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
Sococo
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Sococo is a remote collaboration tool with integrations with third-party applications such as Google Docs, Atlassian JIRA, and Box.
$14.99
per month per seat
Pricing
Amazon Chime
Sococo
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
Sococo
$14.99 or $13.99 if paid annually
per month per seat
Sococo Unlimited
$24.99
per month per seat
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Chime
Sococo
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
*up to $15.00 per user per month
Sococo pricing plan includes a 10 seat minimum and 500 minutes per seat per month. Additional minutes price at $5 per 1,000 minutes. Sococo unlimited include a 100 seat minimum with unlimited minutes per seat per user.
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.
We tried Sococo as means of gamifying a natively remote office. It does the job but the tool suffers from a lack of integrations. You will run out of free minutes very quickly and the additional charges are too high to make business sense.
Visual layout - the virtual office visible was very helpful because it made the organization feel closer and as a whole, much more connected. Further, you can group departments in your layout, so it gave a good visual understanding of who was part of each 'department/team.'
Sound - the sound quality was good overall in meetings, and I liked the realistic sounds for opening and closing an office, etc. It allowed for a real office feel, and this is especially important since a lot of companies offer the option to work from home now - this removes the 'disconnect' that usually exists when working from home.
Communication options - it allowed for multiple ways to communicate and places to communicate - i.e., in the auditorium, lunchroom, conference room, or a smaller room. Very realistic and a variety in that sense.
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.
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.
Sococo didn't seem to have a strong support line. In comparison to other products, such as Microsoft Teams, it did not regularly check in with us. There should be opportunities to give feedback on the quality of the program periodically and if we had any issues. Sometimes, Sococo would crash, and we would 'restart it' but not know why it happened.
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.
I prefer Sococo over Lync/Skype for a few reasons. I feel the user interface is slicker, better voice clarity, easier to hop between calls. And, all call members can go to a common chat room on their own accord instead of one person trying to invite everybody. I also feel that it's easier to share one's screen and swap between different shared screens with Sococo.
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.
Morning meetings are much simpler with sococo than without. Small powwows with coworkers to work out little bugs are also a lot more enticing since setup is essentially nonexistent.
It might be argued that the cost of sococo isn't worth the benefits of simplicity and ease of use.
