What's your recommended replacement?
- Microsoft Teams?
- Slack? (soon to be Salesforce's)
- Google Meet?
Note that Facetime doesn't have the ability to setup a meeting "room" (i.e. having a URL and time schedule) and need to invite each participant individually as the meeting is progressing. Not to mention no support beyond Apple users.
Same as WhatsApp, poor support for group teleconferencing. Being owned by Facebook doesn't help either, noting that the entire company's stance towards privacy is under scrutiny.
I don't have a recommendation, because most solutions have some issue or another, IMHO.
I use
Zoom - but only from my work issued Mac, with a paid, corporate Zoom account - for online classes. Would not (at the moment, nor the foreseeable future) install Zoom on my own Mac. The functionality is good, making rooms and inviting people is a breeze, that has never been an issue. (I remember back when a boss of mine introduced me to zoom back in ~2015, the ease-of-use, from installing to inviting and holding meetings, was - as it still is - its main selling point. Too bad much of it was made possible by making security short cuts. Back then it was our backup solution for whenever Skype failed...which was quite often.) Sidenote: I'm not the first to think
Zoom is Malware.
We use
MS Teams for internal communication at work, chatrooms and video calls. I'm not over the moon for that Teams Electron App, which has been running poorly on the M1 Air, but - to be fair - it was never a spectacularly good on my "old" Intel MacBook Pros (home and work), either. The (weekly) staff meetings over video conference are mostly good. The best ting I can say about MS Teams is that it's not
Skype, which I've never had any good experience with on a Mac.
I briefly tried
Google Meet in March/April, to hold some lectures during the first Corona lockdown at a school using Google's education platform. That was my first experience with Meet, and in use (I had not set up the room or anything, just used it) it was quite similar to Zoom, which means good user experience, but with very questionable privacy, we are - after all - talking about Google.
We use
Discord for chitchat with students (though rarely with video, though a fellow teacher held his video classes through Discord during the lockdown and that seemed to go nicely). The Discord app is - slightly - better behaving than Teams. I would actually prefer
Slack to Discord, based on past experience (but it's been a while since I used Slack, and I've never tried it for video). Our company do use some Salesforce stuff, so maybe I get a chance next year?
I never use
Facetime, unless I press a wrong button somewhere.
I've not even got
WhatsApp installed anywhere. I've also used (Facebook)
Messenger for small, ad hoc video-meetings, and - for that - it worked adequately through the browser. (Haven't installed the Messenger App on my Mac, just my iPhone.) Of course, this has even worse privacy implications than with Google.
I've also tried some expensive solutions, with proprietary hardware, like
Tandberg, for video conferencing in the past and even though they are quite good for meetings I've never though they were som much better than any of the above mentioned to justify the price. (Not tried them with rooms or for lecturing either.)
www.bloomberg.com
www.macrumors.com
