My Favorite Video Conference Application

I have not been to my office since March 7 of this year. Fortunately I still have a job but not going to the office because of COVID-19 means that I have to do all of my meetings using video conferencing applications. While it would be nice to take my meetings outside using my smartphone, I do 100% of my meetings using my laptop computer. For this reason, my favorite app is based on features available for the computer and not the smartphone. Furthermore it is important to know that I use my MacBook Pro and not a Windows laptop.

There are 3 major video conferencing applications: Zoom, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams. If Microsoft Teams sounds like a new product, it is based on their acquisition of Skype and leverages many years of experience doing video calls.

Unfortunately Zoom got a black-eye with a security breech early in the COVID-19 days. Because of that, my company does not allow anyone to use it for meetings. My understanding is that Zoom did a great job getting a fix in place and has gotten a lot of users with their free product which limits meeting times to only 40 minutes and have less than 100 people. My wife holds a weekly Zoom meeting on Emergency Preparedness for people in our community. She likes the 40-minute time limit as it keeps her meetings short and they can't run long.

WebEx has been around for a long time and is the video conference application I have used the longest. Recently I had a company-wide conference hosted on WebEx with around 200 participants. I recorded the conference and then sent people in my company links to the videos. That allowed people to view the conference even though they couldn't attend in person. Some of the presentations contained videos and WebEx has the ability to optimize for presentation text or multimedia (video and audio). That came in very handy. I also recently attended a company-wide WebEx meeting with 1000 people, which is the upper limit for the tool.

Finally there is Microsoft Teams and it seems to be the application of choice that my company is gravitating towards. One reason is that we use Office 365 applications and that means Outlook is our e-mail and scheduling program. When you want to schedule a video conference, you just click a button in the calendar program and a Teams meeting is automatically created. With WebEx, you have an extra step of logging into WebEx and setting up the meeting. My personal observation is that the quality of Teams is better than the other two video conferencing applications. The audio seems to be more clear and the video is equally impressive. Finally my favorite feature of Teams is the ability to use a virtual background. I took a picture of Snowbird and use it as my background, hiding the ugly gray walls and whiteboard in my home office. It does have the added conversation starter as people continually ask me if there is snow still in Utah.

So what is my favorite video conferencing application? It depends. If you are looking for a free solution, I think Zoom is probably your best bet. Unfortunately I don't have much experience with it. I also like WebEx for large meetings as they seem to have the better solution. Ultimately my workhorse for small group meetings is Microsoft Teams and I probably use it the most. All 3 solutions are full featured and differ only slightly in capabilities.

One final note is that I never see the bill for any of the video conferencing applications I use and so I have no idea on how much any of them cost. If cost is an issue for you, then you may rank the solutions differently.