There's an excellent whiteboard, comparable to what's offered by any other app, complete with drawing, text, sticky notes, and even a "magic pen" feature that tidies up your messy rectangles and circles. The collaborative features are particularly noteworthy. Users can join meetings by downloading and installing the application or by using the web version. We immediately noticed that everyone looks and sounds better on this service-both in terms of image and sound quality and in terms of stability-and it's not particularly close. As you might expect, the focus is on video quality, and Webex delivers. For example, you can automatically add Zoom calls to your calendar, schedule video conferences when someone books an appointment, or get notifications for upcoming meetings.Ĭisco is a leading manufacturer of video conferencing hardware. You can do even more with Zoom by connecting it to Zapier, taking the busywork out of meeting prep and follow-up. All in all, it's a nearly perfect team video app. Zoom lets you schedule video conference calls in advance, chat anytime with any of your contacts, or connect to room conferencing hardware. The design here could be a little better-it's hard to tell who's saying what-but you can clear this up by reviewing the transcript of the meeting. There's also support for real-time transcriptions, complete with closed captioning. It now offers one the best whiteboards on the market, making it really quick to fill a virtual board with diagrams, images, and sticky notes. You can even share audio from your computer, if you want. And you can share your screen, an individual app, or just one section of your screen. You can record any call as a full-length video, and participants can also use text chat to talk with each other, either as a group or as individual private messages. It will typically keep your video going even through a weak internet connection, just at a reduced quality level. It's hard to overstate how valuable that is: nothing drags a meeting down quite like someone not being able to join. Joining a meeting is as simple as clicking the link. There are apps for every major platform, and at this point, you can assume everyone already installed the software and configured it to work. You can share a link to a Zoom meeting and feel confident that everyone will be able to join it. It's the most popular video conferencing app out there, and for good reason: it just works. People who literally live under rocks know about Zoom. We kept all of these features in mind while considering which Zoom alternatives to test (let's face it-that's what they are), and also focused on these features while testing. Anyone should be able to click a link and join your meeting without much fuss (though there should also be security features to keep out unwanted participants). Make it simple to add people outside your organization. Recording a meeting should be as simple as clicking a button in your online meeting software. Not everyone can make every meeting-recordings help bridge that gap. The best online video conferencing apps go beyond this to offer whiteboarding or even direct collaboration features.Īllow for video recording. Screen sharing and chat are the bare minimum. Ideally, meetings can be quickly scheduled and added to your calendar, and there should be obvious links to click when it's time to join the call. Make it straightforward to start, schedule, and join meetings. If web conferencing software can only do one thing, this has to be it. Offer high-quality video and audio, reliably. In summary, the best video conferencing apps: Businesses need more than just a solid video connection to do meetings. There are many consumer-facing video chat apps-Apple's FaceTime, for example-that wouldn't work as a video conferencing app. We tested each online meeting app to see how well it performed when the quality of the internet connection changed.īut that's not the only thing we were thinking of. That goes beyond how the picture looks-the best quality in the world doesn't matter if people cut out or calls drop constantly. The most important thing for video conferencing is video quality. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.
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