Review: WebEx and GoToMeeting meet their match

Thomas Friedman famously announced that the world is flat in his 2005 book of that name; he was writing about globalization. In Friedman’s view, VoIP, file sharing, and wireless were the “steroids” that have accelerated the flattening of global commerce. Today I’d add video over Internet, which has become more and more prevalent as bandwidth has improved.

The two leaders in business Web conferencing are Cisco WebEx and Citrix GoToMeeting. Other products in the field include Adobe Connect, Drum ShareAnywhere, Join.me, and Zoom. Of course, I’m leaving a few out, in at least one case as a kindness to the vendor. (They hate it when I leave them out; they really hate it when I tear their product to shreds.)

Some businesses use consumer products for voice and video over the Internet. Microsoft Skype, Google Hangouts, and Google Voice (no video) are three I’ve used extensively. While these can be useful, they don’t quite meet the criteria for business-grade Web conferencing products.

These higher-end products are expected to simultaneously display desktop shares, video, and audio. They have high reliability and quality. They integrate with common desktop software, and they work with mobile devices. They are also expected to handle large conference broadcasts, either in the base service or as a separate product.

As we will see, there is a bit of variation among the business-grade products in all of these areas, as well as some differences in their bundling strategies and their behavior in restricted-bandwidth situations. There is also variation in the geographic coverage of vendors’ telephone points of presence (that is, global call-in numbers), although telephony infrastructure is becoming less important as more users call in from their computers (using microphones and speakers) or mobile devices.

Rise of WebRTC

The big tech news here is WebRTC, a draft set of protocols that define real-time communications in Web browsers. WebRTC, as specified, supports browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat, and peer-to-peer file sharing without the need of either internal or external plug-ins.

WebRTC has implementations (of varying compliance to standards) in most desktop, Android, and iOS browsers, with the exception of Internet Explorer and Safari. Microsoft Edgesupports the protocol, and plug-ins are available to add WebRTC to IE and Safari.

Unfortunately, as many Web meeting developers have found, no browser has fully implemented the current draft WebRTC spec, and the implementations differ. In the course of this review, I have sometimes been asked to use Firefox for my tests and sometimes to use Chrome. Vendors still have to resort to plug-ins, Java, or Flash for some specific features of their Web conferencing products, and for browsers they don’t yet support for WebRTC.

The specific capabilities that need plug-ins are mostly features for the conference host, such as screen sharing or file uploading. In many cases, Web conference attendees joining from a supported browser are able to do so without any downloads. As one of the biggest issues with Web conferencing has long been setup problems for “newbie” attendees, this marks improvement in the field.

Zoom

Zoom is an up-and-coming Web conferencing company founded by former WebEx developers. When I first looked at it a couple of years ago, Zoom had very good audio-visual quality — as good as or better than WebEx — but few features outside of core Web conferencing. Since then it has grown into a high-quality, all-in-one conferencing solution that lacks only persistent meeting spaces and objects, such as those found in Adobe Connect, Cisco Spark, and Citrix Podio.

Zoom meetings currently support Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops; iOS, Android, and BlackBerry mobile devices; and Cisco, Polycom, and Lifesize H.323/SIP video endpoints. Zoom does require a download to join a meeting from a desktop the first time, but it’s a relatively small and painless download. If integration with Cisco and other H.323/SIP video endpoints sounds like a shot across WebEx’s bow to you, I think you have the right idea. 

Zoom now has licensing plans for meetings that range from personal to enterprise-size, as well as for education, health care (HIPAA-compliant), and API partners. It allows on-premises deployment as well as cloud-based usage.

In addition to meetings, Zoom licenses Zoom Rooms, H.323/SIP room connectors, video webinars with up to 3,000 viewers, and teleconferencing through a worldwide call-in and call-out telephony network. Zoom Rooms are a multiscreen solution that is competitive with Google Chromebox, Microsoft Lync Room, and H.323/SIP video endpoints.

Zoom meetings offer text chats, high-quality and optionally stereo audio and HD video, screen and window sharing, shared whiteboards, and audio sharing. In the last update, Zoom added breakout rooms to meetings; that’s competitive with Adobe Connect. Zoom’s ability to display iPhone and iPad screens from a desktop using a software plug-in is unique among Web conferencing systems, according to the company, although it isn’t that much different from what you can do if you’ve joined an Adobe Connect meeting with a mobile device.

What I don’t see in Zoom today is file sharing, pre- and postmeeting functionality, as well as persistent meeting rooms and objects. Less important, I don’t see any way to customize layouts or share course materials persistently from the cloud. On the other hand, you can integrate Zoom with learning management systems, and you can record meetings either locally or in the cloud.

LogMeIn Join.me

While WebEx and GoToMeeting seem to be engaged in a features race, Join.me has concentrated on simplicity and ease of use. (To be fair, WebEx has also streamlined its UI and improved its ease of use, albeit without cutting features.) As Basecamp showed for the project management space, sometimes fewer features and a simpler interface make for a more usable and effective product than including everything anyone could possibly want, no matter how infrequently they’d want it.

What feature set does Join.me support? Audio and video, obviously, but for fun (and probably to save bandwidth) the video feeds are displayed in bubbles, which you can move around at will. As you’d expect, you have text chat, whiteboarding, and screen sharing.

If you’re subscribed, attendees can use conference numbers in more than 50 countries and share windows as well as screens. Meeting recordings are stored in the cloud. You get a persistent personal link and can customize your background, you can lock a meeting and decide whether to admit people who knock to join, you can swap presenters, you can annotate the meeting, and you can use the meeting scheduler. At the Pro level, you have 5GB of storage for recordings; at the Enterprise level, you have 5TB.

You can join a meeting with one touch if you have an Apple Watch. If you use Chrome, you can take advantage of Join.me’s WebRTC support, but you can also join with a stand-alone client or with another browser using the older plug-in.

With an Enterprise subscription, you have single sign-on, policy and permission management, and user and group management. You also get Salesforce integration.

On the downside, there’s no video endpoint or Linux support. The only postmeeting collaboration option is an email that the host is prompted to send to attendees after a meeting. For a persistent group workspace, you would want something like Cisco Spark, Citrix Podio, or an Adobe Connect team meeting room.

Join.me claims that its typical Enterprise license is half the cost of others, although they make you call sales instead of giving you a price. Join.me also includes unlimited audio as part of the subscription; there are no per-minute fees.

The company claims to have the highest customer satisfaction and the fastest-growing product in the Web meeting market. While I have no real reason to doubt these claims, they set off my “marketing bullshit” detector, and I take them with a grain of salt. Its absolute market share is certainly much smaller than WebEx’s.

I like Join.me for casual meetings. It’s certainly worth trying the free version to see whether you like it.

Drum ShareAnywhere

Drum ShareAnywhere is an example of what you can do toward building a Web conferencing system with WebRTC and HTML5, without plug-ins or downloads except for screen sharing. Drum has implementations on Firefox, Chrome, and mobile browsers, although video doesn’t currently work on Chrome.

ShareAnywhere has basic meeting and collaboration capabilities, as well as a very limited telephony network. On the other hand, you can start a Web meeting almost instantly, with good audio quality.

Drum is currently unable to upgrade a Web audio call to a video call. You need to leave the meeting and join again using the video option. The video window shows only the active speaker; even with this bandwidth optimization, in a test call between the United States and the company in England, I noticed video pausing.

The Drum representative suggested I’d get better video performance if I hard-wired my computer to the network. However, after the meeting I benchmarked my Wi-Fi connection and saw 75Mbps in both directions, so I don’t think so. In addition, I am able to see 10 simultaneous video streams on this computer without pauses using other Web conferencing software.

ShareAnywhere is a promising start, but it isn’t yet a serious contender in today’s Web meeting market.

Citrix GoToMeeting

While WebEx started the Web meeting industry, GoToMeeting has managed to develop even greater brand recognition, if not market share. I don’t know whether that’s because of the name, the marketing, or the service itself.

While WebEx tends to bundle many of its services, Citrix breaks its similar services up into different SKUs: GoToMeeting does not include ShareFile, for example, and the high-capacity GoToWebinar and GoToWebcast products are separate, as is the GoToTraining product. On the other hand, the Podio product introduced two years ago provides a persistent combination of social collaboration, meetings, and file sharing that is similar to WebEx.

GoToMeeting installs a Mac or Windows client application to actually run Web meetings, unless you are using Chrome, which supports a no-download HTML5/WebRTC client. Chrome is the only way to run GoToMeeting in Linux. Versioning of the client applications remains problematic. Can you guess how many versions of GoToMeeting I had on my iMac before cleaning them out of my Applications directory?

I used GoToMeeting for several years. In general, audio quality was good and has improved. Video quality can vary, but is much better if you use HD. If you haven’t tried it, GoToMeeting offers a free Lite version with video and screen sharing for up to three people, which you can use without even signing up, and a 30-day GoToMeeting test-drive. GoToMeeting lets you record meetings and save them on your own disk, but you’ll have to convert the recordings after the meeting before they will be usable.

Podio Lite is a free five-employee, five-external-user version of the online work platform Podio. Originally called Hoist, Podio signed its first customers in 2009 and was acquired by Citrix in 2012. Podio now uses Citrix’s infrastructure, GoToMeeting for the Web conferencing portion, and ShareFile for file collaboration, while retaining its own Web “apps” for different types of workspaces. Podio is similar to Cisco Spark, but isn’t linked to GoToMeeting.

I like the way Podio gives each project or meeting its own collaborative dashboard and the way it makes the network functionality feel subservient to the real work being done. At the end of the day, however, Podio and WebEx offer most of the same features and benefits, with somewhat different pricing models: Podio prices per employee, and WebEx prices per organizer.

Cisco WebEx

The doyenne of the teleconferencing world, WebEx is now a total solution for preconference planning, conferencing, and postconference follow-up and action. In addition to supporting Windows, Mac, and Linux, WebEx has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 8 Phone, and BlackBerry. It integrates with most Office and Office-like applications, and with most video endpoints.

In the last year, WebEx has not only picked up a cleaner, more streamlined UI but also new plumbing — meaning HD audio, faster startup, compatibility with third-party endpoints, and a new, persistent “personal room” for your meetings, along with control over the “lobby,” the area for participants waiting to join a locked meeting. In addition, WebEx has ditched its proprietary AV formats and now uses standard formats such as MP4. Corporate administrators can customize the UI; I only saw the stock UI as it comes from WebEx.

I like the new WebEx interface, and I like the meeting space concept. While you can certainly do meeting planning, scheduling, and document exchange via email, putting all of that in one place is a convenience and helps to organize projects. I also like the way WebEx arranges its video windows so that you can see all the participants small while the speaker is big. WebEx also seems to be able to handle more simultaneous video and audio streams than some of the competing products, and the issues I used to have with WebEx audio seem to be gone.

A new, no-download “browser client” is currently in limited beta; in fact, it’s a WebRTC client. The company recommends using Firefox if you want to use WebRTC, which is a message I’ve heard from several vendors. It makes sense for WebEx to wait until its WebRTC client is completely cooked before releasing it for production.

A new persistent, postmeeting group workspace called Cisco Spark is offered to the host after every WebEx meeting; it’s currently free. The host can easily invite the meeting attendees and, later on, anyone else they need to pull in for discussions. A Spark room feels a little like a private Slack channel, only with videoconferencing on demand. Spark is available for Web browsers and for iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, and Windows.

With something like 2.6 billion meeting minutes a month, WebEx is a must-evaluate option for companies in the market for Web conferencing. Signing up for free gives you a 14-day trial of WebEx Premium 25 (for 25 people), followed by a perpetual license to the free basic service.

Adobe Connect

Adobe Connect is a high-end Web conferencing, Webinar, and learning solution with persistent, customizable rooms arranged from pods, which are little windows with specific functionality — similar to what are called widgets in other contexts.

A host can arrange pods into layouts, and both save and load layouts at will. A host can also add pods to his room from the Adobe Connect app marketplace, which contains both free and paid pods from Adobe partners.

The multiple layout feature allows the host to have persistent layouts for different audiences and activities. The weekly status meeting can start with the notes and diagrams from the previous meeting visible along with the newly uploaded agenda for the current meeting; a class that ends in the middle of a lecture can pick up at the same slide when it continues.

Note that the host determines the layout, not the individual participants or the system. That means, for example, that an instructor knows where his video pod is in the layout and can point at other pods from the live video window and be confident that students are seeing the intended destination. The host can also change the layout on the fly — for example, to focus attendees’ attention on a presentation or some code.

A second display area, the Presenter Only area, is visible to hosts and presenters, but not attendees. Hosts and presenters can use the Presenter Only area (also known as Backstage) to prepare content to be shared with attendees or to view confidential content.

Connect currently uses Flash to power the client side of the meetings on top of desktop browsers. In addition, it uses a plug-in to improve video performance. While these may not be as fashionable as WebRTC and HTML5, Adobe has an installed base that isn’t uniformly ready for HTML5. According to Peter Ryce, senior technical evangelist at Adobe, some large customers have PCs that are still locked down to Windows XP and IE8. In any case, once the Flash component loads, the performance is fine.

People who are trying to join a meeting that is offline or locked wait in a lobby area. The host can admit attendees from the lobby selectively.

In addition to persistent personal rooms, Connect supports Team rooms. That solves at least two problems: It enables a meeting to go on even if the manager is away or out sick, and it allows team members to refer to and work on shared meeting notes and diagrams stored in the Team room at any time.

Meeting and training hosts can create breakout rooms and assign attendees to them. Once everyone is assigned, the host can start the breakout sessions and later stop them. All attendees in breakout sessions have presenter roles.

Connect has registration functionality for webinar events. Essentially, you generate a registration website by filling in a form.

For virtual classrooms, you can upload and store course materials and curricula. The model here is that you can combine synchronous and asynchronous online learning to make full use of a virtual classroom even when you’re not actively teaching.

You can create meeting recordings in the cloud, edit the recordings, and play them back at any time. You can also export meeting recordings in FLV or MP4 format, and control the quality of the exported recording.

According to Adobe, Connect is serving 7 billion minutes of meetings a year. That’s a lot of meeting minutes, but nowhere near the volume of Cisco WebEx.

I think that Adobe Connect is currently a stronger product than WebEx or GoToMeeting, even though it doesn’t have the market share of either one. You can evaluate Connect free for 30 days. It’s worth doing.

Web conferencing from A to Z

I’ve discussed six Web conferencing systems that have a common core of meeting functionality and different additional features. There are use cases that might make you prefer one or another.

For example, WebEx and Zoom both integrate with H.323 and SIP video endpoints; to the best of my knowledge, Adobe Connect integrates with SIP endpoints directly and H.323 endpoints through a third-party bridge. If you have that kind of expensive video endpoint, integration with what the rest of the company uses for Web conferences probably matters to you. If you don’t have that kind of equipment but want to equip a conference room inexpensively, Zoom Rooms might be a good option for you.

Adobe Connect, Cisco Spark, and Citrix Podio all support persistent team rooms. Zoom, Join.me, Citrix GoToMeeting, and Drum ShareAnywhere concentrate on the meeting itself. Whether you care depends on what else you use and how you work. For example, you might find that combining Slack with Zoom or Join.me gives you enough ongoing collaboration for your purposes.

If you want to use Web conferencing for e-learning, your best stand-alone choice may be Adobe Connect. On the other hand, you can marry Zoom to several learning management systems to create a strong hybrid solution.

For a small startup with no money, most of these products offer a low-end free plan. Not all the “free” plan restrictions are the same, however. Most restrict the number of attendees. Zoom restricts the length of the meeting.

As you can tell from the scores, I like Adobe Connect and Zoom a lot. WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Join.me all work well, and I could certainly live with any of them. The only argument I’d make for Drum ShareAnywhere over the others is that Firefox and mobile device users can join a meeting almost instantly with WebRTC. Other than that, it’s my last choice.