The user app is the safer first install — install it, watch one recording land, and add the admin app later without undoing anything. Adding the admin app doesn't remove or change the user install; it's a separate authorization from the sign-in page.

When you do enable a member, RecordFlow backfills every cloud recording of theirs inside your account's archive-history window that isn't archived yet — it defaults to the past month and goes up to 10 years, so switching later doesn't mean starting from today. Recordings already archived stay exactly where they are; RecordFlow never moves or re-copies them.

Still not sure?

Tell us the shape of your setup — how many people, whose recordings, and where you want the files — through our support page, and we'll tell you which app fits. You can also book 15 minutes with Adam, the founder, from the same page.

Read the user guide →Read the admin guide →