I am actually a victim of paying for web conferencing services in the past. Stupid ol me! Currently there are 3 major players offering free web conferencing services. I have not actually had the chance to use any of them myself. And i’m looking for some feedback from some of you on which of the 3 services you prefer. Here are each in no particular order:
1. Yugma – the site definitely looks like it was created in India. When you first see the website, it throws you off because the whole web design is just kind of “hacked” together. Get past the bad web design and you get a cool free web conferencing service. They have a desktop application that you have to download and run in order to use their services. Kind of like a Skype application. The free service is only for “Personal” web conferncing. They have a package for 10 users at $9.95 a month. I’m still not sure if that means you can uses up to 9 on the free account or not.
2. Vyew – with the free account you get an unlimited amount of meetings. You get 20 maximum real time participants. You get 5 of what’s called “VyewBooks” which are basically pages where meetings take place. You can hold all types of content. VyewBooks are always-on and always available to users with permission! Vyew definitely appears to be by far the best out of the 3 free tools!
3. dimdim – dimdim is kind of cool because it’s software is actually Open Source. As a user, there is no software to download or install. It’s all done from your Web Browser which is kind of a cool thing. One downfall is that sharing desktop only works with a windows operating system. Support for Mac and Linux are coming soon. The free account gives you up to 20 people in a room.
My Conclusion for Free Web Conferencing
Even though I mentioned them first, Yugma is out of the loop! They don’t really provide anything that the other two don’t. And you have to download a desktop app in order to use their service. Which is really lame. And they only give you to 10 (we think) users in a meeting with the free account. Not worth it.
Vyew on the other hand is very interesting because of their VyewBooks feature. A very cool feature where you can host your content for your meeting online. Very cool! They give you up to 20 users in your meeting on the free account which is more than many of us will ever need.
And then there is dimdim! Since dimdim has licensed it’s software open source then of course it’s going to get some kudos on this blog. It too gives you up to 20 people in a web conference with the free account.
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July 30th, 2008 at 5:21 am
I recently did a small review of DimDim vs Wiziq Vs Vyew … the 3 best online meeting conferencing solutions available completely free. Here is my post. I think you should give Wiziq a try as well.
http://www.openalternatives.org
July 30th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Thanks for the post on Dimdim! And stay tuned, next week we’ll release a new version that will enable Mac desktop sharing, recording, multiple presenters and more – all within the browser with NO DOWNLOAD required to start or attend meetings. You’ll love it.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Thank you for the comparison between DimDim and Wiziq. You definitely put the time in to compare the two. Your article really gave me a better understanding of both services. It looks like Wiziq is pretty solid and might be better than all choices!
October 1st, 2008 at 1:42 am
If you would like to get a solid overview of the broad landscape of web conferencing services, you might take a look at http://www.webconferencing-test.com One small downside: The current version of that portal doesn’t feature DimDim – we will cover this solution with our next release which hopefully will be online by the end of November 08.