I was looking for an alternative to Google Meet for a constantly open meeting room where we can share ideas and screens and spend the lunch break. Ideally, this would've been Slack with discord-like voice channels where you can drop in and out and see if a participant is online. They promised this feature [1] last year, but it did not land.
What we tried and their pros and cons:
1. Google Meet:
* ○ Excellent noise suppression only if you are on one of their higher paid plans like Enterprise or Business Plus
* + Statistics on participant activity (how often did they enable their mic/camera, bitrate, etc.)
* - Overheating on MacBooks
* - Room will be deleted if nobody is joined for X days
* - Real full screen for screen sharing not possible
* - Proprietary, needs a paid plan
* - Forget about privacy
2.Zoom:
* - Proprietary, no privacy, security vulnerabilities
3. Teamviewer:
* - Needs a separate software (otherwise a worthy competitor to Google Meet)
4. Mumble:
* - Others in this thread have already laid out why it is not being used more: UX, setup wizard, no echo suppression, finicky push-to-talk
5. Discord:
* - No privacy
* - No encryption
* - Focused on gaming
* + Interesting feature for screen sharing: You can select if you want readability and low frame rate or high frame rate and low readability
* + Voice channels
6. We now ended up with a self-hosted k8s instance of Jitsi Meet (they host their own at [2]) which works great:
* + Open source
* + Latency and call quality is phenomenal
* + sharing screens of multiple participants works like a charm. Sharing a screen in Google Meet takes 5 seconds or so, in Jitsi Meet, it is immediately.
* ○ Echo suppression is not as good as Google Meet's
* + Unique features like synchronized Youtube player (which automatically mutes all participants)
Been trying to try something for lower latency chat, because I feel like a large part of the video meeting annoyance is talking over each other because of latency.
We've been really excited about the Google Meet noise cancellation, but I guess our work account either doesn't qualify or hasn't had that rolled out yet. Our gSuite account is really old, from back when they were free, so maybe it doesn't qualify. Meet works well in general though, we use it for our lunch chats.
In the past have used Jitsi, had some good and some bad experiences with it, but mostly it works well.
I just tried qTox with my wife, and had her also on the cell phone, and qTox was at least as good as the phone for latency. She was on wifi on Windows, and I was hardwired networking on Linux.
What we tried and their pros and cons:
1. Google Meet:
* ○ Excellent noise suppression only if you are on one of their higher paid plans like Enterprise or Business Plus
* + Statistics on participant activity (how often did they enable their mic/camera, bitrate, etc.)
* - Overheating on MacBooks
* - Room will be deleted if nobody is joined for X days
* - Real full screen for screen sharing not possible
* - Proprietary, needs a paid plan
* - Forget about privacy
2.Zoom:
* - Proprietary, no privacy, security vulnerabilities
3. Teamviewer:
* - Needs a separate software (otherwise a worthy competitor to Google Meet)
4. Mumble:
* - Others in this thread have already laid out why it is not being used more: UX, setup wizard, no echo suppression, finicky push-to-talk
5. Discord:
* - No privacy
* - No encryption
* - Focused on gaming
* + Interesting feature for screen sharing: You can select if you want readability and low frame rate or high frame rate and low readability
* + Voice channels
6. We now ended up with a self-hosted k8s instance of Jitsi Meet (they host their own at [2]) which works great:
* + Open source
* + Latency and call quality is phenomenal
* + sharing screens of multiple participants works like a charm. Sharing a screen in Google Meet takes 5 seconds or so, in Jitsi Meet, it is immediately.
* ○ Echo suppression is not as good as Google Meet's
* + Unique features like synchronized Youtube player (which automatically mutes all participants)
* + End-to-end encryption
* + Recordings
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/7/21505519/slack-instagram-...
[2] https://meet.jit.si/