12 ms·

Offer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with

Offer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts/WebEx/GotoMeeting because their company bans Zoom, it's a recipe for a fruitless meeting. Someone will fumble the sharing controls; screens will take forever to present; at least one person's microphone will become inaudible, static-y, or suffer from "robot voice slow-down" lag. To say nothing of the clusterf*ck that happens when two company-specific instances of Microsoft Teams try to communicate with each other and I'm left with a bunch of orphaned chatrooms with outside personnel after the meeting concludes.

IncRnd 5y ago
I think Teams has every bug known to computers. Though, I've found GotoMeeting to work extremely well, and WebEx has been very decent but much better than Teams.
- rjsw 5y ago
  Teams manages to reboot Macintosh M1 machines after a few minutes in a call.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    Given my experience as a sad participant in Teams meetings, I'll go on a limb and say Teams is probably running an electron shell implemented in x86 code calling a 64bit shim layer inside an ARM hosted VM.
  - el-salvador 5y ago
    I'm not surprised. It can runs super slow on my computer with plenty of RAM and lots of CPU.
wsinks 5y ago
Dang, Webex is still that bad for you? Is it because you're using company's instances where it's more locked down and they're on older code? I know it's not perfect, but it's pretty reliable for me (and full disclosure, I work for a different subsidiary of Cisco - but I also try to be pretty critical of it since I'm close to it) I don't use Zoom a ton, but I've experienced what feels like a similar amount of sluggishness and AV issues as I have on Webex. At this point I know I'm a bit too close to have a useful anecdote, I'm just surprised that Webex is still put in the same group as Teams / Hangouts / GTM. Again, not trying to sway you, just understand a bit better.
- oritron 5y ago
  I found Webex to be quite a lot worse than Zoom in my limited experience. I attended a few IEEE presentations hosted on the platform. Audio didn't connect smoothly and needed a few restarts. The talk was constantly interrupted by a chiming noise whenever a person joined or left the meeting. I remember finding a configuration setting for this but the hosts didn't see my message (another bad feature), as this was a meeting-wide setting rather than a client one. Even if it were configurable per-user, that chime turned on is an unexpected and intrusive default setting. Beyond that, I couldn't see the presented content in full-screen. There was a lot of junk in the form of perpetual UI elements for the "fullscreen mode". These seemed like pretty fundamental misses for the platform to make.
  - echlebek 5y ago
    I attended a webex earlier this year and I found the experience was far better than Zoom. The audio and video quality was better, and also the presentation controls were much more sophisticated.
  - illiac786 5y ago
    this entry beep is a typical example of security vs. usability. The entry beep is meant for everyone to know if someone joined, even if they have joined using a phone only. It is also configurable. I think it was a huge mistake from cisco to make it a default though, the security benefit is too small. In the latest version is is now automatically disabled after 25 participants I believe, so they heard the feedback (took their time though).
blululu 5y ago
As someone who runs Zoom via the browser (they do deploy a dark pattern to discourage this behavior but there is no good reason to trust them) I find that Hangouts and Teams are both solid alternatives in terms of AV quality. Would be happy to see some actual data on this claim. People prefer the interface they are used to. I personally find Zoom to be really frustrating from an interface angle but that is probably just familiarity. Of course Zoom could have avoided such issues had they been more conscious of ethics.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
  That dark pattern drives me crazy. I use Zoom on Linux and prefer to use it in browser and I still almost always miss the link after having done it several times.
  - lisper 5y ago
    That must be a very dark pattern. I didn't even know it was possible to run Zoom in a browser, and even now that I know I can't figure out how to do it. What's the secret?
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      You need to click download zoom on the meeting launch and give it a second, it will show a “having trouble?” message and let you open in a browser.
      - lisper 5y ago
        Wow, that is evil. Thanks!
      - kijiki 5y ago
        I haven't tried it lately, but last time I tried it around a year ago, if you try to use the web client and the moderator hasn't shown up yet, you have to solve a Google ReCaptcha every couple of minutes while you're waiting, or it kicks you out. I usually try to go with the charitable interpretation, but when the dark patterns start to stack up that high...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
reedlaw 5y ago
Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/)
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  Yup. We use this for every meeting at my local hackerspace and it's been great. Bonus: it tells you when connectivity issues are on your end or someone else's end, everyone's network stats are visible.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  Easy to self-host and probably less expensive to host than all the MS Office licenses used for MS Teams or paid Zoom licenses. I set up Jitsi Meet months ago and all I ever had to do was to add user accounts using prosody on the server (which should be improved imo). I've not needed to touch anything since first setup, except for user accounts. It just works. What's more is, that some solutions like MS Teams still is not able to properly work on all browsers. While Discord has solved this problem for ages and Jitsi Meet simply works in all modern browsers. I have a hunch, that with MS Teams there is active unwillingness to make it work properly. How else can this be explained?
  - da_chicken 5y ago
    > I have a hunch, that with MS Teams there is active unwillingness to make it work properly. How else can this be explained? As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      There's an update to that saying: Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity, unless it's Microsoft. Then it's definitely malice.
- rad_gruchalski 5y ago
  Used it once, host shared the screen, never seen anything what they have shared.
baja_blast 5y ago
As someone how uses both Zoom and Google Hangouts, there is nothing Zoom offers that Google hangouts does not provide. The quality is the same for both, but at least Hangouts does not install a sketchy client on my machine that constantly runs in the background.
- whoomp12342 5y ago
  you can disable said client on startup...
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  Google hangouts is garbage. I have never had a hangout call that didn’t freeze or have someone dropout. The audio on hangouts is beyond bad and makes people sound completely different than they do in person. The video quality is always grainy on my fiber connection. Zoom doesn’t have these problems for me.
  - el-salvador 5y ago
    Same issue here. If the link is too slow screen shares become grainy and text is hard to read. While Zoom usually only slows the frame rate, but not the resolution.
  - remus 5y ago
    I find it interesting that people have such different experiences with the same tool. I tend to have 2 or 3 hangouts meetings a day and I can't remember the last time there was an issue.
    - vosper 5y ago
      Likewise - we switched from Gotomeeting to Google Meet (which is the same as hangouts, right?) mostly because the experience for staff in Latin America was so much better. That said, Gotomeeting is the worst of the bunch. They haven't added a useful feature in years, the CPU usage is terrible, their parasitic launcher is very difficult to get rid of, ugh... I'm surprised they're still around.
jeffbee 5y ago
Hangouts would surely have the same problem since I doubt Google can rule out the possibility that your video streams are being relayed through frontend servers outside the EU. The only way you could really control it is to use the old school approach to video conferencing: legacy standards like SIP or h.323 with all of the usability problems that implies, or WebRTC with your own STUN/TURN services ... and all of the usability problems that implies.
croes 5y ago
It's not their job to name alternatives, it's their job if a tool complies to the laws.
- geofft 5y ago
  Technically yes, but practically, if someone can't get their job done without breaking rules, they're going to break the rules. If your goal is actual compliance with rules, giving people a way to comply is much more effective.
  - croes 5y ago
    Tell that the software companies. You can't demand to change the maw just because software companies want to illegaly collect data from their users. Why are people always complaining about data protection officers but not the shitty software companies. They have the tracking and the bugs which endanger their users and most of the time they won't even get punished.
    - illiac786 5y ago
      100% agree. Data privacy _is_ doable. Yes, it's added complexity, but software companies make it out to be much worse than what it actually is — and people believe them. These large software companies just don't want the inherent risk associated with saying "I comply with data privacy law XYZ" – because if they actually don't because they missed something, they will be sued for a lot of money. It's just about money, nothing new.
godot 5y ago
Although I mainly use zoom for work, I've also used Google Meet occasionally and have found the quality to be on par with Zoom. I notice you mentioned Google Hangouts instead of Google Meet, I'm not sure if they are the same now (too hard to keep track of these) but a brief google search seems to suggest they are not the same. If so, my past experience with Google Hangouts with friends would suggest it is indeed terrible. If so, you could give Google Meet a try.
el-salvador 5y ago
I have to do many online meetings, with attendants from developing countries (like mine) or unstable links. From our experience it seemsthat Zoom tolerates our unstable internet links better. I guess it has better error correction. There's also the annotate feature is super useful, which is missing in Teams and Webex. And also offers dial-in phone numbers in more countries then the rest. Zoom's audio design is nicer too, compared to Webex has some very annoying beeps that are a pain in large meetings. Regarding Teams, I have a computer with plenty of RAM, SSD disks and a high end work provided smartphone. Teams is super slow in both of them. I haven't been able to use the Exe version for weeks now because it's too slow. There is also no way to quote a chat using the Windows and Web version, so in order to quote chats I have to do it from my phone. Every once in a while I have buggy Teams or Webex meeting, that ends with a "Hey you know, I'll just send you a Zoom link".
duxup 5y ago
>Offer a comparable alternative, then. Maybe I am not doing a lot of meetings compared to others but I really haven't had more or less problems with Teams, Google products, or GoToMeeting (haven't used webex in a long time) ... compared to Zoom. It's all a wash for me among those experience wise. I constantly have various orgs tell me all about how they only use X video conferencing app because of Y experience. Most of those stories conflict ;)
- ghaff 5y ago
  I'm in meetings typically 2+ hours a day. I'm on a decent but not great Internet connection. My experience is they all mostly work but none are guaranteed to have a video/audio glitch free call.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - duxup 5y ago
    Same. I think a lot of people's experience with them is just happenstance.
iso1210 5y ago
Webex is so shockingly bad. Zoom, Teams, Slack, all seem to work fairly well, all have clients (and can run in the browser) Webex - which I have to use as part of a university course I'm doing on the side - requires you to run it in a browser on my OS, it has really awful options (like allowing the presenter to unmute people), half the claimed features just aren't available (virtual whiteboard, no major loss as everyone uses a shared google doc instead), and if you disconnect for some reason (like sound stops working which happens fairly frequently) you are kicked out of a group and you can't get back in.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  Must be your specific webex/connection settings/version then, we have it in our massive banking corps (90k+employees worldwide) and none of the things you describe are an issue. We have adopted it some 7 years ago. You don't need to run it in browser at all, there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with it. Now it is still a crappy system, but for different reasons than you describe. And other solutions have their own problems, as indicated by article and elsewhere.
  - silurian 5y ago
    > there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with Now you sound as if you are not familiar with it. Looks like Webex added Linux(Deb & RHEL) on May 28, 2021. Before that, you had to use their legacy java applcation which also necessitated you to *manually* figure out, then hunt down & install the missing dependencies. And it was still shit.
  - hobofan 5y ago
    The 1000 slightly different versions of Webex that are all bundeled under the same brand are its biggest drawback. My university uses it as well, and the normal latest version of Webex is on par with Zoom. However for some courses the lecutrers use e.g. Webex Training which is barely usable garbage (but is the only version that has built-in quiz features).
KronisLV 5y ago
> Offer a comparable alternative, then Here's a few: - https://meet.jit.si/ which you can also self host https://github.com/jitsi - https://bigbluebutton.org/ which you can also self host https://github.com/bigbluebutton I've found that they're especially useful, when integrated with Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ which you can also self host https://github.com/RocketChat https://github.com/RocketChat That way you have an experience that's a lot like Slack/Teams, with pretty good support for chat, reactions, file uploads, discussions, making quotes etc., while also being able to start video/audio calls with the press of a single button. Of course, if that's too many platforms, Rocket.Chat also supports WebRTC, albeit the UX was a bit less stellar when i last tried it. Alternatively, there is also Nextcloud Talk, which can integrate with your instance of Nextcloud and allow for file sharing, chatting etc., though personally i found Rocket.Chat to be more usable: https://nextcloud.com/talk/ https://nextcloud.com/talk/ Regardless, those are some very competent options which allow all the data to remain on your own servers.
- cpncrunch 5y ago
  Yes, there are many self-hosted options out there. https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway works well for multi-party video with up to about 15 users in a room assuming everyone has a reasonably reliable connection.
  - foresto 5y ago
    Janus caught my attention when I was looking at WebRTC servers (SFUs) last year, but I couldn't find any good FOSS web apps for it. Do any exist?
    - cpncrunch 5y ago
      It is a complete video conferencing package by itself, so you generally don't need anything else. It just works out of the box to give you multi-party video conferencing across multiple rooms. We use it in our (closed source) online tutoring / whiteboard software, and it is pretty easy to integrate, by taking their videoroom sample code. What is it you're looking for?
badLiveware 5y ago
I believe that the government in Hamburg and the Bundeswehr are implementing(or has already) element and matrix. https://element.io/pro/federation-collaboration https://element.io/pro/federation-collaboration
- hef19898 5y ago
  The latter organisation is not necessarily a benchmark in IT, or organisation in general.
  - illiac786 5y ago
    name one army which is. (Bundeswher is the german army)
choeger 5y ago
Do you ask for a comparable alternative when a road gets closed or slowed down? Or when a particular, well working, herbicide gets banned? Or when carrying guns openly gets banned? Did you ask for a comparable alternative to leaded fuel?
bwship 5y ago
I never have issues with Hangouts. I think Zoom is a slightly better experience, but just making a Calendar invite in Google Calendar, and it automatically having the Hangout meeting is pretty nice. [Edit] Google Meet
jeppester 5y ago
I've seen this argument used many times against GDPR regulations. Who are obligated to provide an alternative? And why? It's not like the police is obligated to give drug abusers something in return for the drugs that they are confiscating.
dcow 5y ago
Tandem is still new and has bugs but it’s never been a meeting killer. It doesn’t really have a guest access feature yet, though (at least to my knowledge).
comeonseriously 5y ago
I hate Teams because of other issues[0], but the video and screen sharing are really good. [0] It will occasionally leave artifacts on the screen if I put my laptop to sleep and wake it up. Just an empty rectangle in the notification area. I had to write a powershell script to cycle teams. And that's just one of the annoyances.
tehnub 5y ago
When my company first started using Zoom, people were fumbling the controls constantly. In fact, people still do ("Can you see my screen?"), and no one knows what "Optimize for video clip" even means. I don't think those other platforms are inherently worse, we're just slightly more familiar with Zoom.
Rd6n6 5y ago
I use whereby and it’s always been without issue. They used to have a very good privacy policy too, but since they updated it I can’t make sense out of it
fukmbas 5y ago
Teams is superior to Zoom... I don't understand why anyone uses Zoom, it's trash and compromised
geraneum 5y ago
Other big services sometimes solve this problem by creating a data center in EU for European customers (DataDog, 1password, etc.). I don’t know how feasible could that be in Zoom’s case technically, but if they see a threat of losing customers because of GDPR they might dedicate such resources.
azalemeth 5y ago
I very much agree with this. Zoom may be terrible from a security point of view; I dislike the fact that I may well have installed spyware on my machines; and I have absolutely no idea why in the nine hells the Android version complains that my phone is rooted (it should exist in a chroot!) but --- despite all of that --- it works. Teams, in particular comparison, is like DIY dentistry with kitchen implements as surgical tools. It lags; it doesn't have a native client on any devices and turns them all into heaters; its codecs are nowhere near as good, and it can't display as many people on screen at one point in time -- and there's no private chat. I understand on one level why most organisations seem to want to force their staff to use Teams – it's "free" (if you already pay the microsoft tax) and comes with the corporation (±NSA) being the spying overlord, rather than "E2EE" (+China). However, I completely also understand why most users prefer Zoom. Frankly, I do too!
ubermonkey 5y ago
I've been a heavy user of GoToMeeting for over a decade. It works very, very well for us, and our use case is entirely multi-org meetings. If someone has shitty home internet (a COVID-era problem), then they should probably dial in separately and not use the meeting audio, but that's going to hurt you no matter what meeting tool you use.
e40 5y ago
Yeah, it's amazing to me the hate people have for Zoom. I feel about Zoom like Garp felt about the plane that hit the house he was looking at buying. When the real estate agent said he wouldn't want to buy it now, he said The odds of another plane hitting this house are astronomical! and bought the house. I think it's unlikely Zoom will jeopardize their leadership by not taking security and privacy seriously.
- illiac786 5y ago
  two wrong assumptions: * not taking security seriously can jeopardize their leadership (they're the de facto standard and no one cares about security as seen in these comments) * Zoom is already taking security seriously - I seriously doubt it with all development being in China.
sharken 5y ago
Have not experienced this myself, but it could be due to poor network connectivity. What i find annoying about Teams, is the ability to use 100% CPU and 90% of the integrated graphics on a laptop. Thankfully disabling GPU hardware acceleration have helped quite a lot.
illiac786 5y ago
- "You can't marry your sibling." - "Offer a comparable alternative then" See the problem with this approach?

IncRnd 5y ago

I think Teams has every bug known to computers. Though, I've found GotoMeeting to work extremely well, and WebEx has been very decent but much better than Teams.

rjsw 5y ago
Teams manages to reboot Macintosh M1 machines after a few minutes in a call.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  Given my experience as a sad participant in Teams meetings, I'll go on a limb and say Teams is probably running an electron shell implemented in x86 code calling a 64bit shim layer inside an ARM hosted VM.
- el-salvador 5y ago
  I'm not surprised. It can runs super slow on my computer with plenty of RAM and lots of CPU.

wsinks 5y ago

Dang, Webex is still that bad for you? Is it because you're using company's instances where it's more locked down and they're on older code? I know it's not perfect, but it's pretty reliable for me (and full disclosure, I work for a different subsidiary of Cisco - but I also try to be pretty critical of it since I'm close to it) I don't use Zoom a ton, but I've experienced what feels like a similar amount of sluggishness and AV issues as I have on Webex. At this point I know I'm a bit too close to have a useful anecdote, I'm just surprised that Webex is still put in the same group as Teams / Hangouts / GTM. Again, not trying to sway you, just understand a bit better.

oritron 5y ago
I found Webex to be quite a lot worse than Zoom in my limited experience. I attended a few IEEE presentations hosted on the platform. Audio didn't connect smoothly and needed a few restarts. The talk was constantly interrupted by a chiming noise whenever a person joined or left the meeting. I remember finding a configuration setting for this but the hosts didn't see my message (another bad feature), as this was a meeting-wide setting rather than a client one. Even if it were configurable per-user, that chime turned on is an unexpected and intrusive default setting. Beyond that, I couldn't see the presented content in full-screen. There was a lot of junk in the form of perpetual UI elements for the "fullscreen mode". These seemed like pretty fundamental misses for the platform to make.
- echlebek 5y ago
  I attended a webex earlier this year and I found the experience was far better than Zoom. The audio and video quality was better, and also the presentation controls were much more sophisticated.
- illiac786 5y ago
  this entry beep is a typical example of security vs. usability. The entry beep is meant for everyone to know if someone joined, even if they have joined using a phone only. It is also configurable. I think it was a huge mistake from cisco to make it a default though, the security benefit is too small. In the latest version is is now automatically disabled after 25 participants I believe, so they heard the feedback (took their time though).

blululu 5y ago

As someone who runs Zoom via the browser (they do deploy a dark pattern to discourage this behavior but there is no good reason to trust them) I find that Hangouts and Teams are both solid alternatives in terms of AV quality. Would be happy to see some actual data on this claim. People prefer the interface they are used to. I personally find Zoom to be really frustrating from an interface angle but that is probably just familiarity. Of course Zoom could have avoided such issues had they been more conscious of ethics.

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
That dark pattern drives me crazy. I use Zoom on Linux and prefer to use it in browser and I still almost always miss the link after having done it several times.
- lisper 5y ago
  That must be a very dark pattern. I didn't even know it was possible to run Zoom in a browser, and even now that I know I can't figure out how to do it. What's the secret?
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    You need to click download zoom on the meeting launch and give it a second, it will show a “having trouble?” message and let you open in a browser.
    - lisper 5y ago
      Wow, that is evil. Thanks!
    - kijiki 5y ago
      I haven't tried it lately, but last time I tried it around a year ago, if you try to use the web client and the moderator hasn't shown up yet, you have to solve a Google ReCaptcha every couple of minutes while you're waiting, or it kicks you out. I usually try to go with the charitable interpretation, but when the dark patterns start to stack up that high...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

reedlaw 5y ago

Jitsi Meet (https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/)

ryukafalz 5y ago
Yup. We use this for every meeting at my local hackerspace and it's been great. Bonus: it tells you when connectivity issues are on your end or someone else's end, everyone's network stats are visible.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
Easy to self-host and probably less expensive to host than all the MS Office licenses used for MS Teams or paid Zoom licenses. I set up Jitsi Meet months ago and all I ever had to do was to add user accounts using prosody on the server (which should be improved imo). I've not needed to touch anything since first setup, except for user accounts. It just works. What's more is, that some solutions like MS Teams still is not able to properly work on all browsers. While Discord has solved this problem for ages and Jitsi Meet simply works in all modern browsers. I have a hunch, that with MS Teams there is active unwillingness to make it work properly. How else can this be explained?
- da_chicken 5y ago
  > I have a hunch, that with MS Teams there is active unwillingness to make it work properly. How else can this be explained? As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    There's an update to that saying: Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity, unless it's Microsoft. Then it's definitely malice.
rad_gruchalski 5y ago
Used it once, host shared the screen, never seen anything what they have shared.

baja_blast 5y ago

As someone how uses both Zoom and Google Hangouts, there is nothing Zoom offers that Google hangouts does not provide. The quality is the same for both, but at least Hangouts does not install a sketchy client on my machine that constantly runs in the background.

whoomp12342 5y ago
you can disable said client on startup...
jbluepolarbear 5y ago
Google hangouts is garbage. I have never had a hangout call that didn’t freeze or have someone dropout. The audio on hangouts is beyond bad and makes people sound completely different than they do in person. The video quality is always grainy on my fiber connection. Zoom doesn’t have these problems for me.
- el-salvador 5y ago
  Same issue here. If the link is too slow screen shares become grainy and text is hard to read. While Zoom usually only slows the frame rate, but not the resolution.
- remus 5y ago
  I find it interesting that people have such different experiences with the same tool. I tend to have 2 or 3 hangouts meetings a day and I can't remember the last time there was an issue.
  - vosper 5y ago
    Likewise - we switched from Gotomeeting to Google Meet (which is the same as hangouts, right?) mostly because the experience for staff in Latin America was so much better. That said, Gotomeeting is the worst of the bunch. They haven't added a useful feature in years, the CPU usage is terrible, their parasitic launcher is very difficult to get rid of, ugh... I'm surprised they're still around.

jeffbee 5y ago

Hangouts would surely have the same problem since I doubt Google can rule out the possibility that your video streams are being relayed through frontend servers outside the EU. The only way you could really control it is to use the old school approach to video conferencing: legacy standards like SIP or h.323 with all of the usability problems that implies, or WebRTC with your own STUN/TURN services ... and all of the usability problems that implies.

croes 5y ago

It's not their job to name alternatives, it's their job if a tool complies to the laws.

geofft 5y ago
Technically yes, but practically, if someone can't get their job done without breaking rules, they're going to break the rules. If your goal is actual compliance with rules, giving people a way to comply is much more effective.
- croes 5y ago
  Tell that the software companies. You can't demand to change the maw just because software companies want to illegaly collect data from their users. Why are people always complaining about data protection officers but not the shitty software companies. They have the tracking and the bugs which endanger their users and most of the time they won't even get punished.
  - illiac786 5y ago
    100% agree. Data privacy _is_ doable. Yes, it's added complexity, but software companies make it out to be much worse than what it actually is — and people believe them. These large software companies just don't want the inherent risk associated with saying "I comply with data privacy law XYZ" – because if they actually don't because they missed something, they will be sued for a lot of money. It's just about money, nothing new.

godot 5y ago

Although I mainly use zoom for work, I've also used Google Meet occasionally and have found the quality to be on par with Zoom. I notice you mentioned Google Hangouts instead of Google Meet, I'm not sure if they are the same now (too hard to keep track of these) but a brief google search seems to suggest they are not the same. If so, my past experience with Google Hangouts with friends would suggest it is indeed terrible. If so, you could give Google Meet a try.

el-salvador 5y ago

I have to do many online meetings, with attendants from developing countries (like mine) or unstable links. From our experience it seemsthat Zoom tolerates our unstable internet links better. I guess it has better error correction. There's also the annotate feature is super useful, which is missing in Teams and Webex. And also offers dial-in phone numbers in more countries then the rest. Zoom's audio design is nicer too, compared to Webex has some very annoying beeps that are a pain in large meetings. Regarding Teams, I have a computer with plenty of RAM, SSD disks and a high end work provided smartphone. Teams is super slow in both of them. I haven't been able to use the Exe version for weeks now because it's too slow. There is also no way to quote a chat using the Windows and Web version, so in order to quote chats I have to do it from my phone. Every once in a while I have buggy Teams or Webex meeting, that ends with a "Hey you know, I'll just send you a Zoom link".

duxup 5y ago

>Offer a comparable alternative, then. Maybe I am not doing a lot of meetings compared to others but I really haven't had more or less problems with Teams, Google products, or GoToMeeting (haven't used webex in a long time) ... compared to Zoom. It's all a wash for me among those experience wise. I constantly have various orgs tell me all about how they only use X video conferencing app because of Y experience. Most of those stories conflict ;)

ghaff 5y ago
I'm in meetings typically 2+ hours a day. I'm on a decent but not great Internet connection. My experience is they all mostly work but none are guaranteed to have a video/audio glitch free call.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- duxup 5y ago
  Same. I think a lot of people's experience with them is just happenstance.

iso1210 5y ago

Webex is so shockingly bad. Zoom, Teams, Slack, all seem to work fairly well, all have clients (and can run in the browser) Webex - which I have to use as part of a university course I'm doing on the side - requires you to run it in a browser on my OS, it has really awful options (like allowing the presenter to unmute people), half the claimed features just aren't available (virtual whiteboard, no major loss as everyone uses a shared google doc instead), and if you disconnect for some reason (like sound stops working which happens fairly frequently) you are kicked out of a group and you can't get back in.

saiya-jin 5y ago
Must be your specific webex/connection settings/version then, we have it in our massive banking corps (90k+employees worldwide) and none of the things you describe are an issue. We have adopted it some 7 years ago. You don't need to run it in browser at all, there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with it. Now it is still a crappy system, but for different reasons than you describe. And other solutions have their own problems, as indicated by article and elsewhere.
- silurian 5y ago
  > there are desktop (and phone) clients for every major OS out there. This shows that you are really not familiar with Now you sound as if you are not familiar with it. Looks like Webex added Linux(Deb & RHEL) on May 28, 2021. Before that, you had to use their legacy java applcation which also necessitated you to *manually* figure out, then hunt down & install the missing dependencies. And it was still shit.
- hobofan 5y ago
  The 1000 slightly different versions of Webex that are all bundeled under the same brand are its biggest drawback. My university uses it as well, and the normal latest version of Webex is on par with Zoom. However for some courses the lecutrers use e.g. Webex Training which is barely usable garbage (but is the only version that has built-in quiz features).

KronisLV 5y ago

> Offer a comparable alternative, then Here's a few: - https://meet.jit.si/ which you can also self host https://github.com/jitsi - https://bigbluebutton.org/ which you can also self host https://github.com/bigbluebutton I've found that they're especially useful, when integrated with Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ which you can also self host https://github.com/RocketChat https://github.com/RocketChat That way you have an experience that's a lot like Slack/Teams, with pretty good support for chat, reactions, file uploads, discussions, making quotes etc., while also being able to start video/audio calls with the press of a single button. Of course, if that's too many platforms, Rocket.Chat also supports WebRTC, albeit the UX was a bit less stellar when i last tried it. Alternatively, there is also Nextcloud Talk, which can integrate with your instance of Nextcloud and allow for file sharing, chatting etc., though personally i found Rocket.Chat to be more usable: https://nextcloud.com/talk/ https://nextcloud.com/talk/ Regardless, those are some very competent options which allow all the data to remain on your own servers.

cpncrunch 5y ago
Yes, there are many self-hosted options out there. https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway works well for multi-party video with up to about 15 users in a room assuming everyone has a reasonably reliable connection.
- foresto 5y ago
  Janus caught my attention when I was looking at WebRTC servers (SFUs) last year, but I couldn't find any good FOSS web apps for it. Do any exist?
  - cpncrunch 5y ago
    It is a complete video conferencing package by itself, so you generally don't need anything else. It just works out of the box to give you multi-party video conferencing across multiple rooms. We use it in our (closed source) online tutoring / whiteboard software, and it is pretty easy to integrate, by taking their videoroom sample code. What is it you're looking for?

badLiveware 5y ago

I believe that the government in Hamburg and the Bundeswehr are implementing(or has already) element and matrix. https://element.io/pro/federation-collaboration https://element.io/pro/federation-collaboration

hef19898 5y ago
The latter organisation is not necessarily a benchmark in IT, or organisation in general.
- illiac786 5y ago
  name one army which is. (Bundeswher is the german army)

choeger 5y ago

Do you ask for a comparable alternative when a road gets closed or slowed down? Or when a particular, well working, herbicide gets banned? Or when carrying guns openly gets banned? Did you ask for a comparable alternative to leaded fuel?

bwship 5y ago

I never have issues with Hangouts. I think Zoom is a slightly better experience, but just making a Calendar invite in Google Calendar, and it automatically having the Hangout meeting is pretty nice. [Edit] Google Meet

jeppester 5y ago

I've seen this argument used many times against GDPR regulations. Who are obligated to provide an alternative? And why? It's not like the police is obligated to give drug abusers something in return for the drugs that they are confiscating.

dcow 5y ago

Tandem is still new and has bugs but it’s never been a meeting killer. It doesn’t really have a guest access feature yet, though (at least to my knowledge).

comeonseriously 5y ago

I hate Teams because of other issues[0], but the video and screen sharing are really good. [0] It will occasionally leave artifacts on the screen if I put my laptop to sleep and wake it up. Just an empty rectangle in the notification area. I had to write a powershell script to cycle teams. And that's just one of the annoyances.

tehnub 5y ago

When my company first started using Zoom, people were fumbling the controls constantly. In fact, people still do ("Can you see my screen?"), and no one knows what "Optimize for video clip" even means. I don't think those other platforms are inherently worse, we're just slightly more familiar with Zoom.

Rd6n6 5y ago

I use whereby and it’s always been without issue. They used to have a very good privacy policy too, but since they updated it I can’t make sense out of it

fukmbas 5y ago

Teams is superior to Zoom... I don't understand why anyone uses Zoom, it's trash and compromised

geraneum 5y ago

Other big services sometimes solve this problem by creating a data center in EU for European customers (DataDog, 1password, etc.). I don’t know how feasible could that be in Zoom’s case technically, but if they see a threat of losing customers because of GDPR they might dedicate such resources.

azalemeth 5y ago

I very much agree with this. Zoom may be terrible from a security point of view; I dislike the fact that I may well have installed spyware on my machines; and I have absolutely no idea why in the nine hells the Android version complains that my phone is rooted (it should exist in a chroot!) but --- despite all of that --- it works. Teams, in particular comparison, is like DIY dentistry with kitchen implements as surgical tools. It lags; it doesn't have a native client on any devices and turns them all into heaters; its codecs are nowhere near as good, and it can't display as many people on screen at one point in time -- and there's no private chat. I understand on one level why most organisations seem to want to force their staff to use Teams – it's "free" (if you already pay the microsoft tax) and comes with the corporation (±NSA) being the spying overlord, rather than "E2EE" (+China). However, I completely also understand why most users prefer Zoom. Frankly, I do too!

ubermonkey 5y ago

I've been a heavy user of GoToMeeting for over a decade. It works very, very well for us, and our use case is entirely multi-org meetings. If someone has shitty home internet (a COVID-era problem), then they should probably dial in separately and not use the meeting audio, but that's going to hurt you no matter what meeting tool you use.

e40 5y ago

Yeah, it's amazing to me the hate people have for Zoom. I feel about Zoom like Garp felt about the plane that hit the house he was looking at buying. When the real estate agent said he wouldn't want to buy it now, he said The odds of another plane hitting this house are astronomical! and bought the house. I think it's unlikely Zoom will jeopardize their leadership by not taking security and privacy seriously.

illiac786 5y ago
two wrong assumptions: * not taking security seriously can jeopardize their leadership (they're the de facto standard and no one cares about security as seen in these comments) * Zoom is already taking security seriously - I seriously doubt it with all development being in China.

sharken 5y ago

Have not experienced this myself, but it could be due to poor network connectivity. What i find annoying about Teams, is the ability to use 100% CPU and 90% of the integrated graphics on a laptop. Thankfully disabling GPU hardware acceleration have helped quite a lot.

illiac786 5y ago

- "You can't marry your sibling." - "Offer a comparable alternative then" See the problem with this approach?