10 ms·

Just curious - what other product that works better do you recommend? Webex, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Teams all pale in comparison when it comes to quality and eas

Just curious - what other product that works better do you recommend? Webex, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Teams all pale in comparison when it comes to quality and ease-of-use.

jszymborski 6y ago
jitsi works wonderfully. I've also have been using Discord for voice almost daily for a little over a year and it just works 99% of the time. Unfortunately, it suffers from "gamer" branding that makes it awkward suggesting for work. They should try offering a "business skin" that interops with discord.
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  I second Jitsi. For me, the value is in hosting your own Jitsi server. Really not that hard to do. Mind you, I only host it at home on a VM for personal use. Have had sessions with 6 people with one of them a Europe-Australia connection. All fine on default 720p. If I were looking for 20+ meeting software though I'd consider something else. I would consider it a case for streaming to faceless attendees. I have never had a meeting with useful input from more than 10 people.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  It bothers me a bit that such branding/skin influences the situations in which people use good products. I tried to get my friends to switch from Facebook Messenger to Slack, and plenty of them use Slack at work (as do I), and a large amount of pushback was along the lines of "I don't want to feel like I'm working." It's just a means of communicating, people. Maybe a few Discord features aren't useful outside of gaming and a few Slack features aren't useful outside of the workplace. I find that to be a stupid reason not to generalize the use of these products. Skinning (and filtering away those specific features) just might be the ticket.
hellcow 6y ago
Honestly, Meet has had huge updates in the past month or so that make it much better than Zoom. The image quality no longer looks like crap with more than 2 people in the room.
- cocoa19 6y ago
  If I had to decide the official comms app for my employer, I'd be wary of Google, due to their poor track record with comms apps.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    Meet is a GSuite product, and the only video-conferencing app in GSuite. Google doesn't fuck with GSuite.
    - potatoketchup 6y ago
      except AppMaker
      - ericlewis 6y ago
        And all of Gsuite
    - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
      I have to remind this to myself when I see features available for free which are not ported to GSuite (parental control, google assistant for home users, reminders, inbox in the past (it took I think a year to port it)
      - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
        And the reasons it takes time to port those features is because Google respects GSuite's privacy promises.
        BrandoElFollito 6y ago
        What do you mean? How porting, say, Inbox has anything to do with privacy? This is the same codebase.
gtk40 6y ago
BlueJeans and RingCentral might as well be clones of Zoom. Amazon Chime and Microsoft Teams are fine for me too, but I'm not picky.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  After the disastrous experience I had with BlueJeans this morning, I wouldn't include it as a quality or reliability match for Zoom. The company my wife works for can't get a reliable Teams conference going with anyone in France.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Zoom is a really great product. The company lied about their encryption. Both of these statements can be true, it's just a question of trade offs.
- Wheaties466 6y ago
  Ring Central uses Zoom for the backend. I know they just announced their own "Ring central video" But im weary of that for the time being.
  - PeterCorless 6y ago
    *wary
    - Wheaties466 6y ago
      ah, my bad. I just googled and educated myself on the difference.
  - hunter2_ 6y ago
    You say backend, but the frontend also has tons of overlap. The first time I saw RingCentral was after much Zoom experience, and I was thoroughly confused (based on nothing but the frontend) by the similarity until reading up about it. As a one-time invitee rather than a frequent user, RC was absurdly identical to Zoom other than the title bar and icon.
depr 6y ago
More to the point: which of those has true e2e encryption?
- vntok 6y ago
  Can't speak for others but Microsoft Teams & Skype do not have E2E, and neither does Google Hangout/Meet.
- boogies 6y ago
  I don't think any of them do, but more relevant to security none of them has auditable source code. Jitsi Meet (the easiest to use out of the services I've tried, namely Zoom and Google Meet) has experimental E2EE. But if you want real security you probably want something more like GNU Jami, which is not grandma-friendly easy to use and is a native application only.
  - neodymiumphish 6y ago
    The beauty of Jitsi is that you can run the software yourself (especially with the free Google Cloud credit) and then the E2E is hardly relevant because it's still server-to-client encrypted and you own the server...
    - Shared404 6y ago
      My understanding is that Jitsi does actually have E2E at this point, at least in an experimental form. It's in here somewhere: https://jitsi.org/security/ https://jitsi.org/security/
    - hunter2_ 6y ago
      Good point. Are there any use cases for E2E when the server isn't potentially adversarial to any clients? Separately: affordable servers likely are accessible to infrastructure providers (whether a VPS, or bare metal at a colo, etc.) so it's tough to say that "my own server" is usable exclusively by me and therefore not adversarial. Plus, maybe people want to use my server and consider me adversarial for whatever reason; they should use their own server instead, but might not have the skills.
tbdenney 6y ago
For ease of use I recommend Whereby.
tsycho 6y ago
Meet seems to be improving rapidly.
andrepd 6y ago
Jitsi worked fine for me every time.
SamWhited 6y ago
I use Jitsi Meet. It's easier to use, the audio is generally better (although my only evidence for this is anecdotal, I'm taking piano lessons over video chat right now and meet was the only one that provided consistently good audio for my teacher), and it's web interface "Just works" whereas Zooms hates to be launched and tries to make you install the app constantly (although their launcher is so weird it behaves differently for me depending on the day).

Just curious - what other product that works better do you recommend? Webex, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Teams all pale in comparison when it comes to quality and ease-of-use.

jszymborski 6y ago

jitsi works wonderfully. I've also have been using Discord for voice almost daily for a little over a year and it just works 99% of the time. Unfortunately, it suffers from "gamer" branding that makes it awkward suggesting for work. They should try offering a "business skin" that interops with discord.

CarbyAu 6y ago
I second Jitsi. For me, the value is in hosting your own Jitsi server. Really not that hard to do. Mind you, I only host it at home on a VM for personal use. Have had sessions with 6 people with one of them a Europe-Australia connection. All fine on default 720p. If I were looking for 20+ meeting software though I'd consider something else. I would consider it a case for streaming to faceless attendees. I have never had a meeting with useful input from more than 10 people.
hunter2_ 6y ago
It bothers me a bit that such branding/skin influences the situations in which people use good products. I tried to get my friends to switch from Facebook Messenger to Slack, and plenty of them use Slack at work (as do I), and a large amount of pushback was along the lines of "I don't want to feel like I'm working." It's just a means of communicating, people. Maybe a few Discord features aren't useful outside of gaming and a few Slack features aren't useful outside of the workplace. I find that to be a stupid reason not to generalize the use of these products. Skinning (and filtering away those specific features) just might be the ticket.

hellcow 6y ago

Honestly, Meet has had huge updates in the past month or so that make it much better than Zoom. The image quality no longer looks like crap with more than 2 people in the room.

cocoa19 6y ago
If I had to decide the official comms app for my employer, I'd be wary of Google, due to their poor track record with comms apps.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  Meet is a GSuite product, and the only video-conferencing app in GSuite. Google doesn't fuck with GSuite.
  - potatoketchup 6y ago
    except AppMaker
    - ericlewis 6y ago
      And all of Gsuite
  - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
    I have to remind this to myself when I see features available for free which are not ported to GSuite (parental control, google assistant for home users, reminders, inbox in the past (it took I think a year to port it)
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
      And the reasons it takes time to port those features is because Google respects GSuite's privacy promises.
      - BrandoElFollito 6y ago
        What do you mean? How porting, say, Inbox has anything to do with privacy? This is the same codebase.

gtk40 6y ago

BlueJeans and RingCentral might as well be clones of Zoom. Amazon Chime and Microsoft Teams are fine for me too, but I'm not picky.

reaperducer 6y ago
After the disastrous experience I had with BlueJeans this morning, I wouldn't include it as a quality or reliability match for Zoom. The company my wife works for can't get a reliable Teams conference going with anyone in France.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Zoom is a really great product. The company lied about their encryption. Both of these statements can be true, it's just a question of trade offs.
Wheaties466 6y ago
Ring Central uses Zoom for the backend. I know they just announced their own "Ring central video" But im weary of that for the time being.
- PeterCorless 6y ago
  *wary
  - Wheaties466 6y ago
    ah, my bad. I just googled and educated myself on the difference.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  You say backend, but the frontend also has tons of overlap. The first time I saw RingCentral was after much Zoom experience, and I was thoroughly confused (based on nothing but the frontend) by the similarity until reading up about it. As a one-time invitee rather than a frequent user, RC was absurdly identical to Zoom other than the title bar and icon.

depr 6y ago

More to the point: which of those has true e2e encryption?

vntok 6y ago
Can't speak for others but Microsoft Teams & Skype do not have E2E, and neither does Google Hangout/Meet.
boogies 6y ago
I don't think any of them do, but more relevant to security none of them has auditable source code. Jitsi Meet (the easiest to use out of the services I've tried, namely Zoom and Google Meet) has experimental E2EE. But if you want real security you probably want something more like GNU Jami, which is not grandma-friendly easy to use and is a native application only.
- neodymiumphish 6y ago
  The beauty of Jitsi is that you can run the software yourself (especially with the free Google Cloud credit) and then the E2E is hardly relevant because it's still server-to-client encrypted and you own the server...
  - Shared404 6y ago
    My understanding is that Jitsi does actually have E2E at this point, at least in an experimental form. It's in here somewhere: https://jitsi.org/security/ https://jitsi.org/security/
  - hunter2_ 6y ago
    Good point. Are there any use cases for E2E when the server isn't potentially adversarial to any clients? Separately: affordable servers likely are accessible to infrastructure providers (whether a VPS, or bare metal at a colo, etc.) so it's tough to say that "my own server" is usable exclusively by me and therefore not adversarial. Plus, maybe people want to use my server and consider me adversarial for whatever reason; they should use their own server instead, but might not have the skills.

tbdenney 6y ago

For ease of use I recommend Whereby.

tsycho 6y ago

Meet seems to be improving rapidly.

andrepd 6y ago

Jitsi worked fine for me every time.

SamWhited 6y ago

I use Jitsi Meet. It's easier to use, the audio is generally better (although my only evidence for this is anecdotal, I'm taking piano lessons over video chat right now and meet was the only one that provided consistently good audio for my teacher), and it's web interface "Just works" whereas Zooms hates to be launched and tries to make you install the app constantly (although their launcher is so weird it behaves differently for me depending on the day).