Too Long; Didn't Read
Monero (XMR) and ZCash (ZEC) are the two most popular privacy-centric peer-to-peer crypto-networks of confidential value circulation (or crypto-hawalas, if you will). Although both in practice conceal sender, receiver, amounts and balances, they implement very different mechanisms and protocols and work in altogether different ways to achieve that. We've already covered both in two separate articles, but below we'll make a brief comparison between the two to get a better understanding of their properties in order to make more informed choices when to use which and the particular purposes best suited for each one of them.