The 3 Best Virtual Meeting Apps You Have to Try Today

Every distributed team relies on a virtual meeting app to keep daily communication flowing. The technology is essential to day-to-day operations, such as hosting meetings and fostering team collaboration. However, the friction that comes from many of these tools — such as video lag, rough audio, and unreliable connections — can make it difficult to stay productive.

Ensuring remote teams are able to collaborate effectively has never been more important: After all, Gartner predicts that 51% of all knowledge workers worldwide are expected to be working remotely by the end of 2021, up from 27% in 2019. Another increasing trend that coincides is hybrid work, which has its own advantages and challenges.

Since many of our team members work remotely, we've assessed various virtual meeting apps. Depending on your needs, any of these three virtual meeting apps could be a great fit for your team.

Virtual Meeting Apps For Distributed Teams

Many virtual meeting apps on the market will fulfill everyday, basic professional needs. You can place calls, host meetings, and schedule time with peers and clients. But as remote work becomes the standard for many teams, more reliable communication tools will be necessary.

The most popular communication tools are already ahead of the curve, releasing new features and benefits that make remote work smoother and seamless.

1. RingCentral

RingCentral provides businesses with communications and collaboration solutions that include message, video, phone, and contact center services. They allow you host online meetings with up to 500 attendees simultaneously directly from your browser — without downloading the app.

It also lets you switch from audio to video call and swap devices in between the meeting without any disruption.

A few benefits of RingCentral include:

• You get real-time analytics to gauge system performance, monitor service quality, and track usage for all departments.
• Its built-in webinar tool to host up to 10,000 attendees with up to 500 moderators globally.
• Easy integration with Microsoft Outlook or iCal / Google Calendar to help you schedule one-click meetings and update them instantly.
• It also integrates with popular CRMs, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and more.

Ring central allows you to share your screen and files, edit files in real-time, collaborate using whiteboards and annotations, record your meetings as many times as you want and share the highlights over the cloud, join a video call directly from the messaging thread, and more.

2. Cisco Webex

Cisco Webex is a leading enterprise solution for videoconferencing, online meetings, screen share, and webinars. It helps you host online HD video meetings and will keep your team connected through messaging.

Cisco Webex also offers:

• Collaborative features like screen sharing, calling, file sharing, whiteboarding, and recording.
• Comes with many AI-based features as well, such as its AI-powered Webex assistant that takes notes of meeting highlights for future reference.
• The Webex assistant also translates in 10 languages in real-time.
• Ability to give in-meeting reactions through hand gestures or send emojis and gifs.

It's possible to personalize your space with custom images, colors, and co-branding, use two-way whiteboarding for team collaboration, record meetings, take post-call surveys (for organizers), and more.

Cisco Webex also has pre-built integrations with business apps like Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.

3. BlueJeans

BlueJeans provides interoperable cloud-based videoconferencing services. You can easily and securely hold live online meetings, webinars, and video calls in HD quality — host town halls, live interactive events, and webcasts for a large number of audiences.

The platform allows up to 50,000 view-only attendees with 150 presenters. Attendees can join browser-based meetings without any installation.

Key benefits of BlueJeans:

• Its Smart Meetings feature helps you tag business-critical moments, mark event highlights, and assign actions for teams.
• Collaboration features like file-sharing during the meeting, whiteboarding, and annotating help you interact with attendees.
• Interactive features include polling, moderator controls, Q&A, event chat, hand-raising, and more.

BlueJeans also has a Command Center that gives you real-time actionable insights into network conditions, meeting performance, and user-focused ROI. With the Command Center, you're able to monitor and resolve issues before they become severe problems.

Improving Communication For Remote Teams

We're just scratching the surface of what's now possible for collaborating with your remote team. There's a whole other dimension we haven't even touched on yet — immersive audio within virtual meeting apps.

What do we mean by "immersive audio"? Watch the video below, preferably with headphones on (but you'll hear the difference with desktop or laptop speakers, too).

This is a demo of videoconferencing with spatial audio.

Over the course of the day, research shows that spatial audio makes an actual difference in reducing fatigue and enjoying conversations during meetings, events, and other virtual gatherings.

You might have heard the term "spatial audio" from Apple, Netflix, Clubhouse, or other major companies over the past year or two — in fact, tons of popular apps and businesses are beginning to support and integrate 3D audio.

What exactly is spatial audio technology? Read more here.

And now, if you're building or working on a virtual meeting app, it's actually possible to easily implement spatial audio in native apps. If you're curious to learn more, contact us here.