GoTo Meeting vs Webex Suite: Which is a better fit?

Clint S.: Hi. My name's Clint, and I am a part of a software development company for a dedicated industry. So it's a SaaS, vertical SaaS software, and I oversee all of our revenue and sales. In terms of GoTo Meeting, I would rate GoTo Meeting on a scale of one to five, five being the best. I'd rate GoTo Meeting at a three. Before using GoTo Meeting, my company was using Join.Me, and some of the issues that we were finding is we were getting drop calls now and then. It seemed like there was a little bit too much clutter that our company... the level of our volume was proposing or creating for Join.Me, which our meetings and Zoom with our prospects are our revenue. It's incredibly valuable, so it was a critical issue that we had to take care of. We chose GoTo Meeting because of the simplicity it provided. It was very easy to use and understand for all of our users. So there was little training, really, necessary. It was almost plug-and-play. We found also that the price was very fair. In fact, we found it to be almost cheaper than most of its comparables in the industry. Finally and the big one was that it hit and achieved what we needed, which was our critical issue, which was it hosted... It was able to keep up with the volume that we provided. Ultimately, what we found out was that GoTo Meeting used lesser bandwidth than Join.Me, and that allowed more individuals or more individual IP users to be on the network, if you will, with their licensings without putting too much strain. Thus, we had no more issues when using GoTo Meeting. Getting started and implementing GoTo Meeting was an experience that my team was pleasantly surprised overall. We had a dedicated individual that we would be able to speak to whenever we had questions and that would actually walk us through personalized training. Even when we didn't request it, they came to us saying, "We're going to go through several personalized meetings together, and you're going to have this individual to work through throughout the entire time to build out business relationship with." So, whereas some of the other softwares that we looked at, most of the training involved videos and, "Here, watch these, these videos. Disperse these out to your team, and then we'll see you on the other end." It felt like there was more of a personal touch and walkthrough with the GoTo Meeting team, which we were really appreciative of, and that allowed us to have questions asked and answered very quickly. It addressed questions that we didn't even have to ask because we were already there with somebody live during our scheduled sessions throughout the timeframe, and the time to implement was a lot less than what we had previously. So we thought we were moving up to a much more robust system. Implementation is going to be more complex, but that was not the case with GoTo Meeting. If you're in the market looking for software like GoTo Meeting and you're looking at some of its competitors, something to look at overall is what kind of volume you're going to bring and use. Some of the other competitors that are very popular right now, I've mentioned one here in my review, but there's others that use large amounts of bandwidth. So if you're bringing a lot of volume on your sales team, or your customer or your staff base, then that can pose a risk. So that's something to look into and ask, and I learned that the hard way. I didn't think that was something that I needed to be worried about. I was really looking at features to begin with, but that posed a critical and even a costly issue until we got it fixed. So it'd be something I'd really highly recommend. Then, lastly, I'd also recommend not to get swayed by all the fun and cool integrations that exist out there with some of the other popular software, web conference softwares. We tested one of those before. We thought those were really neat, but then found that we almost use none of them ultimately. So, really, what you want to stay focused on are the table stakes of really what you need. So be very clear on that. That way, you can stack your functionality and your price up to what you really need.

Diane: Hi, I'm Diane. I'm the founder of PreQualified Mates, and I give Webex a four out of five. I have used virtually every application that preceded Webex, including GoTo Meeting. I was an early adopter of Webex, I've used them all. I have hosted thousands of web-based meetings, so name it, I have used it. We used Webex for PreQualified Mates because of my experience with everything that preceded it, and the state of Webex at that time. I'd only used Webex for B2B, and we were using it in a B2C application. The other reason that I chose Webex at that time was that Zoom was really immature, and the real business model at that time was actually storage, which might be a surprise to most people, but what really appealed to me with Webex is that you had the ability to locally store and control your data. You didn't have to store your data on a data farm and pay for storage offsite unless you chose to do so. As I said, when we launched PreQualified Mates, we were using Webex for internal use, interviewing our clients and prospective clients. And it was actually really challenging, not because of Webex per se, but we were using it in a B2C environment. Hence, when we would prep our prospective clients in advance to confirm that they had a platform hardware to launch a Webex session, it was so challenging because it turned out that a lot of people's own personal computers are really old and obsolete. So it was a real struggle, really painful, and we spent an inordinate amount of time doing the troubleshooting, which really was not at all the fault of Webex. It was that the clients were using really old equipment, and it was really important to us to record the data. So at the time, it was using FaceTime or something, or Skype was an inadequate alternative, and Zoom was too immature at that time to be considered as an alternative. So, it was very challenging, and I've used Webex for so many years. I have tons of war wounds from what it was like in the early versions, which is nothing like it is today, which is easy-peasy. But going back, there were some challenges, but the challenges we had with my company per se, were really the challenges of a B2C environment, which was not my prior experience, which was all B2B and more on an enterprise level. I'd suggest that you review the licensing and forecast your requirements pretty clearly. Make sure you understand what it's like to add additional users and so forth. I'd also suggest you do research on backgrounds and environments. I've written a great blog on it, for example, but there's all sorts of really good material to that end, and I personally like real environments versus the faux screens, but other than that, just do your due diligence on the front end.