Google Meet is the only one of these that has always worked reliably for me. Doesn't require any strange clients, works in most browsers, never randomly fails to move just some person's audio and so on.

Disclaimer: I work for Alphabet, but already held this opinion before I did.

We use Google Meet and it struggles to keep up with meetings with more than 10 people. It seems that the common hack is to ask each attendee to disable their camera. On the plus side, it is the only one that reliably works from a browser only.

I think this is a case where the Hangouts brand is tainting the premium GSuite brand, again.

> worked reliably for me

Every second time I’m using it, I either don’t hear the other people, or people do not hear me. YMMV.

I couldn't get it to work in Firefox ESR on Debian 10, and audio was consistently choppy for me in Chromium 80 after I went through their forced account creation process. Zoom wouldn't use my camera either in Chromium :c

Jitsi and Google Meet worked by following a link and clicking one popup. Much easier UX

Same here - often it'll tell me I'm waiting for other people to show up but the other people will never see I'm there. It works somewhat better with Chrome but I loathe having that installed on my Mac. Rarely I do have to do so, but am forced to spend time removing its tendrils afterward (it's not just deleting the app!).

I just had a Google Meet call. They couldn't hear me. Zoom has its issues but it is definitely reliable for its purpose.

If you have these issues, especially so frequently, I'd wager it's a problem on your end.

Almost all problems on video conferences are on the user's end. What Zoom excel at is to mitigate most of those user issues by trying to figure out all the corner cases that the user might be in.

Yeah, probably. But what should I do about it. It’s unusable for me. Doesn’t work with Chrome, doesn’t work with Firefox. Zoom works for me every single time.

Edit: Maybe if I could receive some support from Google to find out what my problem is, I’d be able to fix it. But that ain’t going to happen.

In my case this is usually caused by a conflict with firefox's anti-fingerprinting. Which I think is fair enough.

I gave up on Google Meet/Hangouts/Whatever. When chatting with Googlers, it is really nice. But their products available to me as a non-Google employee suck and change quite a bit. Just trying to debut issues with participants was frustrating it it would vary based on how they clicked the link, what they had running, etc.

I wish Google would just provide the internal tool and sell that. It’s the opposite of dogfooding their product. They eat the good stuff and product a lesser product to their customers.

Google Meet is the tool we use internally. It's available as part of GSuite.

When I tried it years ago, the GSuite version could not dial out to an external phone number to join them in. Is this now available to gsuite users?

I tried looking up the features on the Wikipedia page [0] and didn’t see a really comprehensive list. I reviewed Wikipedia because when I searched for google meet, Google’s top result (that seems like their product page) [1] just had an “open” button that linked out to the App Store to install “Hangouts Meet by Google.”

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hangouts [1] https://meet.google.com/

It's missing too many features to be usable. No remote control. The speaker detection is terrible. Audio quality is bad. We only use it because we are cheap and it comes free.

Hangouts is different than Google Meet, their premium product. But my big problem with them is that when screensharing you cannot see anyone's faces.

Tiled layout was recently released which allows you to view a grid of all people on the call in addition to the shared screen.

Note that "Google Meet" (part of Enterprise suite) is different than the free "Google Hangout".

I have never gotten Google Meet to work in Firefox. Or the new Edge for that matter, despite it using the Chromium engine.

It seems to work only in Chrome and Safari.

I find this amusing because I regularly use Meet on Firefox and Linux.

My pet peeve with Meet by the way is the absence of a native grid view in big rooms.

I get it to work properly on Firefox/MacOs lately, better than Safari actually, but it's a very recent development.

only skype worked for us meeting group to group over single feed and open speakers, skype seems to work well doing audio google meet hasn't fixed it for ever. personal audio on most works for me, unless you have like less than 2-3megabit for video.

100% agree but I'm tentatively hopeful that alternatives to Zoom have caught up. Zoom raised the bar and I have seen that other products have improved. Meet is decent right now and Jitsi (in my very limited testing so far) seem actually pretty great, possibly better than Zoom (they mix audio more smoothly when two people are talking over each other in a way that is less jarring, not sure but that's my current theory of why it "feels" better). Even historically awful alternatives like Webex really are honestly improved. Anyway, Zoom is getting outed as being a seriously a-hole company - there are definitely alternatives better than selling out just for convenience of not switching or even trying to find an alternative.

Yes. I find jitsi one-on-one audio call is better than zoom. Screenshare is equivalent to skype if you set the fps to 15. zoom is better for videos if it involve large number of users.

I'm surprised to hear that google meet doesn't work well for others. We've used it exclusively with all our clients for the past 5 years simply because its integrated into google calendar, but we've never had any reliability problems with it. Most problems we have are based around people trying to figure out how to unmute their conference room mic.

No idea what kind of unreliable networks people get to use, but WebEx has been quite good during the last 10 years.

Yep I’ve been working nearly 100% remote for five years and have several WebEx conferences every day and Zoom doesn’t perform any better or more reliably than WebEx.

Teams is awful. Skype is worse. WebEx is just fine. So is Zoom.

So has Google Meet and Hangouts. So was Skype, when I used it about 5 years ago.

Perhaps I'm just used to them as a remote worker, but they were never all that janky to begin with. Or, rather, more janky than the other tools available at the time.

Right. I've worked almost only remotely for several outfits over more than ten years although conveniently I am currently unemployed. I have used WebEx, Skype, Hangouts, Slack's built-in video conferencing, Zoom and I'm sure I'm forgetting others. If you have a sane setup all of these work fine.

I hadn't used Jitsi until this current situation meant friends wanted to "meet up" drunkenly on Friday evenings but it's the same.

The main obstacles are hardware. The cheapest correct working solution for a single individual participant is a headset and a webcam. Can you use lapel microphones, or (as two of my Youtube creator friends do for Friday evenings) sit in front of a huge professional microphone with filters? Yes, yes you can but that's not for most users. Can you plug a high-end SLR that's focused dead on you into a converter and stream that instead of a webcam? Yup, but again most people either don't own an SLR or don't want to set it up just so they can be a bit clearer and brighter when drunk.

And the thing about hardware is that we abstracted this away entirely. Zoom doesn't have different hardware support from Hangouts or Skype or any other tool.

"Which VC tool should we use for this meeting?" is a bike shed discussion at the best of times. Chances are good either you didn't need a video conference at all, or any of the tools would have been fine.

I'm baffled by the amount of people claiming zoom to be painless or working, even. Don't you know any linux users? Zoom is utterly broken beyond comprehension on any variant or flavour, even when `sudo`ing everything: installer, running, audio setup (pavucontrol) to try to figure out why it refuses to work, etc

I only ever use Zoom on Linux (Ubuntu), and it works just fine every time.

My experience with Google Meet matches yours with Zoom.

I concur. I haven't tried Zoom on any other platform yet, but it has been 100% reliable on my Ubuntu machine. Nothing else even comes close. I've had hundreds of Zoom calls over the past 8 months, from 1:1s to all-hands with ~500 participants. Audio, cameras, screen sharing all worked every single time.

Same experience with Fedora on Wayland. Zoom is solid: audio, video, screen sharing. True for very large calls too.

Nothing else comes close on Linux for me.

We have two Linux users (myself included) that it works great for. Better than pretty much every other video conferencing tool I've tried on Linux. I do use the flatpak installer so that dependencies aren't a problem.

Linux user here. I have tried them all and Zoom is not perfect but is multiple levels above any of the competitors. Don't even get me started with WebEx.

I share you pain using other products, I really do. I'm stuck with Skype for Business and Webex. However Zoom's attitude to security is unacceptable, and therefore I will not accept it. Full Stop. Every now and then I'm on a company call that, if made public, could do serious harm to the company. My children do video calls with their friends from their bedrooms without adult supervision. In neither of those scenarios am I willing to trust Zoom right now.

I have to agree. I deal with vendors a lot, so I've used a bunch of different ones: GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, WebEx, Skype. And the experience of using those ones is painful. Zoom is a joy to use. Its not perfect, and I have my complaints (when I'm sharing a screen why can't I make the gallery view large so I can see everybody on a second screen??) but it has been rock solid.

I'd second that. It's the first tool I've used that felt like more than just a resolution upgrade from what we had back in like 2002(!).

I just switched to GoToMeeting and they have improved significantly since the last time I used them (before Zoom). New interface, transcription, unlimited recorded meetings in the cloud, great audio so far, I’m happy.

I've only used Zoom in recent times and while it has seemed fairly solid, I also can't say I've noticed any major differences from Google Meet.

We use it internally at Xero, more than ever currently with working from home, and it's been solid from what I've experienced.

Given we also use Google Calendar, joining a meeting is pretty straight forward, as a Meet link is populated in each event, and shows up on the home screen for meet.google.com

Usually the only mic issues that occur are people using their own headsets with audio gain set too high or flaky bluetooth connections

Running in Firefox, it works great for the most part although sadly it breaks every few months. It'll tend to drop me from the lobby a few seconds in with "Network Error" or something along those lines. I would get frustrated but given it's a work tool, a few days to a week using Chrome (just for calls) and Firefox is back in action again.

We also conduct our postmortems via Google Meet and it generally seems to support 50+ person calls fairly well. That said, we use Hangouts Streaming for All Hands type of stuff so I couldn't speak on performance with hundreds of users at once

Purely anecdotal but my coworker has an older HP laptop (specs are still a respectable 8GB ram, presumably quad core CPU) and finds that he can't be on a Google Meet call while also doing development as his fans will flare up too much.

I would actually quite appreciate a Google Meet desktop app (that's not electron) but I guess the premium userbase tend to have enough specs to throw at web-based products

Oh yeah, I do appreciate that Zoom presumably doesn't require any fancy logins because running Google Meet on a phone requires a device policy in order to connect to a call.

I can either install it on my device plainly (requiring a pin to login going forward vs say, a fingerprint) or I could install it in a work profile. The latter is cleaner but then I have an entire second set of apps just to join a call on my phone once in a blue moon :(

At least you can dial into meetings but I find the audio is kinda wonky at times.

Having said all this, I can respect the product but I'm always happy for a non-Google entity to win in any given space ;)

Convenience ≠ Security

These two remove from one-another other.

Zoom just showcased this back to back to back to back in a few weeks time). They played tricks with the words. "we wrote ABC but what we really meant is XYZ" is a shitty response to any type of audit/scrutiny.

This is a public company. They have an Internal Audit. What the hell were these guys been auditing in security audits??? The color of the background????

As someone who demos software frequently, GoToMeeting is the only one that ever held a candle to Zoom for me. Webex does weird shit to screen shares on Windows, and don't even get me started on Teams/Skype. The rest are pretty obviously not designed to be used for screensharing.

Jitsi is quite good.

BlueJeans and Zoom seem to be the most reliable and easiest to use. BlueJeans doesn't have a free option though.

I loved BlueJeans but I don't think they have a free option either. It was really nice to just send a URL to someone and then have them pop into a BlueJeans meeting without a pre-installed client.