Join.Me vs Webex Suite: Which is a better fit?

Grant: Hi, my name's Grant. I'm a financial advisor. I'm the only one in my business and I give join.me a three out of five. I actually wasn't using any similar tool to join.me before I started using it. The employer I was working for at the time was doing a lot of video calls, and this is the one that they recommended the entire team use. So I use join.me because it was really, really easy for clients to join. It doesn't have any kind of obscure name or anything like that. You literally just go to a website, join.me. You give them a code and they enter it and they can join a meeting. It's really just easy to think about and integrate in that way. You just say, "Hey, you're going to join me for a meeting, let's go to join.me." It's really easy to get started. Literally, yeah, join.me, you go to the website, it prompts you to enter the code to join the meeting. The only downside is if the person that you are having join the meeting doesn't already have the app, then they have to download it. At least that was the case when I was a user of join.me. I believe that now it can be web-based, but in terms of simplicity, it's really just that simple. When I was a solid user of join.me, they had a free plan, and that was really great because I wasn't having tons of meetings and it didn't really warrant paying a subscription. There is only a subscription option now, so you can't have a free plan if you just need to join meetings every now and again. It does have good security features if that is important to you, but honestly, if you're just looking for regular meetings, it doesn't really have anything that stands out. If you do need those extra features though, it does integrate with third party software and different tools as well. So it really just depends at the end of the day if those things are important to you or not.

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.