Blackboard Collaborate vs Zoom

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it's great for online instruction in groups less than 100. I do not feel it is the best option to support a large group. I have seen issues with the software freezing in large groups of 500+.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Other

E-Learning Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Great use case: If you hold multiple meetings (5+) every week with people that you can’t easily meet in person (e.g. if you do a lot of business over the phone), Zoom is worth the price.

Great use case: If you regularly do presentations (slide decks, videos, pitches) over the phone or video call, Zoom makes this process very simple (screen-sharing, whiteboarding, chatting).

Great use case: If you expect people to either call in or join by a computer in the same meeting, Zoom makes it really easy to combine people joining by phone and computer.

Bad use case: If you only do a few phone or video calls a week, you’d probably be okay with a free solution like Google Hangouts (not worth paying for the additional Zoom features).

Bad use case: If you have to share lots of files back and forth throughout a meeting, I prefer using a third-party solution WHILE I’m on the Zoom call (i.e. I will share files via Slack or email while I’m on Zoom, rather than use Zoom’s file share feature).

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Andrew Pagels

Partner, Capital Strategy

Investable LLCCapital Markets, 11-50 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Blackboard Collaborate

7.1

Zoom

8.6

High quality audio

7.1

8.9

High quality video

6.9

9.1

Low bandwidth requirements

5.8

8.0

Mobile support

8.4

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Blackboard Collaborate

7.6

Zoom

8.9

Desktop sharing

7.1

9.2

Whiteboards

8.1

8.5

Blackboard Collaborate

8.7

Zoom

8.5

Calendar integration

9.9

8.7

Meeting initiation

8.1

8.6

Integrates with social media

8.2

7.5

Record meetings / events

8.5

8.8

Slideshows

8.7

Blackboard Collaborate

8.9

Zoom

8.5

Live chat

8.9

8.6

Audience polling

9.1

8.4

Q&A

8.8

8.4

Blackboard Collaborate

7.9

Zoom

8.6

User authentication

6.6

8.6

Participant roles & permissions

8.8

8.6

Confidential attendee list

8.4

8.6

Pros

Enables teachers to upload PowerPoint presentations and display them for the class
Allows multiple people to be present at one time
Has adequate tools for teachers to be able to engage class in interaction (polling, raising hand, allowing microphone and video camera sharing)

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Verified User

Team Lead in Other

E-Learning Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Video calling - No buffering, automatic adjustment, and very rarely does anyone have to say "can you hear me now?"
Audio calling - Perfect and recorded for future review
Conference calls - Easy to bring in 10+ parties without any loss in quality
Screen sharing - Easy to use, get to choose what window or monitor to share
Scheduling - Easy to schedule an event and export to calendar then invite guests

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Matthew Gardner

Co-Founder/Product

RouteThisComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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Cons

Blackboard Collaborate frequently causes us to see "Exception errors"
Students and teachers regularly get "kicked out" of the online classroom/lose connectivity
PowerPoints are static. Does not support animations unless using another program to upload.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Other

E-Learning Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Whiteboarding would be a great functionality for remote teams.
If zoom could be similar to a beam type deal, putting us on robots for remote teams. That would be sick.
picture clarity can sometimes be dull if the picture quality could be better that would be wonderful!
Set the screen share size to the real screen size so that users don't get confused. Also, turn the video off to start out, make people change it for themselves.

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Nicole Nagy

Assistant User Experience Researcher

CareerBuilderInternet, 1001-5000 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Blackboard Collaborate 9.0

Based on 1 answer

It is a tool that faculty likes to use. It has so much flexibility to allow students to see a class even if they happen to not be available in the classroom.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 201-500 employees

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Zoom 9.0

Based on 9 answers

It is part of our processes and it is company-wide loved.

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Nicolas Costa Ossa

Director of Marketing & Sales

KoombeaInternet, 51-200 employees

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Usability

Blackboard Collaborate 8.9

Based on 3 answers

Collaborate is a easy to use, easy to learn, and a well supported product. It is not overly complex yet it is quite feature rich. I think that most users (both instructors and students) should find it easy to use without much outside help.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 201-500 employees

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Zoom 8.9

Based on 9 answers

Zoom has been by far the easiest web conference tool for our internal employees and for our customers to use. Customers who've never used it find it extremely intuitive, and they've all loved Zoom! By clicking the Zoom link, you're automatically launched into the session after the Zoom app installs. There's no confusion in joining or leaving sessions, sharing/unsharing your screen, etc.!

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Michael Kim

Usability Research Recruiter

UserTestingInternet, 201-500 employees

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Reliability and Availability

Blackboard Collaborate 8.0

Based on 1 answer

The availability of the software is quite impressive. You can access it at any time that you want and from anywhere that you want, but that depends on how the software is set up by the University. There might be sudden outages due to not having enough space on your database, which we had that very issue happen recently here at our University. During that time, you could not access their blackboard at all until it was brought up online again.

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Verified User

Former Employee in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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Zoom 10.0

Based on 1 answer

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.

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Stefan Scherbik

Associate, Video and Collaboration

BAYADA Home Health CareHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees

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Performance

Blackboard Collaborate 9.0

Based on 1 answer

The performance of the software is remarkable. The loading speed of the pages is more than satisfying, it all depends on the users internet package. So far, there wasn't any issue of Blackboard slowing down other software or systems when integrated with them

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Verified User

Former Employee in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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Zoom 10.0

Based on 1 answer

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.

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Stefan Scherbik

Associate, Video and Collaboration

BAYADA Home Health CareHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees

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Support

Blackboard Collaborate 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Blackboard support is quite knowledgeable and quick to respond to requests.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 201-500 employees

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Zoom 8.4

Based on 8 answers

Anytime I had an issue I was able to find a solution to resolve it. Their online documents are easy to follow and use.

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Rachel Hudish

Instructional Designer

Independent contractorHigher Education, 1-10 employees

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Implementation

No score

No answers yet

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Zoom 8.9

Based on 4 answers

I was not involved in the implementation as those decisions were made before I joined the organization.

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Rachel Hudish

Instructional Designer

Independent contractorHigher Education, 1-10 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Blackboard is just the most widely known software. All of them have issues and glitches, but Blackboard is well supported.

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Verified User

Team Lead in Other

E-Learning Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Zoom is SO much better than the other web conference options out there. We selected Zoom because we tested it, and all of our employees absolutely loved it. It was so easy to convince our IT Team to switch over to Zoom. It meant fewer issues for them to fix

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Michael Kim

Usability Research Recruiter

UserTestingInternet, 201-500 employees

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Scalability

Blackboard Collaborate 8.0

Based on 1 answer

The reason for this rating is that the software is a pretty good tool that can be utilized for use in all of the Universities around the world. It has the capability to fulfill the needs of various different education systems. Although, there are slight improvements that are needed, therefore the rating is at 8.

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Verified User

Former Employee in Information Technology

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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Zoom 10.0

Based on 1 answer

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.

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Stefan Scherbik

Associate, Video and Collaboration

BAYADA Home Health CareHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees

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Return on Investment

Collaborate is not an inexpensive tool. However, integration into the Blackboard environment is excellent. If you are already a Blackboard school it is easier to integrate and use than other solutions. So, you may save money and time on learning a totally new environment and you will be more familiar with getting support from Blackboard. As a side note, Blackboard provides really good training documentation for Collaborate.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 201-500 employees

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We were able to standardize zoom as our only call/video conference tool. Before zoom everyone had a personal favorite. With Zoom nobody argues anymore about which one is better. This is the one.
We do video calls every single day with existing clients. Before Zoom this was a huge pain for us and it affected the delivery of our service. Zoom today is preponderant to the quality of our service.
Zoom has always given good impression to our clients (to the ones that didn't know it before). Because of Zoom, we have managed to actually remove the pain of conference call with clients. "I can't hear you" "is breaking up" "I can't connect" ... those are things I haven't heard in a while.

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Nicolas Costa Ossa

Director of Marketing & Sales

KoombeaInternet, 51-200 employees

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Likelihood to Recommend