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Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?

31 points by blairanderson ↗ HN
and what website do you use to quickly find a good breakdown of services for a given problem?

finding that conference call systems are either free (bare-bones and super limited) or ++$150/year for every feature on the planet.

I want audio conference calls with more than 5 participants and longer than 40 minutes.

44 comments

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jdorfman
Zoom.us
agotterer
Same here. Zoom has been great for our company. We found google hangouts to be very unreliable and buggy (audio constantly not working, pixelated videos, etc). Zoom has a free tier for calls up to soemthing like 45 min. Most of our company is on the free tier and we have pro accounts for the sales and account teams who spend more time on calls. The zoom rooms (for conf rooms) is a bit pricier but you can use your own hardware.
mtmail
https://appear.in/
GFischer
Appear.in is great, but I don't think it's good enough for more than 5 people (which is what the poster is asking about) unless everybody's bandwidth is great.
ereyes01
To echo what others have said, it's great if everyone's internet connection is rock solid. It seems that their calls are setup as fully connected graph between participants, and it has happened more than once that I can hear some people that other participants can't and vice-versa. I usually try to cap it at 3 participants, or it can get messy.
twunde
Uberconference.com, although admittedly I've seen Zoom frequently and I'm starting to see Google Meet in my org (ask but ubercobference support video). For audio, it federally depends on where people are calling from (India tends to eliminate a few potions), if it's internal, and the number (100+ changes things)
kamphey
I use UberConference and love it.
BostonEnginerd
I've been using Uberconference for the last few years. It works pretty darn well. I've noticed that some conference phones have problems with echoing, but haven't' been able to isolate. I suspect it's just lousy phone hardware.
ljoshua
Another vote for Uberconference. Call quality is consistently good, it's nice to get the visuals of callers along with the LinkedIn data (though that's only right maybe half the time) and the controls are easy to use.

Screen sharing is very slick as well, so long as the sharer is using Chrome. The only thing I find missing is the ability to share mouse/keyboard control, but in typical conference settings that's usually not a frequently used feature.

rfc
Jumping on the bandwagon here. We use Uberconference and absolutely love it. Audio is crystal clear and haven't had any issues with it.
odonnellryan
Yeah I think I'm going to switch to Google. Tried the ol' webex and it was garbage.
kilroy123
I also really like uberconfrence. I use their other product DialPad, as well. That's where you have a dedicated phone number and can make calls to anywhere.
ereyes01
I love uberconference and use it whenever call reliability is really important because participants can always dial-in in the worst case scenario.

One interesting edge case I ran into with uberconference was that I was trying to setup a sales call with someone behind an onerous corporate firewall that blocked all P2P traffic, and their connection to uberconference. The only solutions that were known to work on their network were Zoom and Webex.

twunde
I will note that I've had some trouble with Uberconference when calling US to India, although that may have been the phones/conference rooms that the teams in India were calling from. That said, I used to use it while traveling in Italy to run meetings in the US and the call quality was great.
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sologoub
Corp webex. Used to use join.me at a different employer - worked great for smaller meetings, but people always had problems setting up larger (20+ person) calls. Hangouts worked great too, but had a hard limit on number of participants.

For personal, Twilio or Plivo numbers :)

dixie_land
chime.aws
compsciphd
terrible Linux support. Its hard to understand how a company whose products are built on a Linux platform and who use dogfood this product for all their internal needs, doesn't have good Linux support.
zoratu
The app is mediocre at best on all platforms, but the service works well.
AdamGibbins
I work on a cross platform team, i.e. Linux, macOS and sometimes WIndows. Zoom did us well, but then Slack calls appeared and its almost entirely replaced our usage. It works well, no complaints.
confounded
How did you make zoom.us work on Linux? It always seems to make try and download an .exe file. Zoom is one of the ever-decreasing uses for my emergency mac.
DKnoll
I set one up on Twilio for an employer, cost is slightly more than the ~$1/month per DID with minutes charges. It's a small conference with an unchanging set of attendees so I just have it protected with a static pin.

I am in the process of setting up FusionPBX somewhere else at the moment, which I am hosting on a ~$7 a month VPS (lunanode.com). This will support all phone functions for this organisation, and also offer conference calling. PSTN trunking through voip.ms. Monthly cost is slightly more than $12 (including charges for ~5 DIDs and minutes).

> and what website do you use to quickly find a good breakdown of services for a given problem?

I make heavy use of AlternativeTo.net.

teirce
To be the boring voice here... Skype for Business.

The calls themselves are fine, but the applications are garbage. I'd advise against the platform.

Haven't tried MS Teams yet.

vadimberman
It's great for large organisations, but do you use it often for cross-organisational calls?

I remember having all kinds of issues, but it was a year ago.

teirce
I'm not directly experienced with this (most of my work is internal) so I don't know exactly how it works, or if they use Skype explicitly, but my company makes quite a few calls with other organizations.

At worst, it would be possible using our Skype meetings and phoning any external orgs in using the dial-in phone line. Not exactly elegant, but functional. (Hopefully that's not what they do, though...)

apapli
Skype 4 Biz works great for us. We are on Office 365. We do internal conference calls on it and also give the conference number out for clients externally.

Being able to set up a con call from the Outlook mobile app is an awesome feature too. Quality has been fine.

We are in AU by the way.

seanwilson
Google Hangouts has always worked well for me and it's free. I'm curious why the paid alternatives are better.
sundaeofshock
Because hangouts is buggy as hell. Just this morning, I was on a call with folks who could hear me, but I couldn’t hear them. They even closed their browser and tried to login again. No luck! Hangouts is never my first choice for a conference call.
nikanj
They’re branded ”for the enterprise”. ”We don’t want Google to hear our internal discussions” is a commonly-expressed sentiment, and for some reason executives see Lync et al as more secure.
cweagans
But does it work well? If so, you're in the minority. I cannot tell you how many times I've had to kill Chrome because Hangouts caused it to crash, or how many times core functionality in Hangouts straight up didn't work, or how many times I've been interrupted in a group call by somebody else's Hangouts doing the same ("Wait for Joe...he's gotta restart Hangouts").

And on top of all of that, Hangouts does not work at all on the new version of Firefox.

kenhwang
Agreed on all points here:

* Doesn't work on Firefox (for a better part of a year now for me, which appears to be an intentional won't fix)

* Frequently causes Chrome to hang or crash

* Pretty noticeable resource hog when it does work

* Audio/video quality is absolutely garbage, frequently breaks up or stutters, and has poor frame rate and high latency

* Seems to do a poor job isolating voice from sound (a handful of people will pretty much cause nonstop background noise, it tries to be clever by muting you when it detects mostly background sound, but it just results in people talking without realizing they're muted)

* Pretty feature poor compared to competitors (master presenter, remote control, shared whiteboard, phone dial-in, phone dial-out)

* Tied pretty heavily to a Google account, which is incredibly annoying in a professional environment where people are hesitant to join with their personal account, plus some extra confusion when it auto-joins with the account signed into Chrome which is further aggravated by the poor multi-account management story that might still use your personal account when you have a business account.

Source: used to be a consultant and used every possible conferencing software under the sun; currently using hangouts enterprise for work

mgbmtl
Any Jitsi users out there? I found the demo rather flaky, but haven't installed my own server yet.
cypherpunks01
Twilio conference lines - cost $1/mo plus 1 cent/caller/minute. Hard to beat.
kapauldo
We've been using their sample twiml as our business conference line for 5 years. It's outstanding and unbelievably cheap.
lobster_johnson
Currently we use Slack for company meetings and one-on-ones. It works very well, but it's a bit flaky at times.

Our other solution, which we still use with customers and other external parties, is GoToMeeting (Citrix). It's about $180/year, I think. The app, despite being native, looks like something from 1995, and there's very little mobile app functionality to speak of, and also screen sharing is broadcast only, and it has some minor idiosyncrasies (for example, new people who join are muted initially, and the app's UI makes it ridiculously difficult to figure out how to unmute (hint: it's not the microphone icon next to your name)), but it does have several advantages:

* Audio and video is just rock solid. Unlike Google Hangouts, Slack and other web-based solutions, GoToMeeting just works. I can count the number of times we've had people struggle with audio/video on one hand. I don't know what the others are doing wrong (WebRTC?).

* You can dial in with a normal phone. This is useful when you have people who don't have/want the app, or if your Internet connection is slow or flaky.

* You can join a call very quickly even if you don't have the app. The invitation contains a link to an app download that, when opened, immediately joins the right call.

* You can record calls (including screen sharing).

johnturek
I love Blue Jeans Networks! www.bluejeans.com A very feature rich video/audio conference platform with Screen Sharing. Dolby audio with noise cancellation...

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Try a free trial.. It blows WebEx/Zoom/Fuze/GoToMeeting/Skype out of the water with quality...

vsenko
We used riot.im for 2-3 participants and it worked fine.

Maybe somebody has more experience with it?