Just curious - what other product that works better do you recommend? Webex, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Teams all pale in comparison when it comes to quality and ease-of-use.
I've also have been using Discord for voice almost daily for a little over a year and it just works 99% of the time. Unfortunately, it suffers from "gamer" branding that makes it awkward suggesting for work. They should try offering a "business skin" that interops with discord.
It bothers me a bit that such branding/skin influences the situations in which people use good products. I tried to get my friends to switch from Facebook Messenger to Slack, and plenty of them use Slack at work (as do I), and a large amount of pushback was along the lines of "I don't want to feel like I'm working."
It's just a means of communicating, people. Maybe a few Discord features aren't useful outside of gaming and a few Slack features aren't useful outside of the workplace. I find that to be a stupid reason not to generalize the use of these products. Skinning (and filtering away those specific features) just might be the ticket.
I second Jitsi. For me, the value is in hosting your own Jitsi server. Really not that hard to do.
Mind you, I only host it at home on a VM for personal use. Have had sessions with 6 people with one of them a Europe-Australia connection. All fine on default 720p.
If I were looking for 20+ meeting software though I'd consider something else.
I would consider it a case for streaming to faceless attendees. I have never had a meeting with useful input from more than 10 people.
Honestly, Meet has had huge updates in the past month or so that make it much better than Zoom. The image quality no longer looks like crap with more than 2 people in the room.
I have to remind this to myself when I see features available for free which are not ported to GSuite (parental control, google assistant for home users, reminders, inbox in the past (it took I think a year to port it)
I use Jitsi Meet. It's easier to use, the audio is generally better (although my only evidence for this is anecdotal, I'm taking piano lessons over video chat right now and meet was the only one that provided consistently good audio for my teacher), and it's web interface "Just works" whereas Zooms hates to be launched and tries to make you install the app constantly (although their launcher is so weird it behaves differently for me depending on the day).
You say backend, but the frontend also has tons of overlap. The first time I saw RingCentral was after much Zoom experience, and I was thoroughly confused (based on nothing but the frontend) by the similarity until reading up about it. As a one-time invitee rather than a frequent user, RC was absurdly identical to Zoom other than the title bar and icon.
Ring central has used zoom on the backend for a while even before zoom went public. But just recently they added a powered by zoom watermark. And yes the applications do look very similar but RC meetings hasn't changed the UI in the 3+ years i've been using it.
I don't think any of them do, but more relevant to security none of them has auditable source code. Jitsi Meet (the easiest to use out of the services I've tried, namely Zoom and Google Meet) has experimental E2EE. But if you want real security you probably want something more like GNU Jami, which is not grandma-friendly easy to use and is a native application only.
The beauty of Jitsi is that you can run the software yourself (especially with the free Google Cloud credit) and then the E2E is hardly relevant because it's still server-to-client encrypted and you own the server...
Good point. Are there any use cases for E2E when the server isn't potentially adversarial to any clients?
Separately: affordable servers likely are accessible to infrastructure providers (whether a VPS, or bare metal at a colo, etc.) so it's tough to say that "my own server" is usable exclusively by me and therefore not adversarial. Plus, maybe people want to use my server and consider me adversarial for whatever reason; they should use their own server instead, but might not have the skills.
I've also have been using Discord for voice almost daily for a little over a year and it just works 99% of the time. Unfortunately, it suffers from "gamer" branding that makes it awkward suggesting for work. They should try offering a "business skin" that interops with discord.