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Due to the recent events of COVID-19 outbreak, there has been a soaring rise in the use of digital conferencing since people cannot leave their homes. There’s a lot of things that matter when you’re picking the best video conference platform to use, such as security, video/audio quality, participant size, social media integration, easy to use and many more.

In order to help you match your organisation’s needs, it is very important that you pick the right digital conferencing platform. We have analysed several popular platforms that you can use for your future video conferences or meetings and our findings are below:

Our top spot goes to – Go to Meeting  

This is a highly rated and flexible platform.

It’s a great tool for online meetings, training sessions and webinars, making the process easy for the guest speakers and the participants to join. This is a free app but can be upgraded if paid, making it an affordable option. Go to Meeting has built-in multi-language support, which means that international meetings and people with English as their second language can comfortably use this tool, making it a perfect platform for online webinars. It also has a social media integration allowing you to share content across social media channels. This could be especially useful for businesses that want to raise awareness.

GoToMeeting is a great option for having to meet with clients or to show them your screen. Since end-users are not forced to download the app and can join from any web browser, it works well for customers who don’t have security rights to download applications to their computer.

With ever evolving features Go to Meeting not only offers 250 participants and 25 active HD webcams, they also offer unlimited recording, screenshare & draw, crystal clear audio, meeting transcription, diagnostic reports and active directory connector.

Next in line – Microsoft Teams

The main aim of Microsoft Teams is to connect colleagues and enhance collaboration.

This platform is highly customisable, which means that you can customise the platform specifically how you want it for your meeting. This integrates especially well with other Microsoft Office apps and is best suited for Office 365 users. Although this is a paid app, this platform has third party recording tools, which allows you to record the meeting which can be used again at home if needed to. As well as this platform has built-in cloud storage, meaning that your saved files can be easily accessed during conference meetings. Additionally, this platform has an option of a shared mouse or a keyboard. This can ensure that everyone is involved and can have access to adding something during the meeting.

The only serious downside of Teams is that it can’t support more than 4 videos during a meeting or conference, but we hear that Microsoft is on the case and hopefully this great collaborative platform will soon be able to support at least 9 videos in a meeting!

Apart of videos issue, we recommend that companies with large population should seriously consider using Microsoft Teams to communicate, especially if they are already using Microsoft programs like Outlook and their calendar. Teams work great to unify the company on a central hub and standardises the tools needed for work. Software like SharePoint, OneNote, and Excel, which are vital for the day-to-day, are now spread across all of the organization.

And last, but not least – Zoom

This is another highly rated platform, which is the crowd’s favourite with over 200 million daily active users!

This platform contains rich features for hosts and participants. Making it extremely easy for you to use this platform when planning your meeting or conference. By having stellar performance, this ensures the quality of your video conference is at the best of its ability. This platform can have up to 500 people on the video conference at once with large meeting add-ons. This platform also has built-in private messages, which makes it much easier for your delegates to communicate with the hosts, especially if they are shy and do not want to ask a question out loud or do not want to interrupt the presentation, making this platform suitable for everyone.

Whereas other services are more focused on catering to larger organizations that can afford all the bells and whistles of a premium video conferencing suite, Zoom strikes a balance between the economical and the necessary. Honing in on high quality HD video and crisp sound quality, along with a diverse selection of subscription packages, Zoom has proven to us that it’s every bit deserving of its grandiose clientele.

The only downside holding Zoom off the top spots (and it’s a biggie) is privacy & security. Even though we applaud Zoom for having a massive increase in users over the past few months, the ease and quality is just not worth the risk, but lets hope they will manage to get their ducks in a row soon and their well developed platform can flourish without a hitch!

We hope you found this article useful and best of luck with your video conferences and online meetings! We on the other hand will be concentrating on making sure your face to face meetings, your training sessions, collaborative workshops, board meetings and networking events are as successful and productive in our beautiful and unique conference venues… this of course will need to wait a bit, but we’ll be back and stronger than ever!