Zcash has to have privacy enabled by the user. It’s not automatically private. Monero is automatically private.
Halo Arc removes the trusted setup and also sets shielded transactions by default.
ECC also has announced that they intend to work on implementing shielded assests which seem compelling: https://electriccoin.co/blog/zsas-ecc-progress-and-next-step...
One glaring issue is that there seems to be lots of tension between the community and the Zcash foundation (wrt power control).
Another issue with Zcash is that it had a trusted setup, which is not an issue Monero has.
That's not a true statement as far as I understand how Zcash works. Right now there are >742K ZEC in the shielded Sapling pool, so there are quite a few people using it and you can not tell their shielded transactions apart.
https://electriccoin.co/zcash-metrics/
> Another issue with Zcash is that it had a trusted setup, which is not an issue Monero has.
Yes, but they took a number of steps to make sure that the ceremony for creating the trusted setup discarded the keys used and there was no one listening in. (they were geographically distributed and destroyed the hardware)
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/cerem...
Skip to around 36 minutes for that.