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
MaestroConference
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
MaestroConference is a web conferencing platform with the capability to run small break-out sessions within the main group. It incorporates voting and social capabilities.
$49
per month
Pricing
GoTo Connect
MaestroConference
Editions & Modules
Basic
Starting at $27
per month per user
Standard
Starting at $32
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GoTo Connect
MaestroConference
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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.
Go-To softphones have made my life as an IT manager significantly easier. Being able to take calls and listen to my voicemails on both my computer and mobile phone has been a game-changer. I also cannot recommend the "drag-and-drop" dial plan management system enough. It makes the entire process as easy as programming in Visual Basic and allows you to see exactly what is happening when someone dials into a line.
This is best suited for webinars where you want increase participant engagement. Maestroconference has helped us avoid the type of webinar where the presenter has no idea if people are listening and participants often lose interest and end up checking email. The interaction level can become extremely high leading to increased engagement, satisfaction and buy-in.
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
The number one strength of Maestro Conference is the ability for the host to create "break out" groups where members of the call can interact with each other in smaller groups as if they were in an in-person conference.
Another quality of Maestro Conference that I love is the fact that the host can then "weave in and out" of the different break out groups, listening in, providing support and getting feedback. It's an incredibly tool that Maestro offers.
Lastly I think Maestro Conference has excellent customer service.
The call sound quality was often pretty poor, and we had a lot of trouble with calls being dropped. Over the years I would periodically throw in the towel and go back to Free Conferencing just to have reliable quality. But they only have 3 of 4 breakout rooms and I couldn't conduct the rooms easily. Then I try MC again to see if the engineering had improved. It was like a wave. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
The conductor interface has an annoying glitch wherein we could not change a persons attribute fields on the fly. I would interview my callers and assign them to one class or another based on their answers, and the partner up people into breakout rooms based on their answers. This meant editing the two attribute fields , and it just plain didn't work 75% of the time.
Maestro Conference repositioned its business away from small educators like me, to large organizations like political action committees. The price became too high for me, and it just no longer made sense. I repositioned my product to work with less expensive and less complicated solutions.
The add on features, like recording each conference room, were insanely expensive.
VOIP and MC didn't mix. The MC dialer never worked. Neither did Skype. This meant that my international callers were out of luck. This was FRUSTRATING to say the least. Now I just use Skype. A picture is worth a thousand words.
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
we have found no other company with the technology that allows us to conduct webinars with this level of interactivity. We've also been watching as the company has added on addtional functionality and are very please with how it is developing.
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.
One of the MOST challenging things in tech support is that some of the offshore agents "don't speak Texan/English", and are really hard to understand. GoTo Connect's support is usually someone who is VERY easy to understand their US/English, and are very helpful. In dozens of interactions for our business & our clients, we've only had a few tickets that couldn't be resolved on the first call
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.
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.
Maestro Conference is the only service I know that allows you to create break out groups and allow participants to actively engage with each other and with the host. It is the most like an "in-person" event of any service I have used. And the customer service has always been excellent
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.
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.
When the monthly call with breakout rooms was working well I had a lot of good conversion. When it was not, because of sound quality of dropped calls, I was giving people a poor experience. Since I was using MC as the centerpiece of my TRIAL calls, it was a two edged sword.
