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
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Whereby
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
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.
I don't know that it is an apples-to-apples comparison because in most other cases I used these platforms alongside Whereby. The best direct comparison would be Google Hangouts. With Whereby, I think the video and audio are superior, the UX is superior, and it's just a better …
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.
If you cannot use another more common solution on the market or are looking for an alternative to the known solutions, it is a great alternative. If you have other tools already, and just want to test [them], that's fine, but I think the better-known ones have a better chance of using, knowing, and the learning curve will be shorter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 find Zoom more complicated to use and harder to use because a lot of people do not like having to download things to their computers or devices and Whereby is so easy to get connected with . I like that Zoom offers larger rooms, but at this point the cost is not worth the extra expense.
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.