If you run a business, it makes sense to be familiar with video conferencing software. Not only does it make sense, but you’ll probably want to take the plunge and start using it for your important meetings as well as regular discussions among your team members.
Here’s some more information on some of the best free video meeting options as well as those that cost you nothing.
YouTube Live
Who should use it?
YouTube Live, like Facebook Live, is a platform for demonstrating a product with live Q&A, hosting an educational session to teach your audience while screen sharing or using a whiteboard, or hosting a live conversation with members of your team.
Top Free Features:
- Three stream quality options (normal latency, low-latency, ultra-low latency)
- Added delay
- Live questions from the audience
- Private live streams (people can only access with the link)
- Advanced scheduling
- Live automatic captions
- Location tags
Google Hangouts
Who should use it?
Google Hangouts is a simple way to connect with Google contacts (or those outside of your network) and can be used for personal or business reasons. Use this tool for individual conversations, team meetings, recorded demos, and more.
Top Free Features:
- Up to 25 video participants
- Video, audio, and messenger conversations
- Video meeting recordings
- Join calls using Google Calendar
- Screen sharing
Dialpad Meetings
Who should use it?
The free version of Dialpad Meetings is ideal for teams of 10 or less. The free version limits your video call duration to 45 minutes, so it’s ideal for shorter meetings. Since it allows unlimited video conferences, you can use this video conferencing tool for recurring meetings, like 1-1s or monthly team debriefs.
Top Free Features:
- Up to 10 participants
- Unlimited conferences
- Call recording
- HD Audio
- Screen and document sharing
- Mobile apps
TrueConf Online
Who should use it?
TrueConf offers a free plan with up to three participants in video calls. This solution is great for small teams or individuals who need a simple tool to host video calls or collaborate with small groups. The collaboration features like remote desktop control are helpful for those in support who may need to help a client solve a problem.
Top Free Features:
- Up to three participants on team calls
- HD video
- Collaboration tools (screen sharing, remote desktop control, recorded calls, file transfer, and shared virtual whiteboard)
Skype
Who should use it?
The free version of Skype works well for small teams with less than 10 total members. It is a good tool if you need a simple way to video chat from your computer, phone, or tablet and tend to have smaller group meetings or 1-1 conversations. Skype also offers a tool called Skype in the Classroom specifically designed for online education.
Top Free Features:
- Up to 10 people on video calls
- HD video calling
- Screen sharing
- Video call recording
- Interactive video chats
- Location sharing
FreeConference
Who should use it?
FreeConference ideal for smaller teams or meetings with five or fewer participants. One major perk of this video conferencing tool is its ease of use — no downloads are required to start using it. Plus, moderator controls allow the individual who’s running the video conference to keep the meeting on track.
Top Free Features:
- Up to 5 online meeting participants
- Screen sharing
- Document sharing
- Moderator controls
- Text chat
If you’re looking for a completely free video conferencing service, FreeConferenceCall gives you most basic features—including call recording, screen sharing, and calendar integrations. It’s easy enough to use, with sign-up only taking a few seconds.
The free plan lets you host audio or video meetings with up to 1,000 participants, and you can choose to add a virtual phone plan for toll-free and international calling, plus add-ons like customization and extra cloud storage space.
Although the main features are offered for free, FreeConferenceCall operates on a “pay what you can” scheme where the company asks for donations for the service—but the choice of whether to be a freeloader or a philanthropist is entirely up to you.
If you use the free plan, you and your participants do have to put up with ads on calls and invitations.
FreeConferenceCall does have a paid plan called StartMeeting (which seems like a totally different company, but isn’t). This costs $9.95 per month (up to 10 users), or you can contact them for customized enterprise-level packages.
Slack Video Calls
Who should use it?
Slack users can take advantage of the call feature by simply using the command /call or clicking the phone icon at the top of the conversation with another Slack user. This is an easy way to make calls right from Slack if you need to ask a teammate a quick question. You can also Slack with up to 15 people if you start a call from a channel, enabling the rest of the channel’s members to join. This tool is good for teams looking for a supplementary video calling solution for small teams.
Top Free Features:
- Group calls of up to 15 people
- Individual calls
- Messenger
Facebook Live
Who should use it?
Facebook Live is a great fit for businesses, influencers, or individuals who are looking to broadcast demos, videos, or showcase their company culture while streaming live. Your followers on Facebook can comment and chat live, you can select a custom audience for the video, and you can schedule videos ahead of time to gain excitement.
Top Free Features:
- Broadcasts up to four hours
- Advanced scheduling
- Custom audiences
Dialpad (Try it for free!)
If you’ve been paying attention so far, you’ll have noticed us pointing out a few of Dialpad’s cool features—but there’s more.
The ability to join—and host—video meetings from any browser with no downloads is a big selling point, but in case you do like apps, there’s a mobile and desktop app too.
Besides the Outlook and Google Calendar integrations, there’s also a useful automatic dial-out to participants. What this does is make sure that everyone arrives at your video meeting on time because it “calls” your attendees when it’s time for the meeting to start—no more “pinging people to see if they can make it.”
We mentioned the screen sharing and HD video and voice quality, but there’s also a voice enhancement function that reduces background noise (both for those who join through the app or dial in using a phone).
Dialpad’s also designed a thoughtful post-meeting experience, with a post-call summary that automatically gets emailed to participants. (It’s also where you’ll find the meeting recording, transcript, and follow-up action items.)
Not that you had to take all those notes yourself! Dialpad’s Vi not only acts as your personal meeting assistant for note-taking and to-dos, but can also do other things like detect customer sentiment on phone calls by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to pick up on keywords and phrases (if you’re using the contact center product).
Other fun features include custom hold music and the perfect ice-breaker game: Buzzword Bingo.
Dialpad’s pricing is simple and very affordable for businesses. The free version gives small businesses plenty of features, including unlimited 45-minute meetings (up to 10 participants), HD quality, screen sharing, an integration with Salesforce (which is the CRM of choice for most businesses), and unlimited call recordings.
The Standard tier costs $15 per host per month, has up to 100 participants, and gives you call transcriptions and automated post-call notes.
Lifesize
Lifesize is a video conferencing platform whose flagship feature is 4K video conferencing, making it an option for businesses who hold a lot of virtual meetings with high-value clients.
Standard features like call recording, screen sharing, and one-click meetings are included in the free plan. The Lifesize app can be used on mobile and desktop devices with a simple download, and the layout is easy to navigate. You also get useful integrations with third-party programs such as Microsoft Teams and Slack.
The downsides are that it doesn’t have end-to-end encryption, and doesn’t manage its own data centers, which could be a concern for some businesses. And the 99.9% uptime SLA is only provided to customers who buy the Extreme Support package.
The free plan offers meetings of 40 minutes for up to 10 team members, plus online support and access to the desktop and mobile apps.
If you need to upgrade, the Standard plan costs $12.50 per host per month, which increases capacity to 100 participants and meeting length to unlimited duration. Single sign-on (SSO) support and a centralized management console are included.
The Plus plan costs $14.95 per host per month (minimum 10 hosts), and covers meetings of up to 300 participants, as well as Microsoft 365 integration, real-time insights, and cloud storage for meeting recordings. A customized Enterprise package is also available.
Google Meet
Previously known as Google Hangouts Meet, this is an easy-to-use service that’s free for up to 100 participants and unlimited meetings (with a Google account). It’s designed to work in the Google Chrome browser, and has mobile apps available for iOS and Android.
Google Meet comes with unlimited Google Drive storage if you have five or more users, and can be coupled with Google Voice to give you a basic cloud phone option. As well as integrations with other apps, tech-savvy types can also build their own custom app using Apps Script.
However, the service doesn’t provide cloud recording or storage unless you pay, and it doesn’t feature business SMS or secure online fax options. The features you’ll get depend on which version of Workspace or G Suite you have. If you want up to 150 meeting participants, you can pay $8 per month for Workspace Essentials, or contact Google to customize an Enterprise plan.
AnyMeeting
AnyMeeting offers an easy-to-use interface and a handful of features, including screen annotations in the whiteboard function, an AI-powered smart assistant for meeting transcriptions, and unlimited recording, storage, and sharing capabilities.
The free tier limits you to only four meeting participants, though it does support a phone conference bridge, desktop and mobile apps, and custom meeting URLs. You also get a choice of video layouts and virtual backgrounds, plus guaranteed 99.999% uptime SLA.
Unlike Dialpad, AnyMeeting doesn’t have end-to-end encryption of ongoing calls, which could raise privacy and security concerns, but they have other security settings like automatic or manual locking of meetings, the option to set a password for the meeting, and the removal of participants if necessary.
The paid tiers will get you integrations with popular office tools including Outlook, Workspace, and Slack. These start at $9.99 per user per month for the Lite version, which enables up to 10 participants but not many more features than the free version.
It’s $12.99 per user per month for the Pro version, which gives you up to 100 participants, the full suite of meeting and collaboration tools, and 24/7 support. You can also add custom branding to meetings with a company logo and personalized background.
Finally, the Enterprise tier offers you all the bells and whistles for $17.99 per user per month, including up to 200 web participants, meeting transcripts, and international dial-in.
Whereby
The first thing to note about Whereby is that it’s a Norwegian company, so it operates under the notoriously strict Norwegian privacy laws. This is good for businesses with particular concerns about security, and means you can reassure your customers that their data is safe.
There’s a free version with screen sharing, chat, emojis, and moderator controls. You can host meetings with up to 100 participants for up to 45 minutes, and unlimited one-on-one meetings. The Pro tier costs $6.99 per license per month, or it’s $9.99 for the Business version which includes priority support. Both paid tiers accommodate up to 100 participants.
Whereby allows you to lock your rooms, but new guests can “knock” and have their entry approved by the meeting administrator. In the paid tiers, you can choose your own personalized URL and use the same one for every meeting, while meetings can be recorded and saved.
Since the entire platform is web-based, you only need a URL to access a meeting—no need to download anything or even create an account. It’s suitable for small team meetings and for inviting people who are not especially tech-savvy.
Zoom
You’ve probably heard of Zoom. It became popular as a free video conferencing service that gives small companies the basic conferencing tools they need and for the most part that hasn’t changed.
Free Zoom meetings can accommodate up to 100 participants for 40 minutes, and include functions like background noise suppression, screen sharing, and recording—and like with Dialpad, you can schedule meetings from Outlook, Gmail, or iCal.
You’ll also get access to reactions, polls, hand raising, and filters (though it might be best to leave the filters alone during formal meetings—we’ve all seen the guy who turned himself into a cat and got stuck that way).
Zoom doesn’t let you send team messages, share files, or track tasks, so you’ll need to use other apps alongside it—and you can’t add a meeting agenda to the invite from the app itself.
Larger organizations will probably want to upgrade to a paid tier, but it’s quite a big leap to $149.90 per year for the Pro version, $199.90 for Business, or $240 for Enterprise.
Conclusion
Video conferencing has changed the way businesses run their operations forever. However, the industry is changing faster than ever with varying types of video conferencing applications being introduced on a regular basis. Evidently, no single online meeting platform will work for every kind of business. That’s why it’s important to know your options before you invest in tools.