Zoom vs Skype vs Google Meet Best Free Tier for Video Chatting

Zoom vs. Skype vs Google Meet: Best Free Tier for Video Chatting

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Google Meet and Skype have both shaken up their features to compete with Zoom. With these changes, which video chat app has the best free tier?

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Zoom vs Skype vs Google Meet Best Free Tier for Video Chatting

As the battle of the best chat platform heats up, there’s confusion regarding which service offers the most value between Zoom, Skype, and Google Meet. Each of these offers a free tier, but the feature sets and experiences between those can be wildly different.

It’s hard to imagine sometimes but less than six months ago, no one really cared about video chatting. Apps like FaceTime, Skype, and Google Duo had already been around for years but were mostly taken for granted. Zoom had millions of downloads but existed in relative obscurity outside of enterprise circles. Now, due to the global pandemic, it feels like video chatting is part of everyone’s daily life, whether they’re participating in one themselves or watching one happen on TV. But what makes this modern technological marvel so crazy is the number of companies offering video chat services for free.

These platforms still have to generate revenue, so they all have some benefits hidden beyond the paywall, but their free versions are more than sufficient for most people’s needs. Unfortunately, that also means it’s difficult to make a clear decision about which one to use. Zoom benefitted greatly in February as people who would have already had experience with the service were the first to transition to work from home, but is it the best option for those unwilling to pay for premium features? Knowing what to expect from the free versions of these video chat apps should make it easier to decide.

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The Limitations of Skype, Zoom, and Google Meet’s Free Tiers

There are two areas where all of these platforms have some kind of caveat: meeting times and participant maximums. Google Meet just switched to a completely free tier (it used to require the host to pay a monthly fee) and it allows 100 people to chat for an unlimited amount of time. However, the company has said that duration may be trimmed to 60 minutes by September 30th. That would still put it ahead of Zoom’s offering of 100 people for just 40 minutes. There are some clever ways to avoid this limitation without paying for a subscription, but it’s still less than what the competition offers. Meanwhile, Skype only supports meetings of 50 members, but it offers 4 hours per meeting, 10 hours of meeting time per day, with a limit of 100 hours per month.

Beyond just basic chatting, each service also has a unique feature set that could easily sway an opinion. Skype Meet Now and Zoom both offer URL-based invites for free, making them incredibly accessible. It’s possible to pull users into a video chat without them signing up or installing software. The downside to this option is that unintended guests can get those links, leading to Zoombombing, but, with some attention to the privacy settings, those issues can be avoided. Google Meet, on the other hand, doesn’t do URL invites, instead requiring everyone to be invited through email. This is about as secure as a video conference can get but the downside is it can be slightly less accessible for something like a seminar.

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Finally, Skype records meetings and keeps those recordings for up to 30 days for free. It will store files shared during a video meeting and its text chat for longer than that. Google Meet saves recordings to each member’s Google Drive account, meaning they can be stored indefinitely. The free tier of Zoom does not allow recording.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/zoom-vs-skype-vs-google-meet-free-tiers-compared/

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