During this afflicted time because of the pandemic, all we are yearning for is social and emotional support. Even business requires some amount of social and emotional connect too. As work from home may make them feel lonely and can affect their interest in work.
Even mental health experts are emphasizing on good social support during this tough time. According to them during, this time it’s important to find happiness in small things to uplift our day, like celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, and keeping in touch with family, friends, and relatives through video calls, texts, or social media.
Millions of people are working from home. As a result, there is an abnormal demand for video calling and video conferencing applications. Let’s discuss various apps that are available to us as options.
Google Duo
Google’s Google Duo is a free to download video calling app and quite simple to use. Where you can do video call with up to 8 people. It has a special nifty feature called “Knock-Knock”, with the help of which you can have the preview of the live video before attending the call. This medium is suitable for small group chats.
Google’s Hangout Meet
This app is suitable for business conferencing platforms. It is a free service within Google’s G Suite software. It has a capacity of up to 50 participants with good video and audio quality. The app has even announced free access to special features for educational purposes. Otherwise, normally the advance feature costs you about $13 and upgrades your capacity for meetings to 250 participants and live stream to up to 100000 viewers. You can even access google drive to record and save meetings. So, this app is more apt for professional purposes.
It is the most popular app when it comes to socializing, with a user base of 2 billion active users. It is free to download app owned by Facebook, where you can make both voice and video calls. The video and audio quality are satisfactory plus it even supports group video chat. But this feature is limited to only 3 participants making it inconvenient for big group video chats. And the app has one more restriction as its desktop version allows you to chat through text but you can’t place a video call on the same.
Skype
The app is so famous when it comes to video calling that people usually term video calling as Skype. Skype calls are free and have a capacity of 50 people. It also provides you with the option of calling landlines and cell phones with the app itself. Decent for both personal and professional use.
Facetime
This app is exclusively available only on Apple devices. If you use Face-Time you know that theirs no better video calling app than this. It serves both audios as well as video calls. It even has the feature of Group Face-Time where up to 32 people can participate. So, you can easily have a big fat group chat but yeah only with the Apple device owners, that’s where the impediment comes.
Now let’s talk about the ones that are making the most in this business.
Zoom
Zoom video conferencing software has now become the new social network in the pandemic. It is a cloud-based video conferencing platform with a capacity of up to 1000 participants and up to 49 videos on a single screen. About 60% out of Fortune 500 companies use this software. It allows unlimited meetings but that too for a 40 minute and 100 participant limit. To get longer meetings and more participants you need to upgrade by paying for packages starting from $15 per month per host.
CiscoWebEx
It is another most popular video conferencing app, especially for business users. Providing you a good quality of video and audio. The platform is paid but it provides you a free tier with a capacity of holding meetings with 100 participants. It also provides 1GB free cloud storage for you to record and save the videocall.
House Party
It’s a very popular free video chatting app mainly amongst the youth. In this app, you can enjoy playing games with your friends. It has a capacity of 8 people so it’s ideally suitable for small group chats.
Within this short time, the popularity of these apps has touched pinnacles by crossing 62 million+ downloads worldwide. As its one of the ways to stay positive and to care for the ones who aren’t there with you.
