
Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls? - blairanderson
and what website do you use to quickly find a good breakdown of services for a given problem?<p>finding that conference call systems are either free (bare-bones and super limited) or ++$150&#x2F;year for every feature on the planet.<p>I want audio conference calls with more than 5 participants and longer than 40 minutes.
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twunde
Uberconference.com, although admittedly I've seen Zoom frequently and I'm
starting to see Google Meet in my org (ask but ubercobference support video).
For audio, it federally depends on where people are calling from (India tends
to eliminate a few potions), if it's internal, and the number (100+ changes
things)

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ereyes01
I love uberconference and use it whenever call reliability is really important
because participants can always dial-in in the worst case scenario.

One interesting edge case I ran into with uberconference was that I was trying
to setup a sales call with someone behind an onerous corporate firewall that
blocked all P2P traffic, and their connection to uberconference. The only
solutions that were known to work on their network were Zoom and Webex.

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DKnoll
I set one up on Twilio for an employer, cost is slightly more than the
~$1/month per DID with minutes charges. It's a small conference with an
unchanging set of attendees so I just have it protected with a static pin.

I am in the process of setting up FusionPBX somewhere else at the moment,
which I am hosting on a ~$7 a month VPS (lunanode.com). This will support all
phone functions for this organisation, and also offer conference calling. PSTN
trunking through voip.ms. Monthly cost is slightly more than $12 (including
charges for ~5 DIDs and minutes).

> and what website do you use to quickly find a good breakdown of services for
> a given problem?

I make heavy use of AlternativeTo.net.

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lobster_johnson
Currently we use Slack for company meetings and one-on-ones. It works very
well, but it's a bit flaky at times.

Our other solution, which we still use with customers and other external
parties, is GoToMeeting (Citrix). It's about $180/year, I think. The app,
despite being native, looks like something from 1995, and there's very little
mobile app functionality to speak of, and also screen sharing is broadcast
only, and it has some minor idiosyncrasies (for example, new people who join
are muted initially, and the app's UI makes it ridiculously difficult to
figure out how to unmute (hint: it's not the microphone icon next to your
name)), but it does have several advantages:

* Audio and video is just _rock solid_. Unlike Google Hangouts, Slack and other web-based solutions, GoToMeeting just works. I can count the number of times we've had people struggle with audio/video on one hand. I don't know what the others are doing wrong (WebRTC?).

* You can dial in with a normal phone. This is useful when you have people who don't have/want the app, or if your Internet connection is slow or flaky.

* You can join a call very quickly even if you don't have the app. The invitation contains a link to an app download that, when opened, immediately joins the right call.

* You can record calls (including screen sharing).

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teirce
To be the boring voice here... Skype for Business.

The calls themselves are fine, but the applications are garbage. I'd advise
against the platform.

Haven't tried MS Teams yet.

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vadimberman
It's great for large organisations, but do you use it often for cross-
organisational calls?

I remember having all kinds of issues, but it was a year ago.

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teirce
I'm not directly experienced with this (most of my work is internal) so I
don't know exactly how it works, or if they use Skype explicitly, but my
company makes quite a few calls with other organizations.

At worst, it would be possible using our Skype meetings and phoning any
external orgs in using the dial-in phone line. Not exactly elegant, but
functional. (Hopefully that's not what they do, though...)

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mtmail
[https://appear.in/](https://appear.in/)

~~~
ereyes01
To echo what others have said, it's great if everyone's internet connection is
rock solid. It seems that their calls are setup as fully connected graph
between participants, and it has happened more than once that I can hear some
people that other participants can't and vice-versa. I usually try to cap it
at 3 participants, or it can get messy.

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johnturek
I love Blue Jeans Networks! www.bluejeans.com A very feature rich video/audio
conference platform with Screen Sharing. Dolby audio with noise
cancellation...

* Use your existing Polycom/Cisco VC Gear (even h323!) * Get a dial in number or toll free # * Use the web without a plugin! (WebRTC) * Mac/Windows/Linux/iOS/Android...

Try a free trial.. It blows WebEx/Zoom/Fuze/GoToMeeting/Skype out of the water
with quality...

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sologoub
Corp webex. Used to use join.me at a different employer - worked great for
smaller meetings, but people always had problems setting up larger (20+
person) calls. Hangouts worked great too, but had a hard limit on number of
participants.

For personal, Twilio or Plivo numbers :)

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peckrob
Asterisk [0] and a combination of SIP soft phones and Polycom physical
hardware.

[0] [https://www.asterisk.org](https://www.asterisk.org)

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jdorfman
Zoom.us

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agotterer
Same here. Zoom has been great for our company. We found google hangouts to be
very unreliable and buggy (audio constantly not working, pixelated videos,
etc). Zoom has a free tier for calls up to soemthing like 45 min. Most of our
company is on the free tier and we have pro accounts for the sales and account
teams who spend more time on calls. The zoom rooms (for conf rooms) is a bit
pricier but you can use your own hardware.

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cypherpunks01
Twilio conference lines - cost $1/mo plus 1 cent/caller/minute. Hard to beat.

~~~
kapauldo
We've been using their sample twiml as our business conference line for 5
years. It's outstanding and unbelievably cheap.

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vsenko
We used riot.im for 2-3 participants and it worked fine.

Maybe somebody has more experience with it?

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AdamGibbins
I work on a cross platform team, i.e. Linux, macOS and sometimes WIndows. Zoom
did us well, but then Slack calls appeared and its almost entirely replaced
our usage. It works well, no complaints.

~~~
confounded
How did you make zoom.us work on Linux? It always seems to make try and
download an .exe file. Zoom is one of the ever-decreasing uses for my
_emergency mac_.

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svec
[https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204206269-Linux-
In...](https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204206269-Linux-Installation)

I haven't used the Linux client, but many others at my company use it.

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seanwilson
Google Hangouts has always worked well for me and it's free. I'm curious why
the paid alternatives are better.

~~~
cweagans
But does it work _well_? If so, you're in the minority. I cannot tell you how
many times I've had to kill Chrome because Hangouts caused it to crash, or how
many times core functionality in Hangouts straight up didn't work, or how many
times I've been interrupted in a group call by somebody else's Hangouts doing
the same ("Wait for Joe...he's gotta restart Hangouts").

And on top of all of that, Hangouts does not work _at all_ on the new version
of Firefox.

~~~
kenhwang
Agreed on all points here:

* Doesn't work on Firefox (for a better part of a year now for me, which appears to be an intentional won't fix)

* Frequently causes Chrome to hang or crash

* Pretty noticeable resource hog when it does work

* Audio/video quality is absolutely garbage, frequently breaks up or stutters, and has poor frame rate and high latency

* Seems to do a poor job isolating voice from sound (a handful of people will pretty much cause nonstop background noise, it tries to be clever by muting you when it detects mostly background sound, but it just results in people talking without realizing they're muted)

* Pretty feature poor compared to competitors (master presenter, remote control, shared whiteboard, phone dial-in, phone dial-out)

* Tied pretty heavily to a Google account, which is incredibly annoying in a professional environment where people are hesitant to join with their personal account, plus some extra confusion when it auto-joins with the account signed into Chrome which is further aggravated by the poor multi-account management story that might still use your personal account when you have a business account.

Source: used to be a consultant and used every possible conferencing software
under the sun; currently using hangouts enterprise for work

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mgbmtl
Any Jitsi users out there? I found the demo rather flaky, but haven't
installed my own server yet.

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dixie_land
chime.aws

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compsciphd
terrible Linux support. Its hard to understand how a company whose products
are built on a Linux platform and who use dogfood this product for all their
internal needs, doesn't have good Linux support.

~~~
zoratu
The app is mediocre at best on all platforms, but the service works well.

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greenleafjacob
Freeconferencecall.com

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c17r
Pow Wow Now

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znpy
Talky.io?

