We are G-Suite at work so obviously use Hangouts Meet everywhere. However, whenever we need a company-wide meeting we switch to Zoom as apparently HM can't handle this.
Zoom is the only thing that's worked reliably in conferences for me. Some of those apps work for small calls but aren't made for work meetings.
Our university had premium GSuite accounts for every student beforehand and STILL moved all its classes onto Zoom in 2020, because Meet/Hangouts was (and still is) far behind. Aside from lacking some of Zoom's important features and always having random issues with joining meetings, it totally hogs your CPU to the point of it actually impacting meetings, probably cause it uses VP9 which doesn't have hardware accel on most machines.
I can tell you that this is pretty much everyone. I've just experienced this in some interviews and conferences where people were using Zoom and Teams for the first time.
There was definitely much more confusion when using Zoom than teams. How do I share my screen? How do I open the participants/chat when sharing the screen ... The interface especially when sharing a screen is absolutely horrible.
I run on Linux currently and Macbooks previously. I've run into problems almost every time I tried a meeting in Google hangouts (which to be fair has not been often).
Zoom just works across Windows, Mac, and Linux. Problems with meetings are very rare. My previous employer VMware moved from Webex and GotoMeeting to Zoom. It added up to 5 minutes of productive times to calls for engineering teams due the fact that things actually worked and people weren't futzing around with audio, etc.
Zoom is much easier to use than Teams for conference calls. When I use Teams for conference calls, I find the default never works for establishing a connection (I have found that connecting through the browser works fine -- but this is not the default way to connect -- it still takes some effort to pick the path that works).
I have also found the user interface is non-intuitive. I had little trouble getting up to speed on zoom (from webex). I might have less problems with Team once I get used to its interface. At present, if anyone accidentally schedules a meeting with Team (which sometimes is the default conference call setting in our Outlook), they usually create a zoom conference call link which is used instead (usually, the notification for the zoom link goes out through slack -- for some reason, folks don't even chat over team to let folks know that the meeting has been changed to zoom).
As far as the application itself, I find that Slack is much easier to use and has capabilities that have been very helpful. The Slack user interface was intuitive and I quickly got up to speed. For Teams, I use it when I need to (not all times at our company have slack) but everyone I know prefers slack. The slack ui is more intuitive and has features such as slacking to yourself which is useful for notetaking. Again, my opinion of Teams might change as I better learn the user interface.
(I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.)
Zoom,
1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.)
2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)
What's up does chat / does duo? We use zoom at work despite being on Google - meet really doesn't always work across even Google account tyoes. Ie Gmail vs gsuite vs some admin left some setting off for an external users domain and they cannot join.
Zoom I can host a no account conference that everyone can join (waiting rooms driving us all crazy)
Zoom meetings created on my company's account can only be joined by people logged in through my company's SSO (unless the meeting is explicitly set to open).
Universities typically have SSO, so this don't seem like a hard thing for them to implement.
My company uses hangouts almost exclusively, but I have had a chance to work with a 3rd party that uses zoom and zoom is amazing. It just works. Most conferencing software I rate on a numberline of hate. Zoom doesn't even exist on that dimension for me.
We tried using Google Meet for work meetings at my university. The experience SUCKED compared to Zoom. There were serious problems like taking 30 seconds to a minute for the screen share widget to popup after clicking the button in Firefox! It was, frankly, unusable for us.
We also tried self-hosting Jitsi, and while that kind of worked, we had some problems getting everyone to be able to connect to it and send/receive audio. It went on the backburner of things to look into more later.
Zoom has a lot of problems, clearly, but it solved THE most important issue: we can actually communicate successfully with it -- as in right now with minimal additional effort. That's why it won.
I will try that next time. I don't think that occurred to me because the Zoom app experience is very good. What I have been doing instead is joining from the Teams app on my phone unless I must share content.
Video and audio quality in hangouts is terrible, it also doesn’t support gallery view so groups larger than 2 are a lot worse than zoom for that reason alone.
You also do need gmail, an app, and to have it enabled.
Zoom is in a class of its own in terms of actual call quality and UX, it’s a lot better.
Zoom "just works". My in-laws joined a Zoom conference without help. There is no way they would have figured out Hangouts or Teams.
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