Business culture has changed a lot in recent years. A growing number of companies have adopted hybrid work, a trend that even predates the COVID-19 pandemic. And with a couple of years of remote work under their belts, many workers are starting to insist on roles that allow them to work from home, even if it means finding new employment. But for all its benefits, accommodating this new model also calls for new tools and practices. For starters, investing in a world-class video conferencing system is essential.
That's because these services have evolved into the beating heart of both online collaboration and personal interactions via the web, at least until the heebie-jeebies around travel finally fade. To help you choose the best service, we've tested 12 video conferencing systems, though only the eight top contenders made the list in this roundup.
Working from home is what's driving the majority of video conferencing sales these days. The proprietary end-to-end systems you've probably seen deployed in smart conference rooms are still around, but the star players today are cloud services that require little more than an account and a webcam. We're focusing on these for this review roundup, since they're the most relevant to remote work. However, these platforms can sometimes spread their solution across several component vendors, raising support difficulties. To solve them, you'll need a good understanding of video conferencing systems first.
What to Look for in a Video Conferencing System
Video conferencing has been around for some time in various proprietary formats. Companies specializing in enterprise solutions generally built these systems to connect meeting rooms. Connections were over a local area network and then leased telecommunication lines if the link was between different buildings. Buying into one of these systems usually required proprietary cameras, microphones, dedicated servers, and client-side applications that were also proprietary.
Today's cloud video services use TCP/IP as the primary network protocol, and many video calls go over the internet. Also, their hardware support is generally open, meaning you can use whatever webcam or microphone works with your computing device. These new services often support an entirely web browser-based experience without the need to install any app (though a proprietary app usually gives the best experience). Additionally, there's support for all kinds of mobile devices, though these generally work best after installing either an Apple iOS or Google Android app.
The challenge with these systems is that they typically don't interoperate. For example, you can't attend a video conference initiated in Microsoft Teams using a Cisco Webex meeting client. The advantage is that these systems no longer require one large system purchase. Instead, they are services offered on a per-user or per-host subscription basis (see below for more about hosts). This can seriously reduce costs.
They also offer a big bucket of new capabilities that older systems never had. Best-in-class video conferencing services let users share their screens, remotely access one another's desktops, chat via text, exchange files, communicate via digital whiteboards, and even broadcast conferences to large groups of passive viewers (like webinars). Some are part of business-geared Voice-over-IP (VoIP) packages, which allow you to dynamically change a voice call to a video call or initiate a shared meeting at the touch of a button without ever losing the original connection.
Those features are great for central offices, but they're also fantastic communication aids for work-at-home scenarios, especially when viewed through a long-term lens. But video conferencing can go even further. For example, it's a perfect tool for addressing customers' support questions live or interacting with customers in real-time during a webinar. These and other factors are likely to continue to drive user adoption of these services for at least the next few years, as shown by growth projections from Fortune Business Insights:
There's no mistaking that telecommuting is booming. According to a 2017 report by FlexJobs, 3.9 million US employees were working from home at least half of the time, even before the pandemic. This is an increase of 115% from 2005. That means in some cases, video conferencing represents the only visible interaction that those employees will get with their employers; and now that many companies have made hybrid work policies permanent, those numbers are only going to grow.
Ways Video Conferencing Lowers Costs
Pandemic aside, many small to midsize businesses (SMBs) spread across geographic locations, a trend that preceded the coronavirus. While that trend has both cost and hiring benefits to most companies, it also brings complex challenges for communication, even for in-house employees. Add customers and partners to the mix, and it's challenging to think about talking to all of these people without extensive travel, which brings restrictive costs. This is where video conferencing can deliver a serious boost to your company's bottom line.
But even without considering geography, video conferencing can save money. Many of the new collaboration features included with this round of contenders aim to automate tasks that used to cost extra. The prime examples are meeting transcription and recording.
In older, proprietary systems, recording a meeting meant either a separate camera or a third-party microphone for audio-only recordings, plus server space for storage. Modern services have automated recording that you can initiate with the press of a button and then automatically save the recording to the cloud and auto-share it with all meeting attendees.
Transcription, too, used to cost extra. Meeting managers would have to send an audio recording to a transcription service. Many new video conferencing services now contain artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of virtual meeting assistants that manage things like attendance tracking and transcribing meetings directly to PDF or Microsoft Word documents. They can then send those docs to everyone in the discussion or save them in shared cloud storage.
How Video Conferencing Is Priced
As with all software services, understanding pricing and packages is essential. The prices quoted in our reviews are typically for the vendor's middle pricing tier, and those are usually charged on a per-user per-month basis. For more pricing information, click through to the individual reviews. All but one video conferencing service tested offer free trials (most are for 30 days), and many don't require a credit card. That means you don't have to worry about being charged automatically when the trial ends.
Most services offer free plans with a limited feature set. These can be great for individuals who want to reach friends and family, or for distributed teams who don't plan to spend a lot of time in conferences. Once you move to a paid tier, however, you need to pay attention to pricing details. For example, many products tested charge differently for hosts and users. Digging through the fine print, you'll find that hosts are users that can initiate meetings. Not all companies need to make every user a host, depending on how your organization handles collaboration. That can have a significant impact on your overall price, so be sure to nail down the details before buying.
Many services scale their pricing based on the number of hosts and attendees you need. That's why we recommend not just trying the features of our top-rated video conferencing services but also using that trial time to experiment with how many users need to have meeting manager status. In other words, evaluate how video conferencing best fits your organization's culture and workflows.
Generally, services that are priced per host instead of per user are more cost-effective for webinar-type environments, where a few hosts will present to many attendees (users). Those plans that are priced per user tend to be more attractive to collaborative-style engagements where anyone could start a meeting.
Another price consideration is hardware. Most every laptop has a microphone and a serviceable if fairly mediocre webcam built-in. Some laptops, such as the Microsoft Surface and the 2021 Apple MacBook Pro, ship with high-quality 1080p webcams, and the same goes for many higher-end mobile devices. So the basics for a web meeting are all there in that kind of hardware.
Desktop PCs, however, will need additional hardware. If you're looking for enhanced clarity of sound or video, you'll need the best microphones and high-end webcams you can get. Depending on how many desktops and conference rooms you're looking to outfit this way, you can significantly affect the overall cost of your video conferencing solution, so you should budget for that upfront.
Using Video Conferencing for Collaboration
Let's say you've found a shortlist of video conference services you like. Now what? Start by remembering that video conferencing is no longer about just high-end smart conference rooms. Hybrid work is here to stay, so your video conferencing system is going to be the heartbeat of that model. Many if not all of your meetings are likely to be conducted as video conferences.
This is likely to be a new way of working for many employees, which in turn means a platform's ease of use is a great place to compare one vendor's capabilities with another's. If the user interface (UI) is a maze, it will not only cause delays in meeting start times, but it'll also become a blocker to using any of the more advanced collaboration features. Instead, you should be looking for easy and always-on collaboration.
In each review, we discuss the ease of signing up, creating a meeting, inviting participants, and setting up audio and video controls for each review. We also look at the user experience (UX) from the meeting invitees' point of view and how easy it is to access smart meeting controls. That covers whiteboard-style collaboration and file sharing, annotation, and the virtual assistant features mentioned above.
We've also tested each service's prominent features, but it's up to you to decide which features you need most. Do you need dial-in numbers, VoIP support, or both? How about features like screen sharing or remote control? Some services offer both teleconferencing with dial-in numbers (local or toll-free) and VoIP calling, while some offer just one or the other. A few offer international dial-in numbers.
All of the products reviewed offer video calls via webcam, which is a feature that's creeping into several team messaging platforms, like Microsoft Teams and Slack. In Teams' case, this is a complete video conferencing solution, which is why we've reviewed it here. On the other hand, Slack and some of its competitors have only implemented person-to-person video calling, which is why we haven't included them in this roundup.
However, Slack's strength in this regard (and it's a strength shared by its competitors) is its very long list of out-of-the-box integration options. While you can only do person-to-person video. inside Slack itself, the platform also integrates with Google Workspace, Teams, Zoom, and a host of other communications platforms, including the ones we've reviewed here. A skilled Slack administrator can build full meeting functionality this way.
In all of these reviews, we hosted and joined meetings to test the experience of registered and non-registered users alike. We made sure to outline how easy it is to join a meeting, including whether a participant needs to download software before joining (which could cause a delay). When that's the case, it's important to communicate with employees about hardware compatibility and your preferred browser. Other services simply require that attendees enter a code to access the meeting.
Recommended by Our Editors
Our reviews also cover the host's administration features. The best services let you set up various types of meetings, such as lecture-style meetings where all participants are muted, or a discussion or Q&A mode in which presenters can mute and unmute participants as needed. Other options include enabling and disabling webcams, locking latecomers out of a meeting, creating a waiting room while preparing for the meeting, and allowing break-out sessions.
For presentations, screen sharing is essential. But so are more granular options, such as the ability to share just one , document, image, or application (Microsoft PowerPoint, for example), not just your entire desktop. Most of the video conferencing services in this roundup also offer a text chat mode not only during a meeting but sometimes outside a video call, too.
During a trial, you should experiment with all these features and think carefully about how much actual collaboration you need in your various meetings. That means evaluating the service with more than just IT personnel. You should also include stakeholders from your various departments, so you've got an accurate representation of the different kinds of gatherings your employees hold between themselves and folks outside the organization.
Network Considerations for Video Meetings
Unfortunately, even in a centralized network like the one in your main office, working with any stream-dependent app, and especially video, becomes trickier the larger the network and the more apps there are competing for bandwidth. That means if you're running all or part of your solution on a high-traffic network, some network settings may need tweaking.
While the basic setup is enough to get one session running, be sure to work with your IT staff to test what happens when multiple streams are open. Those streams will also be competing with all the other types of traffic you've typically got running. You're looking for video artifacts, stuttering, or excessive buffering that pauses the stream.
The at-home network situation is even more complicated, and it will be a persistent issue for many IT pros. For one thing, video conferencing can put your IT help desk personnel in an awkward position. The video conferencing app is now a core business service. And yet, it's now being deployed over consumer devices and home network routers. And then there are additional peripherals, like webcams and microphones. Most of these weren't purchased by the IT department, which means IT support staffers haven't been trained to service them. All of this makes supporting those home users on an end-to-end basis very difficult. And that's not even considering the conditions on the internet, which handles most of the network traffic and which your IT department doesn't control either.
Most businesses are using the same "solution," and that's to handle this problem on a case-by-case basis. If an IT pro can service a router remotely, that's what happens. If not, then it's down to either sending the device to a central location to be reconfigured, or walking the employee through the required steps over the phone.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a huge driver of working from home, and now many companies are moving toward making the hybrid work model permanent. If that's the case for your company, it's a good idea to develop long-term solutions for remote workers. For example, IT could pre-configure a number of router models and then distribute them to remote workers so that everyone is using the same platform.
Virtual private networks (VPNs) are another related problem. Many businesses require employees to use these services when working remotely, both to protect themselves from cyber-attacks and to protect corporate data. But because they use encryption, VPNs can often cause bandwidth or throughput problems that affect video streaming performance. They're also run by companies other than your video conferencing vendor, so supporting the combination of the two usually ends up as an internal problem.
To help, you'll need to investigate VPN offerings for remote connections and potentially work with your IT staff to implement Quality of Service (QoS) features on both your main network and users' home networks. That'll help protect the bandwidth required during your video conferences. If you're already using a cloud PBX-based VoIP system for your phone calls, your IT people will already have a good idea of how to protect traffic this way, as the requirements are very similar.
Don't Forget Vendor Support
If all this sounds like you'll be supporting yourself once you buy into one of these services, that's not the case. It's just that the particulars of implementing any video conferencing service can vary so widely from business to business that your own IT people are usually the best first line of support. After all, they're the ones who'll wind up knowing the system best.
But aside from making sure your IT staff is thoroughly familiar with your chosen video conferencing service, you'll also want solid support resources from your vendor. The best video conferencing services offer phone, email, and chat support in addition to extensive online documentation. End-user support in this manner may cost extra, but it's worth considering if your IT staff is small. Checking for a professional services arm that will help train both users and IT pros is another important factor, and an active user community can be a good resource, too.
