Product Habits - Zoom’s #1 alternative

Last week, I was curious to learn which of the many Zoom alternatives you’ve been trying.

Ten replies in, it became clear that the #1 alternative to Zoom is Google’s Meet, Hangouts, Chat, Duo or whatever they are calling it this month.

“Given the number of new names Google comes up with each passing week, perhaps Google Meet/Google Hangouts/Google Hangout Meet counts as something new."

"We use meet.google.com, the user experience is effortless."

And it’s completely free with a personal Gmail account or with G Suite at work. Plus it seamlessly integrates with Google Calendar.

"Google Meet: Used dozens of times, extremely reliable even when moving around the apartment, great call quality, great integration with Google Calendar."

But the main reason people liked Google’s product and a few of the other alternatives is that they didn’t require a software download to work.

Zoom does.

These alternatives provided a seamless experience from clicking the link to getting on a call, right from a browser window.

and Jitsi were two of the newer tools that work without a download.

"I've actually used Whereby a lot more than Zoom. It's great because my guests don't need to download any software or sign up for an account—they just click the URL and they're in the call."

"I've tried Jitsi, works great, almost the same as Zoom, it's free, and you can use the web version without downloading any apps."

Other popular voice/video communication tools included Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoToMeeting, Slack and BlueJeans. Most people mentioned that Zoom was more reliable than these alternatives.

There were two categories of tools that I didn’t quite anticipate when I originally asked the question.

RemoteHQ and Tandem were in a category of their own because they focus on communicating with colleagues while using SaaS productivity tools at the same time.

“RemoteHQ because it makes video a smaller part of the experience (small real estate footprint) and focuses on doing work collaboratively. If you're going to do synchronous work, at least make it be true work and not just talk.”

“Tandem is quite good for ad-hoc stand ups and smaller teams.”

Loom is in its own category. It was mentioned a few times as an asynchronous alternative to Zoom.

“Loom is super interesting because it's async + video. Async is a key component of flexible / remote work (people are completely overdoing Zoom right now and completely missing the opportunity to keep more of their time for deep work). And video is higher information density than text. So it's better than Zoom because it's async. And it's better than Google Docs, Confluence, etc because it's video.”

This got me thinking.

I have a hunch that the asynchronous video category might be the next big thing in tech.

Do you use video or voice for asynchronous collaboration? What tools are you using and how are they helping you?

Reply and let me know.

Hiten

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