Norwegian company appear.in offers their flagship video conferencing platform to small teams, both in a free edition hosting up to 4 guests simultaneously in a session or a paid edition that supports up to 12 simultaneous meeting guests, among other features.
$0
per user
Zoom Workplace
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Zoom Workplace, Zoom’s open collaboration platform with an AI Companion, empowers teams to be more productive, and strengthen customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle with Zoom’s Business Services for sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, including Zoom Contact Center.
When compared to the other VC platforms, we found Whereby the easiest to use for users and invitees. The only install from a recipient's point-of-view is a Chrome extension. Zoom requires a download and an account to sign into. Microsoft Teams is only for other members on the …
Whereby is a great tool for individual meetings or among small groups. It's super simple to use and very convenient. But if you need to have meetings with more than 10 people, a tool like Zoom is probably necessary. You'll have more options to control who can share and who can …
We started testing the tool and quickly changed everything. We chose to use it because it worked very well and with a higher quality than expected. Today we do not think of using another tool because it is meeting all our needs. We managed to keep the team updated and united, …
Skype for Business has an instant messaging feature with the rest of the organization and is linked with Outlook email, so that's an advantage, but sometimes sharing the meeting invite with others is difficult, because it is linked to the Skype bridge. appear.in was easy to …
I've used Google Meet, appear.in and Skype. In between these, I think Zoom is the most complete tool. But probably the most expensive too for larger use. In the videoconferences that we host, we use Zoom sometimes, other times when we don't need some tools, we use Google Meet. …
I have used quite a range of these tools over time. Some work pretty well if all parties are using a laptop with high bandwidth. However, Zoom works extremely well when people are on different devices / media (like some on phone, some on computer). Others services either can't …
Whereby is well suited for making connections with clients and people who are not technologically savvy. It is very easy to use for the most part. It does not work very well when I am trying to screenshare and show demonstrations of excel spreadsheets, but not a lot of products do
* Onboarding new employees - adaptation is quick and easy for new employees - for phone and meeting use. * Administration is quick and easy as well as finding answers to the 'what ifs' * Delegation for scheduling and creating scheduler links - what an awesome process - delegation allows for ease of on-boarding new employees - pre-emptively setting up their meetings and orientations in advance of start date *AI summary - our development teams uses them for ALL meetings creating a great history and follow up process for the entire team
The paid version may have dial-in. But I have always used the free version. Dial-in is typically required for an "official" multi-purpose teleconference platform.
I did have some trouble with larger groups (5+) when it was Appear.in but almost always use it for small 1-on-1 or 3 person meetings.
You need an app to make the calls and meetings, but it would be perfect if it had a web-based option.
Sometimes when internet speed drops, the audio quality also drops; I would understand the video quality dropping, but the audio doesn't consume much bandwidth, so it would be nice to have a consistent audio even on low internet speeds.
We are using a larger tool suite that already includes video conferencing instead of our older approach of using different apps from different vendors. appear.in has a simple but great set of features but its pricing scheme is not as scalable as we really need in a 500+ employee company.
Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.
There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.
Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.
Never had to contact support, so we cannot give a rating for their overall support. When we noticed the audio was not always great quality, we simply educated our users to mute the mic and use the in-room conference phone which is connected via a dedicated VOIP link and had much better voice quality. The video performance varied by locations network speed and found it got much worse when the room size increased to over 4 connections.
Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.
If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.
I did not evaluate other applications against Whereby, because we had a very specific need, which was the partner that we would use the solution, only accepted to use Whereby, so, we accepted to use the solution. As it was for a specific period, there was no problem. And in the end, it proved to be a very stable, very fast solution, with no need for crazy plugins or anything. Basically, it was access[ed] and use.
Zoom Workplace is typically on the more expensive end against other options, but it's the industry leader for a reason. It has the most brand credibility by far, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. There are limitations when it comes to technical performance, customization and video/audio quality. I prefer Slack myself for communication apps, but Zoom Workplace is a good alternative.
Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.
We have not lost much productivity in our teamwork during the pandemic because of the ability to have Zoom video calls and keep everyone in touch. This is definitely a positive.
We are able to have more people participate in coaching sessions (described earlier) because we don't have room space limitations. This is a big positive.
Being able to start a meeting instantly is great when we are doing support and/or training with a client over the phone and need to be able to share a visible