Best Video Conferencing Apps For Teams In 2020.

Video conferencing apps have seen a rise in usage, as far as meetings are held using the power of the internet amidst coronavirus.

What makes a great video conferencing app?

There are a lot of things that contribute towards great video conferencing app, and such is why we urge you to take your time and continue reading.

High-quality video conferencing software has to do more than just show your face to the world. Whether you want to have a quick chat with your coworker or put an all-hands presentation on everyone’s calendar, a good video conferencing solution makes it straightforward to create a meeting link or dial-in number, share it with others, and add more people to in-progress calls.

It should also offer features that let you turn facetime into collaboration time, such as screen sharing, annotation or whiteboarding, and live chat. These features are key to making your virtual meetings as productive as they would be in person, so we only included apps that support these functions.

And while it’s a bit harder to define, a good video conferencing app should be reliable, meaning it should enable consistently clear calls that don’t usually drop or get choppy. While some apps on this list are better for smaller groups of people, we’ve also included a few powerhouse tools that can reliably handle video calls for large groups.

• Zoom

If you’re looking for a video conferencing app, you’ve probably already heard of Zoom. It’s one of the most popular group call apps—and for good reason. For the most part, Zoom just works.

Once you install the Zoom app (on your computer or on your phone), you can host free 1:1 video calls with no time limit and group calls with up to 100 people as long as you don’t talk for more than 40 minutes. Paid plans let you chat with up to 1,000 people at once, plenty for almost every situation.

More importantly, Zoom is incredibly reliable. Even when your internet connection isn’t the best, Zoom typically will keep your video going—though sometimes at a reduced quality level. You can record any call as a full-length video. Participants can also use text chat to talk with each other, either as a group or as individual private messages, during a call. And you can share your screen, choosing to either show your whole screen or just one of the apps you’re running.

Zoom even lets you schedule calls in advance, chat anytime with any of your contacts, or connect to room conferencing hardware. All in all, it’s a nearly perfect team video app.

For best video conferencing app for reliable, large video calls, then Zoom is one of the recommended app to use.

Platforms: macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Web

Price: Zoom is Free for up to 100 participants for 40-minute meetings; from $14.99/month per host Pro plan for user management, unlimited meeting length, and reporting.

• Google Meet

Google Meet’s best feature, perhaps, is its deep integration with Google’s other apps. Whenever you create a meeting in Google Calendar, you’ll get a Meet link that you and your meeting attendees can click to instantly join a call. And when you’re in the middle of a call, you can find files from Google Drive and Apps and share them in chat, without leaving your call. You can even start a call directly from your Gmail inbox.

Google Meet includes live captioning, which is a huge plus for accessibility. The captions work fairly well in English, though it can’t detect when other languages are spoken on a call. There’s also a tab-sharing feature that’s great for media sharing, with very little lag when used to stream a short video as a group.

Meet can struggle with large group calls, however. In our experience, it doesn’t degrade calls as gracefully as some other apps (such as Zoom) if your internet connection is slow. But there is a workaround: you can opt to have up to 100,000 participants join via view-only mode. This mode doesn’t display participants’ video, so they’ll only see and hear whomever is leading the call. Though it’s not the same as a true video conference, since it limits their ability to chime in, it’s a decent option if you just need one or two people to present to a large group—such as in a lecture-driven distance learning class.

If you’re working from the same location, you can also use the Meet conference room devices for full-room video chats and the Jamboard touchscreen device for team collaboration. Together with Meet’s deep integrations with the rest of G Suite, Meet just may turn into the best way to talk with your team.

You can connect Google Meet to the other apps you use most. For example, you can automatically schedule calls with leads, no matter where they reach you.

Platforms: (iOS, Android, Web)

Price: Google Meet goes for Free for up to 100 participants and up to 60 minutes; from $6/month as part of G Suite Basic for business teams.

• GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting is part of LogMeIn’s family of video conferencing apps that let you meet with your team or broadcast a webinar to thousands of viewers. With GoToMeeting, you’ll schedule meetings online, then use GoToMeeting’s app to join calls, share your screen, and present to audiences.

You can choose to schedule a recurring session or start a one-time call. And GoToMeeting also lets you create a custom link for your meeting—which is a great feature if you’ll be inviting people outside your organization or running a publicly-available virtual event like a webinar.

GoToMeeting offers all the features you’d expect from a video conferencing tool aimed at professionals, including call recording, dial-in numbers (or an option to have GoToMeeting call your number so all you have to do is answer), and HD video for up to six participants. You can even monitor your audio levels from the app’s toolbar, so you can see exactly how loud you’re being during the call.

The downside is that the app can be a little confusing due to all the features and options available. For the most part, though, GoToMeeting is a reliable option that can be a good choice if you want a tool for team calls and webinars.

Some common GoToMeeting automations include automatically creating meetings for new calendar events or when someone books an appointment in your scheduling app.

Platforms: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Web for participants

GoToMeeting Price: From $14/organizer/month for a Professional plan for up to 150 participants.

• join.me

Also a LogMeIn offering, join.me is a bit like GoToMeeting’s sleeker, leaner cousin—perfect if you just need to host the occasional call.

Once you create an account, you can start a meeting from your browser or any of the desktop or mobile apps, and participants can join straight from their browser as well. Some Pro features, like screen sharing, are only available if you use the desktop app. But if you’re just looking to host a quick video call—if you need to talk to a client who won’t need to share their screen, for example, and you don’t want to ask them to download any software—join.me is a solid option.

If you do choose to use the desktop app, you can screen share and annotate, just like in LogMeIn’s signature tools. And on mobile, you can even both share your screen or specific documents on your phone, so you can collaborate as a team while on the go.

You can use our automated workflows to schedule a join.me meeting and automatically add attendees who registered in another app, start meetings when events in your scheduling app are about to begin, and even get SMS notifications for upcoming meetings.

Platforms: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Web

join.me Price: From $10/user/month for a Lite plan with unlimited number and length of meetings and 5 participants per meeting.

• Cisco Webex Meetings

From one of the leading manufacturers of video conferencing hardware, Cisco Webex Meetings is designed around large-scale collaboration. It’s notorious for having some usability issues, but it has all the features you’d expect from a video conferencing app, with especially crisp audio compared to some other options.

But the real standout feature is Webex’s virtual whiteboard. Once you start a call, you can opt to share your screen as a blank white space—and then use a wide range of sketching tools, text, and geometric shapes to collaborate. You can even create separate whiteboard “pages” and view them one at a time or navigate through them as thumbnails. The best part is that everyone can use the whiteboard at the same time.

If you just want a normal video conference, you can do that, too. And if your team needs an easy way to stay in touch between meetings, Cisco’s companion Webex Teams app adds team chat and one-click calls to your video collaboration.

You can automatically add scheduled Webex meetings to your calendar, for example, or get a reminder in your favorite chat app when a meeting is about to start.

Platforms: iOS, Android, Mac, Windows

Webex Price: From $14.95/host/month for a Starter plan with up to 50 participants per meeting and 5GB of cloud storage.Webex Price: From $14.95/host/month for a Starter plan with up to 50 participants per meeting and 5GB of cloud storage.

• Slack

Today, Slack is one of the most popular team chat apps, and it’s taken chats beyond just text and images. Slack added 1-to-1 voice calls to its desktop and mobile apps in June 2016, following up six months later by adding video to those calls.

To call a colleague in Slack, just open a channel or direct message and click the phone icon—Slack will start the call in a new window and add a notification to the chat. Calls feel a bit more like a normal phone call with video added on (just tap the video icon to turn on video). Up to 15 people can join the call, but you can only make video calls from the desktop app, not mobile. You can also share your screen—and you and your teammates can annotate it—though there’s no dedicated whiteboard option.

The limited video call settings (and the fact that video quality quickly drops with more than a couple of people on the call) make Slack calls best for quick conversations with just one or two other people.

If you’re already using Microsoft Teams or another chat tool that includes video calls, don’t download Slack just for the video conferencing. We chose Slack because of its ease of use, but it makes more sense to stick with the tool you already use (assuming you like it), so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between apps.

Platforms: macOS, Windows, Web

Slack Price: From $8/month Standard plan for video calls along with unlimited chat archive and priority support.

Meetings would have not progressed without video conferencing apps in this pandemic coronavirus era, and such is why these Best Video Conferencing Apps For Teams In 2020 is a post to share with friends.

Best Video Conferencing Apps For Teams In 2020

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