What's your favorite video conferencing software?
Displaying poll results.12297 total votes.
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 37 comments
Whichever isn't installed on my company computer.. (Score:5, Funny)
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My "Other" answer, too. Deserves the funny mod, but I just hate video conferencing in general. But you did remind me how much I dislike meetings, too.
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I’m finding that if people really want a meeting, I prefer video meetings rather than in-person ones.
With video meetings, when some blowhard starts informatively gassing on and on about something that’s actually irrelevant - I can switch to a terminal window or other application and get some real work done... while, at the same time, still appearing to be engaged in the meeting.
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They'll eventually notice that your reactions are out of sync.
Doesn't anyone have an avatar app? Kind of a filter that keeps your fake image in sync with the dominant reaction of the other participants in the meeting.
Hmm... Just thought of a hilarious bug. Imagine that everyone has tuned out of the meeting and the avatars start looping on each other. Kind of a feedback loop with the equivalent of a visual squeal. Some avatar randomly chuckles, the other avatars start chuckling, then laughing, then eventuall
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That's a great time to fart into the microphone. It breaks the monotony, throws blowhard off his game, and if questioned later you can always say it was just the microphone brushing up against the desk or something.
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I don't turn the camera on, ever. I see no benefit to it at all. If I can hear everyone then we're good.
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Microsoft pool (Score:2)
Because employers seems to prefer what Microsoft offers.
Given the bad news Zoom has had it's time to scrap that.
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Eagerly awaiting version 3.1, sin
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Because employers seems to prefer what Microsoft offers.
That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Everyone I know seems to be using Zoom for work meetings right now. And, for better or worse, they don’t seem to care about the potential security issues.
I do know of some groups Who also use Teams, but it is seen more as a Slack alternative - they’re still using Zoom for video.
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Everyone I know seems to be using Zoom for work meetings right now. And, for better or worse, they don't seem to care about the potential security issues.
As far as I know, MS has used this to give Teams Licences "for the duration" to healthcare organisations all over the world. Presumably, they will want us all to buy licences once we have all found out how "good" it is.
I have one other hospital that wants us to talk to them with Cisco Webex. This could end up being a real PITA.
As for worrying about Zoom security, I have never totally impressed with MS security.
what the heck?? (Score:5, Insightful)
PS: I am not endorsing any of these, just find the choices...lacking.
Re: what the heck?? (Score:3)
Yeah, Slaahdot is rules by the *kids* of Eternal Septemberer now. People who probably have never even heard that term think the web is "the Internet", and are the iEquivalent of grandpa who prints out web pages and e-mails.
s/rules/ruled/ (Score:2)
Goddammit.
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Whippersnapper
Re:what the heck?? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah Jitsi is the best out there.
I voted Zoom anyway, because they're provided me a lot more entertainment, and a lot less meetings.
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Jitsi #1
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It's curious how the worst system always wins. MS-DOS, Windows, VHS, Whatsapp and now Zoom.
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This isn't about the 'best' system but more about a usable system. The problem with Windows in the 1990s was that it wasn't good enough. It was flawed even by the contemporary standards but it was, as you say, better marketed than OS/2 and much cheaper than Apple's stuff. Same with VHS. VHS was absolute rubbish. Even the most modern systems could not show one frame without lots of distortion and stipes. Betamax was better and there was a much superior system than even Betamax, made by Philips, called Video2
Jitsi Meet (Score:5, Interesting)
Jitsi Meet [meet.jit.si]:
Of course Jitsi Meet ain't perfect, but it gets the job done.
Before you complain about missing "features", if funny backgrounds and other childish gimmicks are higher priority to you than privacy of your communication channels, think twice.
Re: Jitsi Meet (Score:2)
Any of the choices listed in the poll could not even qualify for requesting qualification for being called perfect. If perfect had a dog, and that dog had a dog, *that* dog would still shit on them.
So much for asking for perfection. :)
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If perfect had a dog ...
Hold it right there! What do you mean *IF*?
I think I speak for all my fellow dog people....
Perfect obviously has a dog. Wouldn't be perfect otherwise!
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Any options for commercial support? BigBlueButton has 6 or 7 companies that will give paid support and hosting. If it really Just Works, is really Free software, but has something to make the guys that wear ties happy like commercial support I'll look into it and recommend it at work (medium sized college)
Short Answer... (Score:2)
No. This is a completely community-led project. Nothing like Canonical's Ubuntu or Red Hat's RHEL, unfortunately. This project is more for tech companies or data centers wanting to make their own remote presence tool for internal use.
Not exactly polished enough for use by Joe Average in the sales team.
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Tech Question here. For a scenario with one or up to 20 speakers, one after the other, and up to 500 viewers (moving a meatspace conference online) how does Jitsi stack up? How does any of the others stack up?
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I was looking at it a month ago but there wAs no iOS app. However last I read they were working on it so might be available now.
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Oh, can the techie "I attend meetings in flip flops, deal with it" attitude. Projecting a professional look still matters to a lot of users.
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Oh, can the "I don't care what happens to our company's proprietary info as long as I think I look good" attitude. Here in the real world, not giving it all away to the competition/criminals/foreign governments still matters quite a lot.
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Whereby.com (Score:2)
Jitsi Meet or GTFO. (Score:3)
What is all that listed crap?
Use Jitsi Meet, like a person with a clue.
Seriously, I bet you have never heard of Signal either.
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To be really honest, it's not for large groups. Up to 12 people before it starts losing stability. Very much a work-in-progress. For sysadmins and tech-savvy people, this is a finished product because they will roll the GitHub code into some custom Jitsi client for their data center or tech company.
For an academic or business environment where not everyone is so tech-savvy... Avoid it. Better off with commercially-supported services.
In short, there is currently no "one-click easy" FOSS solution for video co
I just put Zoom (Score:2)
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Except for those who are worried about the massive security concerns about it ... or have banned it like all federal agencies, the NHS, India ...
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Re: I just put Zoom (Score:2)
The security concerns with zoom are absolutely not related to the stuff thats being discussed in the meeting.
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Re: I just put Zoom (Score:2)
Try again. You still did not get the âoeobviousâ point.
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Yikes on that, chief... I'd be pretty paranoid about my email address getting harvested without my knowledge.
Oh well... At least Zoom is quickly securing their service with each passing day.
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background swapping was added to teams last week.
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I've been very happy with Zoom. There are some exotic features that will keep technical people happy.
We had to do a piano concert over Zoom last weekend. All the other tools are "optimized for voice" , so they throw out all the low and high frequencies as noise and the AGC is always messing with the volume and ducking out notes that it thinks is noise.
Zoom has a "Use original audio" for the mic to enable unprocessed audio transmission (it's off by default so you don't forget to stop using it). They also
Netflix (Score:1)
Come on, your not on the couch doing "video conferencing" with Netflix?
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I do that every day. Binge watching the first season of Start Trek. Lots of fun! The special effects are amazing!
Fuze (Score:1)
Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton (Score:2)
BigBlueButton (Score:1)
Missing option (Score:1)
E-mail.
Because seriously, about 90% of the time sitting and listening AND watching some talking head drone on and on must be one of the most brainicidal things invented. Get the person to think about what s/he wants to say, THEN put it down in writing in a concise and clear manner, and save everyone else quite a bit of their time and attention.
There's still not many use cases where seeing other people's mugs is more conducive to communicating the necessary.
Now please step of my lawn.
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I do not need to see other people when I am participating in teleconferencing.
What ever my aging family can get running. (Score:1)
BigBlueButton (Score:1)
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!Zoom (Score:1)
Any one that isn't programmed on behalf of the CCP.
Slack has video (Score:2)
Video meetings waste even more time! (Score:2)
Video conferencing just makes it easier to say "let's set up a quick video call" that still should have been an email or even a Teams chat. Lonely people inevitably drag out the meeting even longer just for human contact.
I'm living the introverted nerd's dream right now: I never have to leave the house and engage in the awkward practice of "meeting and talking to people".
Highfive (Score:2)
As someone who has not been in the office for 6 weeks, it is an absolute necessity. We have had a company wide meeting, team meetings, and 1on1s using it. It has been really quite painless.
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..you had unnecessary meetings that were pointless before ... now taking up bandwidth to see those colleagues you can see in person
the summary of the hour long meeting is less then 20 words ...
none (Score:2)
Video (Score:2)
Why video ... I didn't look at you before lock down why now ...
Videoconference ... (Score:2)
... I don't possess a video camera ... good luck with that - why not call me like you did before lock down ?
I have been liking Discord (Score:4, Informative)
Discord has been a surprise for me. I got invited to a meeting in Discord and it was surprisingly good.
Now, I even teach over Discord. I ran a training workshop over it. It is a nice tool. The conferencing feature is still to come, but audio and screen sharing works great. And it is very easy to split into sub groups to discuss different kinds of issues.
I'll see how it pans long term. But so far, I like it!
Re: I have been liking Discord (Score:2)
Nice to be able to have breakout discussions without having to leave the meeting
MS Teams and Skype are two different animals (Score:2)
Yes, they are both owned by MS, and they have similar functionality, but they are not the same platform.
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Skype, and in particular Skype For Business (used to be Lync) is a nightmare compared to Teams, or any platform really. We just switched over and Teams is such a happier place. Skype For Business is repulsive.
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I completely agree! Skype for Android is dog-slow.
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I'm a little partial to Zoom... (Score:3)
What I think a lot of people don't realize, if they aren't overly familiar with Zoom, is how nice a setup Zoom made for offices wanting to dedicate rooms as video conferencing areas.
There are plenty of good video-chat options if you just want to fire something up on your laptop using your web-cam and chat with someone else (or several someone-elses) doing the same thing.
Zoom was unique, years ago, when they integrated the Apple iPad as a "room controller" for a version of Zoom designed to run in a kiosk mode on a Mac, attached to a decent quality pan/tilt/zoom camera and speaker-pod (like Logitech offered with their CC3000 and other ConferenceCam solutions). They were the first I know of to support the clever setup where the Zoom Rooms system output an ultrasonic tone that the PC or Mac clients could pick up to know which system they should stream audio/video to. That way, people in a conference call in the room could present something by simply running a copy of the Zoom client on their machine and clicking the "share screen" option.
Eventually, they ported everything so a Mac and an iPad was no longer needed. You could use any old cheap Android tablet and any Windows based PC (like an Intel NUC) as the Zoom Rooms system. And they started supporting a second tablet to mount on the wall outside the conference room, that would simply show the room scheduling info and let people book the room for certain time windows.
And today, companies are making "all in one" Zoom Rooms instant solutions with all this stuff integrated into a kit you purchase. I know these "integrated" solutions also exist for Skype -- but Zoom was doing more comprehensive stuff, with capabilities like inserting custom photos or video to display as your backdrop while in a conference.
The biggest downfall I see with Zoom is just that they never focused much on security and compliance. It was just a startup business trying to make a really cool videoconferencing product, and I think they were after small businesses initially. I doubt the product is HIPAA compliant for doctors and patients to use it? And we've seen the recent security breaches with it as it's seen such widespread adoption, post COVID-19.
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Two cans and a string (Score:2)
As a friend used to say, "High technology is low magick."
http://www.jitsi.me/ (Score:2)
how meet.jit.si is missing! that list is full of crappy and/or obsolete apps.
jitsiit works great, it is open source, it uses html5 browsers, p2p and they have encrypted video in beta.
You can even install the server side and have your own jitsi server
crowdcast (Score:2)
Not exactly videoconferencing software, but similar:
https://www.crowdcast.io/ [crowdcast.io]
Facetime??? (Score:2)
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Maybe in your company 100% of the users and 100% of your customers use Apple product, but I can assure you that in the ROW about everyone is using a Windows PC and has an Android phone, and has no clue what facetime is.
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For my family, FaceTime or WhatsApp though we are going to try our first zoom this weekend with 5 parties around the world.
None of them are problem-free (Score:2)
Zoom is by far the easiest to use, and the most tolerant of limited networks and odd hardware; it's security and privacy issues are well known now, though, and suggest that it shouldn't be used for meetings where what's discussed should be kept private. Care with settings and meeting arrangements can mitigate the the problems but not eliminate them.
Really, though, none of them should be considered actually private or secure.
As for general usability, the only one I've used that comes close to Zoom for genera
Re:None of them are problem-free - PS (Score:2)
I've been in WebEx meetings where people call in to the phone number using Skype. Hilarity ensues.
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And that's just the client side. It's fairly trivial to deploy your own Jitsi Meet server using the provided docker packaging, complete with letsencrypt certificates and all (thanks FSF and certbo
Corporate vs. Personal ? (Score:2)
Corporate - Webex has been getting more robust as the Work From Home trend continues.
Personal - Zoom is spotty as heck, and terrifyingly bad on crappy rural internet (Satellite Wild Blue). Fortunately the family is all Apple hardware users, so we Facetime conference every week to stay in touch. And that works really well, AND doesn't require tech support for an 80+ year old great grandma.
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I used to like WebEx when I used it a decade ago. It's been having a bunch of weird problems lately, like freezing when trying to move it to another monitor, and generally not playing well with virtual desktops. Had to cancel a few meetings because of a big outage last week too. Oops.
At least it's not as terrible as Lync / Skype4Business ... too bad even Microsoft is not having much luck getting people to stop using it in favor of their newer products. My entire laptop freezes and gets ghost windows al
Need at least 3 (Score:2)
The one that doesn't spy on me (Score:2)
Oh, wait, they all do.
So, NONE OF THE ABOVE.
Or Cowboy Neal.
(caveat: use Zoom and Panopto, both of which are insecure, no matter what they tell you)
Jitsi Meet (Score:2)
Client's choice (Score:2)
Jitsi (Score:2)
I like Jitsi because it's free, high-quality, open-source, needs only a browser to join, and I can self-host the server.
Skype/Teams (Score:2)
Although Teams is growing on me...
StarLeaf (Score:2)
you need to use ON by Gab (Score:2)
seriously, you should join it because well its much more privacy laden.
Roll20! (Score:2)
It works surprisingly well. You can load pictures as maps or use the shared whiteboard space.
BigBlueButton (Score:2)
Jitsi is also ok, but requires more Bandwidth.
WebX (Score:2)
H.323 (Score:2)
I still use H.323 and with a GNU Gatekeeper [gnugk.org]. I like the independence from all these one-vendor systems.
land line (Score:2)
I do not like any video conference software. Just a phone, preferably a land line.
Why, I do not want to spend half the meeting with everyone saying "can you hear me", "I here echos", "too much static" and "the video froze".
Send the pdf presentation via encrypted email and we all talk about that. All video (and many such meetings) do is encourage people putting meetings together without thinking about the issue first. Thus hoping someone will do their work for them and wasting the time of almost everyone
Slack (Score:2)
Slashdot is becoming irrelevant... (Score:2)
...to its original audience. It is 2020 and the "news for nerds" site is publishing polls on software like this ignoring established and well known FOSS options like Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button.
If you forget about Free and open-source software in this day and age your nerd card is revoked indefinitely. Sorry folks.
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Switched my vote to this because it was the only one that finally worked the last time around... Quality was adequate.