We switched from google hangouts to zoom a while ago because the quality "felt" better. We are a small distributed team where our internet connections run the range of fast to slow. We didn't track numbers or anything, but fewer dropouts, frozen videos, better sound quality, etc. Maybe we all just had better internet days each time we used zoom though. Never know.

The UI is initially confusing, but so is the UI for every video chat app I've used. It seems to be the fad to have "clever" UI in video chats apps (controls that auto-hide, non-standard icons, low contrast, non standard control placement (use the standard toolbar luke!) etc.

On top of that zoom has always "just worked". The "just worked" thing is now resulting in security woes, but still. Start a meeting, send link. Done. Online works, dial in works.

Contrast with hangouts (dropped non-chrome browser support for at least a year). To this day we have users that can't use slack video for unknown reasons (app store slack doesn't work as well as slack installer slack or something). WebEx is some horror show that seems to constantly re-install itself for each meeting. You're lucky if you can get it going before the meeting is over.

Where most apps stop at video chat and maybe poor quality screen sharing, zoom has a pretty deep enterprise feature set. Good webinar support, integration with SIP systems, SSO, recording etc.

Zoom is better at quality.

To give an example, they prioritize audio over anything else. Which makes sense because if you can't understand what the person is saying, you can't have a meeting. So they automatically downgrade or upgrade your video to try to keep latency decent on audio. Meet just has a manual setting where you can up or downgrade video or audio.

For the most part my understanding is that zoom is better at quality because it does not use webrtc - but hangout meet does. This means webrtc needs a lot of the fixing, which is hard because it's a standard.

zoom sends proprietary stuff over web sockets instead. Which is also why they prefer you use their fat clients with native decoding

When you say hangouts, do you mean old hangouts or the newer Hangouts Meet? They are 2 very different products.

It is, as of today, just Google Meet, no "Hangouts".

Hangouts still exists, I'm too confused at this stage as to what is what.

I thought so as well, but apparently it's called Google Hangouts Meet. https://gsuite.google.com/products/meet/

(disclaimer - I work at Google, but not on teams that build video chat software)

Disclaimer: also work at Google

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21214059/google-hangouts-m... you would be incorrect

When we used it they still called it hangouts.

Have you tried GoToMeeting? From the company that makes LastPass.

It's mostly equivalent to Zoom, from my experience. Grid view, screen sharing, recording, chat, file sharing, phone dial-in, calendar meetings, etc. If you follow a GTM invite link it downloads the app and run its for you, so nobody needs to have the app previously installed.

It's also rock stable. I've had hundreds of meetings with GTM, and never had any audio/video issues, whereas Google Hangouts/Meet has always been really flaky.

I wish more companies would ban WeChat's desktop clients and force them to re-enable the web version at web.wechat.com

WeChat now often pops up a notice when you try to use web.wechat.com that translates to "For your account safety you cannot use the web version, and you need to download a Windows or Mac client."

Safety my ass -- web is the safest. I know better than you about my safety, Tencent.

What companies would allow weChat apps on company machines or machines where company data is handled?

That is insane!

I have seen MANY people install it on company hardware because it's tiring to have long chats on a 5" screen and it's hard to send/receive files through a phone. Many hardware providers send/receive contracts and even firmware hex files over WeChat (WTF, I know, but they do) so you're forced to use it for work if you are in the hardware industry, but for most people Tencent doesn't let you use it from a desktop without a native app. And they try to brainwash you into thinking it's for your own "account safety". BS.

Also, Alibaba's conferencing client. If you even have a meeting with anyone at Alibaba, they send you a proprietary desktop client to use for the meeting. More people need to learn to stand up and say no to this. From a corporate executive level, proprietary conferencing apps need to be banned on company-owned machines.

What they should be doing is straight-up WebRTC running in a web browser, which works great, and which will work in China as long as you set up signalling servers there.

I went from Zoom to Jitsi with my family, because I was tired of it pushing the desktop client to me and the webapp limitations as you point out. Jitsi web supports Grid view, as well as desktop sharing (with audio!). We've been playing Jackbox games over it just fine.

How do you manage the audio for your games? Do you use the newer audio sharing setup, or have you rigged something up in OBS, etc?

Right in Jitsi, you share your screen and Chrome's dialog opens, you go "application window" and select your game, and check the little box "share audio". Here's a GIF from their newest blog post showing it: https://335wvf48o1332cksy23mw1pj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

Zoom tends to just work more reliably than other solutions in my experience.