Amazon Chime is a communications service from Amazon Web Services with a built-in VoIP solution. Amazon Chime can be used for online meetings, video conferencing, and business calling, and features pay-as-you-go pricing.
$0
per minute
GoTo Connect
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
GoToConnect, from GoTo, is a cloud-based business phone system with built-in web-based video conferencing solutions. It includes features such as call analytics, call recording, softphone, fax to email, voicemail to email, and desktop integration.
$27
per month per user
Pricing
Amazon Chime
GoTo Connect
Editions & Modules
Business Calling - Inbound
$0.002216
per minute
Business Calling - Phone Numbers
$1
per number per month, US Only
Meetings - Pro
$3
*per user per day
Meetings - Basic
Free
Business Calling - Outbound
Country Dependent
per minute
Business Calling - Receive Text
Free
US Only
Business Calling - Send Text
Country Dependent
Basic
Starting at $27
per month per user
Standard
Starting at $32
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Chime
GoTo Connect
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
*up to $15.00 per user per month
No-obligation month-to-month account are available, or a long-term contract is available for better deals on service pricing and hardware. GoToConnect provides all features with unlimited use. Customer & Technical support is available 24/7 to resolve any issue. A dedicated onboarding team will help to the phone system set up for any plan.
Amazon Chime is well suited for online video and audio meetings, IMs, and conducting training sessions using a whiteboard. It can be integrated well with Google Calendar and Microsoft outlook. With Amazon Chime mobile app you can attend meetings on the go as well. Meetings can be locked so that only legitimate participants can join the meeting. Amazon Chime is less suited in case you want meeting transcripts as well for your meetings. Given that Amazon Chime is not used by a larger audience so your client or customer may face some difficulties in join the meeting or accessing some of the features of the Chime.
GoTo has been fantastic for office and remote work. No matter where our people are in the world, they can be reached by DID or extension through the phone or computer apps. When an employee is out, his line can be forwarded easily from the local phone or apps and can be forwarded to multiple numbers if necessary. The forwarding can be turned off just as easily. The only challenge there is that if it is forwarded from the local phone, it can not be adjusted remotely. This is not a big deal unless you need to keep your office locked but are not using the app find me/follow me feature.
Call reports: You can see and review calls received from the first receptor until the last who attend this call, also you can review all calls make and received by your teams
Voicemail options: Availability to create some voicemail with multiple receptors
Devices option: with several options to change on your devices
Audio library: Multiple option to create your own audio library with or without ambien music
More simplified dial-in numbers. The PIN for our conference line is long and easy to mistype.
You do not have to download the Chime app in order to join a conference, but if you want to do anything beyond join (schedule a conference, participate in a group chat, control participants), you have to have the app downloaded and installed. The app that you have to download in order to launch a conference is a memory hog, and slows down a computer's boot up time.
The add-in for Microsoft Outlook is particularly clunky. It helps you add scheduled conference calls/video conferences to your Outlook calendar, but it can cause Outlook to crash, and creates a really slow open time for Outlook. If you can avoid downloading the Outlook Add-In, I would.
Making a dedicated button for "mute all" (other than yourself) for when someone "walks off before they mute"/has to quickly leave their computer....and FORGOT to Mute. Particularly when dogs are barking when someone working from home has a visitor at the door
I'd like to see some of the functionality from GoTo Webinar enabled for GoTo Connect: see who's "actively watching" vs has their computer screen on another application
They are knocking it out of the park on all fronts. I love the service and support I am receiving and have no complaints. If they raised their prices substantially I would reconsider but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. They would have to mess up something consistently moving forward to make me want to move
Overall, it's a decent product for the price. It has the basic features our company needed when it was brand new and was not overly difficult to set up. As we've grown, it's become increasingly difficult to build out the features we want to implement within the PBX, and customer support can be less than helpful. Many of the more advanced features (dial plans, queues, etc.) take a lot of research to understand how to implement. Some of the features we paid for weren't even available when we were attempting to set them up.
I have never experienced or heard of unplanned outages when it comes to GoTo Connect. Most of the time the unplanned outage is always local power at a site or internet service provider having an unplanned outage. GoTo's service has never failed any of our orgs yet that I know of.
There is no lag in phone calls. There is no background noise or static/fuzz. Calls are crystal clear. With other dialers and phone systems, I have experienced delays between dialogue or delays with the caller picking up the phone and then being able to hear you. We do not experience this with Go To Connect.
They were very supportive in answering all of our questions when we had problems. Their in-person calls but their support site also had a full set of information that can answer a good portion of your questions before you have to pick up the phone. But when you, you will get good service.
Support used to be great when it was Jive support out of Utah. Now that they've offshored support it can be difficult to get a response. Our most common issues are least cost routing, and we run into support pushing back in stead of just figuring out which upstream carrier is having an issue like they used to. We often have to get our account manager involved, who is pretty strong.
The training videos could be more in-depth. This would help our user base so that they can feel impowered to look up information that they need without having to ask our admins every time they have a question about the system. Online training videos are also inferior to an actual person explaining systems.
One big lesson we learned is that training the team well makes a huge difference. It was easier when we started with the fundamental features, such as the way calls are handled. Getting staff involved early helped us set it up the right way. So I would say my experience with implementation was straightforward.
Better than Skype for Business in terms of loading the application onto your device. Skype had crashing issues always and those are comparatively low when using Amazon Chime. Amazon chime is fast and easy to work with while collaborating and setting up meetings. The audio and video quality are better than Skype for Business.
Avaya IP Office was for us a complicated and inflexible on-prem solution. It could be made to do a great many things similar to GoTo, however it was not flexible and scalable in the same way as GoTo, which is to be expected of a cloud solution. In particular, as we aimed to build out a contact center, IP office could not do it in a work-from-anywhere environment, and the softphone provided almost no information to the agent. GoTo solved all of the problems we were encountering with IP office, with the added benefit of not needing continously upgrading licensing - as GoTo is a one-license solution.
Its not readily apparent to me, other than cost, where you would run into any issues with larger scale deployments. When we went live on the product, the Jive team was always willing to do mass updates for us on our extensions, users, etc. in the system, so we didn't have to do too much manual one-by-one updates.
The positive ROI is Amazon Chime helps make our sales reps more professional in their calls leading to an increase in closed/won deals.
Amazon Chime has increased overall morale across our sales team because it has greatly improved our call processes when compared to other tools we've used in the past.
To combine SMS and call answering by one of many individuals and voicemail recordings with voice to text in their emails has allowed us to give substantially better customer service to our customers.
We used to host our own hardware, but since going with GoTo Connect we no longer dread a piece of equipment going bad or keep a full spare in reserve. This has saved us money and our sanity.
