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.
$0
per user
Zoom Workplace
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Zoom Workplace, Zoom’s open collaboration platform with an AI Companion, empowers teams to be more productive, and strengthen customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle with Zoom’s Business Services for sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, including Zoom Contact Center.
When compared to the other VC platforms, we found Whereby the easiest to use for users and invitees. The only install from a recipient's point-of-view is a Chrome extension. Zoom requires a download and an account to sign into. Microsoft Teams is only for other members on the …
Whereby is a great tool for individual meetings or among small groups. It's super simple to use and very convenient. But if you need to have meetings with more than 10 people, a tool like Zoom is probably necessary. You'll have more options to control who can share and who can …
Zoom is a good option compared to these other softwares as it is more universally accepted. The advantage of this is that most people use Zoom, making it easier to arrange a call with external stakeholders. Microsoft Teams is often very unreliable, and Zoom seems to work more …
We started testing the tool and quickly changed everything. We chose to use it because it worked very well and with a higher quality than expected. Today we do not think of using another tool because it is meeting all our needs. We managed to keep the team updated and united, …
I have used quite a range of these tools over time. Some work pretty well if all parties are using a laptop with high bandwidth. However, Zoom works extremely well when people are on different devices / media (like some on phone, some on computer). Others services either can't …
Skype for Business has an instant messaging feature with the rest of the organization and is linked with Outlook email, so that's an advantage, but sometimes sharing the meeting invite with others is difficult, because it is linked to the Skype bridge. appear.in was easy to …
I've used Google Meet, appear.in and Skype. In between these, I think Zoom is the most complete tool. But probably the most expensive too for larger use. In the videoconferences that we host, we use Zoom sometimes, other times when we don't need some tools, we use Google Meet. …
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.
Zoom Workplace is especially good for corporate environments or for companies with a large number of employees. This is exponentially more so for companies that have remote workers, as it's one of the leaders in the video conferencing industry. It may not be ideal for smaller companies or startups who could easily get by with cheaper/free messaging apps or text messaging on phones.
I love how easy it is to set the focus on the presenter. It is annoying when people don't spotlight themselves as a presenter, so you get to see the whole gallery of attendees in smaller, two-inch windows.
I like the capability of having break-out rooms. Even though I don't use them very often, it is nice to have them available if the right situation presents itself for smaller group chats.
The recording quality is better than I have experienced with other products (Microsoft Teams, WebEx, etc.), and the fact that it is already an MP4, so I don't have to convert it for publishing on our intranet is huge to me.
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.
Allow a way to group individual people chats - not channels just individual peeps into groups for ease of finding - like how you can group shared calendars into sections in Outlook
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.
We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.
Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.
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.
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.
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.
Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.
If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.
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.
Based on my experience with Teams, I like Zoom's messaging interface much better and Zoom seems to have better video quality. When I was evaluating different VoIP providers, Zoom Phone also had way more features and was much more stable than Teams Phone. I also evaluated Nextiva and did not its UI as much as the Zoom desktop app. Zoom Phone's pricing was also significantly better.
The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.
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.
Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.