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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
by 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 agoyou can disable said client on startup...
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoGoogle 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 agoSame 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 agoI 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 agoLikewise - 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.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoHow are you okay with the audio compression? It makes everyone sound flat, monotone. It’s hard to tell who’s who if people have their cameras off.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoAppart from not having a linux client.
- azornathogron 5y agoThe client is a web browser. There are web browsers on Linux. I use hangouts in both Chrome and Firefox, and haven't had a problem with either of them.
- _huayra_ 5y agoWhile hangouts is a dumpster fire, Google Meet seems to work pretty well for those who aren't willing to jump through some self-hosted hurdles to run their own.
- CrimsonRain 5y agoHangouts has zoom-level annotation or 5k screen share where texts are crisp?
- eurasiantiger 5y agoHow often do you use those features, and how useful are they to all participants?
- CrimsonRain 5y agoEveryday. Multiple times. How do you screen share and not use annotation?
- eurasiantiger 5y agoI’ve yet to see someone use it, so clearly one of us is in a bubble.
- rand_r 5y agoI'm sorry, but Hangouts is terrible. It sucks on every level. The UI is so bad it's hard to believe. I wish I could sit down with their product team to get an explanation for how badly Hangouts is designed. Takes about 10s to see all the problems with it compared to Zoom.
- robrenaud 5y agoMy 94 year old grandpa would constantly struggle with zoom, to the point that we'd schedule him 15 minutes early to avoid half the meeting being about zoom problems. Hangouts worked well for him first try. The auto captioning also works quite a bit better with hangouts, which is good for people with hearing loss.
- aqme28 5y agoCan you be more specific about the UI problems? It seems pretty equivalent to Zoom to me.
- rand_r 5y agoTwo words: Gallery view. Like what in the actual fuck. How are they unable to do a simple grid properly? It’s just rectangles. The UI is there to copy from Zoom even.
- SahAssar 5y agoI don't think having the gallery view grid less gracefully handling non-even numbers of participants justifies saying "The UI is so bad it's hard to believe".
- john_yaya 5y agoI used to agree with you, until I discovered that (surprise, surprise) Hangouts works great on Chrome, not so much on other browsers.
- yibg 5y agoScreen sharing on hangout (a year or so ago) has been terrible for me, especially for text dense screens like code. Pair programming on hangouts I can't even read the other person's code a lot of the time. Also hangout quality for video and audio drops really fast on relatively poor quality network. I've had a few cases where the quality on hangout was too poor so we switch over to zoom.