Likelihood to Recommend I think it is well-suited for populations who value social media and being connected in this manner at work. If the population does not value this type of open interaction, it will be underutilized. Many of our baby-boomer generation staff have a hard time seeing the relevancy of a site such as this.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros I think it helps people crowd source an organization for information and resources that may not be easily found. The subjects feature is a great place to develop communities of practice where links, files and communication can be shared. As long as the search engine is optimized / working effectively, it can be a powerful way to access sites and resources across the organization. Read full review Easy to use: The app is very, very easy to use. Literally just create a chat room (input a name) and access it to chat. Call/video quality: I've experienced better call quality on appear.in than in almost all other chat and video conferencing services out there. Read full review Cons The profile finder is glitchy and rarely comes up with solid results. The site sometimes has glitches, such as subject pages not loading and complete content not appearing on the screen until you refresh or give it an abnormal amount of time to load. The "USAID Search" option should appear first for the search results. It is not intuitive that it is the last search option to select. Often users don't even clearly recognize that they need to select types of search results. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability Very easy to use, technical and non-technical colleagues have used it with no instructions needed. That says all about the app and services.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating After a recommendation from a partner, as the system is very easy to use, we simply start. Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Return on Investment I feel that it has connected colleagues who would have never met in our global organization. I has created a division in the organization between the users and those who oppose its existence. It has been a great place for communication-oriented departments to get their messages out, advertise events, etc. Read full review In general, any sort of online collaborations saves a lot on your budget. The meetings are rather more on time and can be efficient and short. Easy to drop-by and have a small talk with clients/teammates within COVID era. The URL makes you look fancy instead of a random hash. Read full review ScreenShots