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
Whereby
Score 8.6 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
