Hangouts! Review
December 14, 2018
Hangouts! Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Hangouts
Since three years ago when my company decided to change the online-based chatting service from Skype to Google Hangouts, it's been the best chatting service we use within our company. Google Hangouts is being used by various departments within my company from chatting with my internal employees, meetings, and clients calls. I personally use it to get in touch with my department, by just selecting the person I want to chat with and instantly I am connected with the person. The calls are crystal clear, and there is no lag in connection with Google Hangouts. The main business problem that I get solved with Google Hangouts is the ability to solve any issues that come up with our application, I can quickly call any developer and instantly do a screen share to show the problems that need to be addressed with our application. Google Hangouts makes it easy to use and communicate since we have G-suite and our company email exchange is Gmail, so it all syncs very well. I would recommend Google Hangouts to anyone who is looking into web-based communication software.
- It's FREE: Google Hangouts is free to use and comes with your Gmail account through G-Suite.
- Quick, fast, and reliable: Google Hangouts is very fast when connecting to a call, there has never been a call dropped with Google Hangouts. Installation is a breeze, there are no requirements needed to use Google Hangouts. But I will say you may need to install a plugin to use Google Hangouts - if you are not using Chrome browser, other browsers will require you to install a plugin that is needed to utilize Google Hangouts.
- Contacts: Google Hangouts uses your existing contacts stored in your Google account, so it is easy to quick-chat or call the person if the other person has a Google account.
- Instant Messaging and HD Video calls: quick message and call is great with Google Hangouts.
- Group conference calls or meetings: Google Hangouts makes it easy to invite a group of people in the call and start the meeting, messaging, and screen sharing.
- Updates: Google Hangouts has not been updated in ages and the UI for Google Hangouts is horrible. It's 2019 almost and they would think to make it a priority to update. Sometimes it's confusing to see who's online and offline.
- Positive Impact: Google Hangouts gives us the ability to solve our application issues faster by getting in touch via VOIP call with the developers and addressing issues quickly.
- Positive Impact: Google Hangouts is free, our company has a subscription plan with G-Suite that includes Google Hangouts for no additional cost, and contacts are synced automatically.
- Positive Impact: Google Hangouts does not take up huge space in our employees' company-issued laptops, so i'ts fast and there are no issues reported with using Google Hangouts.
- Negative Impact: With Google Hangouts not being updated as often as you think it would, looking at the same UI for very long time without new changes can become boring to use.
Google Hangouts is free, fast, reliable and easy to use, the reason why Google Hangouts has a huge benefit against other competitors is that it's free and all the contacts within Google account are synced automatically. Google Hangouts has HD video calls and connections are super fast whenever we need to get in touch directly to a person in contacts. I can use Google Hangouts on my mobile phone, not saying that other software products mentioned above do not have an app, but with Google Hangouts the app UI is much more fluent and icons and contacts are easier to read. Google Hangouts screen sharing and screen recording is great, options are available to save the screen share or even quickly upload images, docs, and files via cloud service such as Google Drive. Moreover, with Google Hangouts you can add up to 100 people in a conference call while other products are limited to 50 or so. Also, Google Hangouts has no ads within the application while other competitors do, so more tasks at hand can be accomplished much faster without any interruptions from ads.