Zoom alternatives?

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TristramEvans

The Right Hand of Doom
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My gaming group has been meeting via zoom for a while now, and it's fine...except that they kick us out every 40 minutes and we have to reboot. I looked at the paid options, but $600 a year for the lowest paid tier is just way too much. Is there a good free or at least cheaper alternative that offers the most basic features -

*videochat
*screensharing
*customizable avatars

?
 
Discord? We use that and I can I believe screen share and video chat. Not 100% sure about the Avatars but I think that is doable too.

I think it's free. I don't pay anything for it.
 
Discord? We use that and I can I believe screen share and video chat. Not 100% sure about the Avatars but I think that is doable too.

I think it's free. I don't pay anything for it.

Hmm, I'll look at that. thank you.
 
It pains me to suggest our surveillance overlords, but isn't Google Meet a pretty good option?

I had the fortune of a generous player in my campaign paying for Zoom. I don't think it was as much as $600 then.
 
I'm another vote for Discord, my group switched to it after a disasterous month trying skype and haven't had any major problems since.
 
What went wrong with Skype?
Literally everything, we had connectivity issues, sessions would randomly drop, the video and audio quality was very poor all the time. Additionally you couldn't mute individual people on your end. So If I needed to mute someone, I would mute them for all participates, not just for myself. To top it all off it would take a solid 30 minutes to actually get the session running properly, as we would constantly have to join, log off and rejoin just to get audio or visual.
Discord on the other hand is great! and the only quality issues we've had have been on our end.
 
I've been using a number of plaforms for work and Google Meets seems pretty good, easy to use and lots of flexibilty.
 
The best Zoom alternative is Jitsi. Bar none. It's free and open source.

I like everything about it, except the experience. I strongly believe the FLOSS solution will be better in the long run, but now it's a resource hog. I have not had pleasant experiences with it.
 
If it works for everyone, discord is a good option. I personally use Skype as its the only platform other than Zoom that works across all my players' devices. We dont use Zoom as it costs to much to only use it once a fortnight.
 
I like everything about it, except the experience. I strongly believe the FLOSS solution will be better in the long run, but now it's a resource hog. I have not had pleasant experiences with it.
What computer are you using?
 
Discord video works fine on my phone, but I've given up trying to use it on my laptop because it crashes every 5 minutes or so. The group I play in uses Discord video & the group I run uses Google Meet.
 
I use Google Meet for my gaming (we were using Google Hangouts until they shut that off). It works nicely, but most of the stuff we do is on Roll20, just using Google Meet for voice (and video, but usually I have the Roll20 window up, I only switch to the Google Meet window if we're mostly chatting).
 
It happened to multiple participants that their computers ran hot and blew lot of hot air. I think the only common denominator was that we were all using laptops.
Video conferencing, especially with many people at once, require a good amount of computing power. I've also dealt with this on Zoom.

Regardless: My point is Jitsi is the better option because, unlike Zoom, the project is not out to make money off user data.
 
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Jitsi looks interesting, especially since one of my players needs the ability to call into the meeting via phone.
 
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