Lifesize Video Conferencing vs. Skype (discontinued)

I think there's much better options out there. In a small setting, they might be suitable but I don't believe they scale very well in any medium-large size businesses. We wanted to take advantage of things like a Microsoft Exchange calendar, a "Join Now" button and integrating with Teams. These are all things that our company made a sizeable investment on and in order to take things to the next level, we had to move on from Lifesize Video Conferencing.

Incentivized

Skype is an excellent choice for phone calls, both local and international, and is also one of the most affordable solutions for business office line. It is simple to use and get started with and provides a call experience on mobile that is similar to a regular phone call. It is not the ideal tool for team chat. For text-based team communication, a separate dedicated tool is still ideal

Incentivized

• The touchpad makes it extremely easy to join or start conference calls with a single pushbutton.
• The Lifesize solution is affordable and has been extremely reliable for our video conference calls.
• Camera quality is great and provides clear video for our organization.
• The pan/tilt/zoom features are very helpful to focus in on specific people or items during a training or demonstration.

Incentivized

• Perfect for chatting via text. Has emojis, file sharing, audio sharing, and even video sharing capabilities.
• Good for video chats. You can do 1 on 1 sessions with a good quality video.
• Privacy is also another important function they have. They allow for private conversations between users.
• Ability to delete conversations with sensitive information you may not want seen by users not authorized. Can share confidential information via Skype.
• Customizable profiles to fit your company culture.

Incentivized

• International users have experienced spotty/jittery sound and video.
• Connecting to meetings that are on different conferencing services is very clunky and not end user friendly.
• Being able to remote control the camera from a mobile device would be nice. If a change is needed during a meeting, the menu is pretty large and draws plenty of attention and distracts the audience.

Incentivized

• Skype is a RESOURCE hog. People who have limited bandwidth will have poor call quality.
• It is hard to figure out how to use emojis and upload images in the chat.
• The background images do not fool anybody....it is clearly not your real background.

Incentivized

I have a lot of Lifesize hardware and I do like Cloud but I am always watching the market for a company that will finally nail this space. I feel like Lifesize has a solid head start but I hope they can create a vision for the marketplace and execute in a meaningful way.

Incentivized

I have given this rating as this need to give more than that as it's very helpful for us and makes our work more efficient and fast.

Overall experience with Lifesize Video Conferencing has been great. While it serves it's basic purpose of allowing smooth video/audio meetings of people located at different places with option of screen sharing/chatting/ recording, what add to it's pros are it's accessibility from various platforms, flexibility to switch to a listen only mode in case of network issues and ease of operation.

Incentivized

Skype is not as good as Facetime in terms of ease to glance at it and figure out how it works. I think that's a result of Skype trying to be too many things at once. A lot of the menu and UI could be streamlined, and I would jettison some of the additional functions that have been tacked on over the years to simplify. That being said, while some options are slightly hard to find, they all work flawlessly once found.

Incentivized

Since we are an educational institution we not only have scheduled classes which must be available, but we have staff members in a variety of areas ranging from recruiting and admissions to advancement and the President's office who need to connect with students, alumni and other interest groups, often at odd hours. I have not, since using Lifesize had anyone complain of not being able to connect

Incentivized

Lifesize is an amazing platform for VC. However, it is a costly solution for any scaling startup. However, implementation and user acceptability was fairly easy and worth the additional spend. Quality has always been on point and support has always taken care of us. Our account manager also ensured a seamless transition process for Google Hangouts. Will go with this solution again at any other organization.

Incentivized

Most of the front-line call takers are only as knowledgeable enough to tell you to reboot or reset. If your issue is more complicated than that, it will need to be escalated. On the other hand - most of our problems have been on our network side. The techs are ALWAYS super nice and try to be as helpful as possible. They do care about fixing the problem.

Incentivized

I am not aware of the current support level for Skype for business, as I have never used even though I have the product. However, the support for Skype's personal paid users is not where it could be. Users who pay for Skype features do not have a clear path to reach out to support. So, rating 6, can be better as soon as I need to use Skype for business support and get a good experience. I will say that I will renew Skype for Business subscription, which is a significant inconsistency on my end. The explanation is that Skype for Business comes bundled with Office for Business, with no additional cost, so why not.

Incentivized

Sensus was really helpful in the initial setup and training of our technical Support Team. Sensus gave us training on site so that it would be our own equipment that was set up. Then the in house tech team took over to train other users who would be using the system. When needed the Sensus and Lifesize tech support were really helpful in trouble shooting or guiding us through any difficulty.

Incentivized

I gave this rating because Lifesize's website offers multiple quality videos that shows you exactly how the software works. The videos are divided into different categories which makes searching for a video fairly simple! If for some reason you have a question not answered in one of the how-tos you can always contact support. Excellent product, excellent service!

Incentivized

Great for companies that need to accomplish multiple things at once while at different places. From our experience, broadcasting news is most favorable considering the level of excellence you get with the product plus the affordability. It can be used both privately amongst employees, or shared publicly through covering events

Incentivized

It can be used on the phone via mobile application as well as on the desktop by logging in to the website. Easily installed and ready to use.

Incentivized

Select Lifesize Video Conferencing because it is an online meeting software that has a robust interface, a pleasant interface, and solutions that we can take full advantage of, it offers immediate solutions for screen sharing communication through the web or app. It has worked perfectly for me, offering quality and security as well as being fast and with a free trial, which adjusts to the needs of its users.

Selected Skype because it was the only platform that was available for such purposes for video conferencing or audio conferencing. Since Microsoft, the tech giant, backed it, it was assured that it would work great in terms of productivity, with utmost security measures for all data, conversations, work materials, and personal information.

Incentivized

With LifeSize Cloud, it's very easy to simply add another Icon to your system and join it to your cloud. You can easily and instantly create meetings and add users both in your organization and out without any difficulty. The cooperation between the Icons and cloud users running on their laptops makes it easy to scale this out to your entire company, including joint venture without difficulty.

Incentivized

• First the cost of licensing was significantly lower than other applications. We were able to experience an almost immediate return on investment now having the ability to bill the health plans for Virtual Visits.
• Again, the lower cost of licensing allowed us to provide more users within the company with license. I am unable to share the specifics of our contract with Lifesize Video Conferencing. What I can say is the price made it easy for us to subscribe to Lifesize.

Incentivized

• Skype has contributed to increased efficiency for remote collaboration, especially now due to the ways things are and having so many remote employees. Without this tool, or any collaboration tool, business could not move forward.
• I think Skype is the cost effective solution also between it and the other competitors out there. I'm not privy to the exact costs, but it strikes me as the cheaper option.
• The only negative impact I would say is its lack of functionality and customization for larger organizations or groups that have employees spread out or require inter-departmental collaboration.

Incentivized