Alternatives to Google Hangouts logo

Alternatives to Google Hangouts

Skype, Hangouts, Zoom, Duo, and Google Meet are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Google Hangouts.
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What is Google Hangouts and what are its top alternatives?

Message contacts, start free video or voice calls, and hop on a conversation with one person or a group.
Google Hangouts is a tool in the Web and Video Conferencing category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Google Hangouts

  • Skype
    Skype

    Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are. ...

  • Hangouts
    Hangouts

    It is a communication platform which includes messaging, video chat, and VOIP features. ...

  • Zoom
    Zoom

    Zoom unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and cross platform group chat into one easy-to-use platform. Our solution offers the best video, audio, and screen-sharing experience across Zoom Rooms, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and H.323/SIP room systems. ...

  • Duo
    Duo

    Duo is a next-generation package manager that blends the best ideas from Component, Browserify and Go to make organizing and writing front-end code quick and painless. ...

  • Google Meet
    Google Meet

    It is the business-oriented version of Google's Hangouts platform and is suitable for businesses of all sizes. It allows users to dial in phone numbers to access meetings, thus enabling users with slow internet connection to call in. ...

  • Slack
    Slack

    Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together. ...

  • Microsoft Teams
    Microsoft Teams

    See content and chat history anytime, including team chats with Skype that are visible to the whole team. Private group chats are available for smaller group conversations. ...

  • Jira
    Jira

    Jira's secret sauce is the way it simplifies the complexities of software development into manageable units of work. Jira comes out-of-the-box with everything agile teams need to ship value to customers faster. ...

Google Hangouts alternatives & related posts

Skype logo

Skype

17.2K
653
Voice calls, instant messaging, file transfer, and video conferencing
17.2K
653
PROS OF SKYPE
  • 258
    Free, widespread
  • 147
    Desktop and mobile apps
  • 110
    Because i have to :(
  • 57
    Low cost international calling
  • 56
    Good for international calls
  • 10
    Best call quality anywhere, generally
  • 5
    Beautiful emojis
  • 4
    Chat bots
  • 2
    Translator
  • 2
    Skype for business integration with Outlook
  • 1
    United kingdom
  • 1
    Not the Best, but get the job done
CONS OF SKYPE
  • 5
    Really high CPU utilization during video/screenshare
  • 3
    Not always reliable
  • 3
    Outdated UI
  • 3
    Birthday notifications are annoying
  • 3
    The worst indicator noises of any app ever
  • 2
    Finding/adding people isn't easy

related Skype posts

Dmitry Mukhin

Uploadcare is mostly remote team and we're using video conferencing all the time both for internal team meetings and for external sales, support, interview, etc. calls. I think we've tried every solution there is on the market before we've decided to stop with Zoom.

Tools just plainly don't work (Skype), are painful to install for external participants (Webex and other "enterprise" solutions) can't properly handle 10+ participants calls (Google Hangouts Chat).

Zoom just works. It has all required features and even handles bad connections very graciously. One of the best tool decisions we've ever made :)

See more
Mark Nelissen

I use Slack because it offers the best experience, even on the free tier (which we're still using). As a comparison, I have had in depth experience with HipChat, Stride, Skype, Google Chat (the new service), Google Hangouts (the old service). For self hosted, Mattermost is open source and claims to support most Slack integrations, but I have not extensively investigated this claim.

See more
Hangouts logo

Hangouts

84
4
A communication platform
84
4
PROS OF HANGOUTS
  • 4
    Free
CONS OF HANGOUTS
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Hangouts posts

    Zoom logo

    Zoom

    1.7K
    155
    Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing
    1.7K
    155
    PROS OF ZOOM
    • 25
      Web conferencing made easy
    • 16
      Remote control option
    • 13
      Draw on screen
    • 12
      Very reliable
    • 11
      In-meeting chat is pretty good
    • 9
      Free
    • 9
      Pair programming sessions with shared controls
    • 8
      Easy to share meeting links/invites
    • 7
      Good Sound Quality
    • 6
      Cloud recordings for meetings
    • 5
      Great mobile app
    • 4
      Virtual backgrounds
    • 4
      Recording Feature
    • 4
      Other people use it
    • 4
      User Friendly actions
    • 2
      Reactions (emoticons)
    • 2
      Auto reconnecting
    • 2
      Chrome extension is great to easily create meetings
    • 2
      While sharing screen, you can still see your video
    • 2
      Mute all participants at once
    • 2
      When ending the videocall, everybody gets kicked
    • 2
      Different options for blocking chat
    • 1
      Easily share video with audio
    • 1
      /zoom on Slack
    • 1
      Registration form
    • 1
      Meant for business and education
    • 0
      Zoom
    CONS OF ZOOM
    • 20
      Limited time if you are a basic member
    • 14
      Limited Storage
    • 11
      Hate how sharing your screen defaults to Full Screen
    • 10
      Quality isn't great (Free)
    • 9
      No cursor highlight on screenshare.
    • 8
      Potential security flaws
    • 7
      Onboarding process for new users is not intuitive
    • 5
      Virtual background quality isn't good
    • 5
      Security
    • 4
      Editing can be improved
    • 4
      Doesn't handle switching audio sources well
    • 4
      The native calendar is buggy
    • 4
      Dashboard can be improved
    • 3
      Pornographic material displayed
    • 3
      Any body can get in it
    • 3
      Not many emojis
    • 3
      Past chat history is not saved
    • 3
      Recording Feature
    • 3
      En In reality,the chat in the meet not is excelent,noo
    • 3
      Zoom lags a lot

    related Zoom posts

    Yonas Beshawred

    Using Screenhero via Slack was getting to be pretty horrible. Video and sound quality was often times pretty bad and worst of all the service just wasn't reliable. We all had high hopes when the acquisition went through but ultimately, the product just didn't live up to expectations. We ended up trying Zoom after I had heard about it from some friends at other companies. We noticed the video/sound quality was better, and more importantly it was super reliable. The Slack integration was awesome (just type /zoom and it starts a call)

    You can schedule recurring calls which is helpful. There's a G Suite (Google Calendar) integration which lets you add a Zoom call (w/dial in info + link to web/mobile) with the click of a button.

    Meeting recordings (video and audio) are really nice, you get recordings stored in the cloud on the higher tier plans. One of our engineers, Jerome, actually built a cool little Slack integration using the Slack API and Zoom API so that every time a recording is processed, a link gets posted to the "event-recordings" channel. The iOS app is great too!

    #WebAndVideoConferencing #videochat

    See more

    Server side

    We decided to use Python for our backend because it is one of the industry standard languages for data analysis and machine learning. It also has a lot of support due to its large user base.

    • Web Server: We chose Flask because we want to keep our machine learning / data analysis and the web server in the same language. Flask is easy to use and we all have experience with it. Postman will be used for creating and testing APIs due to its convenience.

    • Machine Learning: We decided to go with PyTorch for machine learning since it is one of the most popular libraries. It is also known to have an easier learning curve than other popular libraries such as Tensorflow. This is important because our team lacks ML experience and learning the tool as fast as possible would increase productivity.

    • Data Analysis: Some common Python libraries will be used to analyze our data. These include NumPy, Pandas , and matplotlib. These tools combined will help us learn the properties and characteristics of our data. Jupyter notebook will be used to help organize the data analysis process, and improve the code readability.

    Client side

    • UI: We decided to use React for the UI because it helps organize the data and variables of the application into components, making it very convenient to maintain our dashboard. Since React is one of the most popular front end frameworks right now, there will be a lot of support for it as well as a lot of potential new hires that are familiar with the framework. CSS 3 and HTML5 will be used for the basic styling and structure of the web app, as they are the most widely used front end languages.

    • State Management: We decided to use Redux to manage the state of the application since it works naturally to React. Our team also already has experience working with Redux which gave it a slight edge over the other state management libraries.

    • Data Visualization: We decided to use the React-based library Victory to visualize the data. They have very user friendly documentation on their official website which we find easy to learn from.

    Cache

    • Caching: We decided between Redis and memcached because they are two of the most popular open-source cache engines. We ultimately decided to use Redis to improve our web app performance mainly due to the extra functionalities it provides such as fine-tuning cache contents and durability.

    Database

    • Database: We decided to use a NoSQL database over a relational database because of its flexibility from not having a predefined schema. The user behavior analytics has to be flexible since the data we plan to store may change frequently. We decided on MongoDB because it is lightweight and we can easily host the database with MongoDB Atlas . Everyone on our team also has experience working with MongoDB.

    Infrastructure

    • Deployment: We decided to use Heroku over AWS, Azure, Google Cloud because it is free. Although there are advantages to the other cloud services, Heroku makes the most sense to our team because our primary goal is to build an MVP.

    Other Tools

    • Communication Slack will be used as the primary source of communication. It provides all the features needed for basic discussions. In terms of more interactive meetings, Zoom will be used for its video calls and screen sharing capabilities.

    • Source Control The project will be stored on GitHub and all code changes will be done though pull requests. This will help us keep the codebase clean and make it easy to revert changes when we need to.

    See more
    Duo logo

    Duo

    21
    1
    A next-generation package manager for the front end
    21
    1
    PROS OF DUO
    • 1
      Lean and efficient
    CONS OF DUO
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Duo posts

      Google Meet logo

      Google Meet

      513
      155
      A video conferencing app
      513
      155
      PROS OF GOOGLE MEET
      • 35
        Free
      • 15
        Integrated with G Suite
      • 14
        Group video call
      • 10
        Gmail server integration
      • 10
        Good to make phone calls
      • 9
        Instant Messaging
      • 9
        Easy to add and remove contacts
      • 7
        Unlimited Storage (Premium version)
      • 6
        Easy setup
      • 6
        User friendly mobile app
      • 6
        Record (Premium Feature)
      • 5
        Accessible from the Browser
      • 5
        Saves the chats for future reference
      • 5
        Browser extension
      • 3
        No pornography
      • 2
        Google Meet is never buggy
      • 2
        Cool emoji extensions
      • 2
        Amazing captions
      • 2
        16 people show at the same time
      • 2
        Meet has the best quality in terms of participant view
      CONS OF GOOGLE MEET
      • 9
        Quality isn't great
      • 5
        Really high CPU utilization during video/screenshare
      • 2
        No client annotation on shared screen
      • 2
        Not great sound quality
      • 2
        Difficult to share video with audio
      • 2
        Needs to take measures to improve the ecosystem
      • 1
        Auto-added to G Cal invites
      • 1
        Needs better support and rollout process
      • 1
        No interactions activities
      • 1
        Overheat cpu on Android
      • 1
        No desktop client
      • 1
        No desktop client

      related Google Meet posts

      I own an Escape Room. Since right now everyone is practicing social distancing, I would like to run my Escape Room games virtually. I would like to allow approx 4 users to log in to play. They can chitchat a few minutes before their game to get to know each other. Then once the game begins, I will introduce myself and give them the plot to their escape game. I will have a wide-angle camera mounted to the wall to show the room, and as the game master, carry a tablet or webcam around as players talk to me and direct me to show them certain items in the room, move in for closeups in certain areas, try lock combinations, etc. I will be their hands while they solve the puzzles. I am not sure if Google Hangouts Google Meet or Zoom is better for this. I did try it yesterday using google hangout meet and it was good, but I think there may have been a wifi issue where it was choppy. Just trying to figure out the best option. Thank you! Catherine

      See more
      Slack logo

      Slack

      120.1K
      6K
      Bring all your communication together in one place
      120.1K
      6K
      PROS OF SLACK
      • 1.2K
        Easy to integrate with
      • 876
        Excellent interface on multiple platforms
      • 849
        Free
      • 694
        Mobile friendly
      • 690
        People really enjoy using it
      • 331
        Great integrations
      • 315
        Flexible notification preferences
      • 198
        Unlimited users
      • 184
        Strong search and data archiving
      • 155
        Multi domain switching support
      • 82
        Easy to use
      • 40
        Beautiful
      • 27
        Hubot support
      • 22
        Unread/read control
      • 21
        Slackbot
      • 19
        Permalink for each messages
      • 17
        Text snippet with highlighting
      • 15
        Quote message easily
      • 14
        Per-room notification
      • 13
        Awesome integration support
      • 12
        Star for each message / attached files
      • 12
        IRC gateway
      • 11
        Good communication within a team
      • 11
        Dropbox Integration
      • 10
        Slick, search is great
      • 10
        Jira Integration
      • 9
        New Relic Integration
      • 8
        Great communication tool
      • 8
        Combine All Services Quickly
      • 8
        Asana Integration
      • 7
        This tool understands developers
      • 7
        XMPP gateway
      • 7
        Google Drive Integration
      • 7
        Awesomeness
      • 6
        Replaces email
      • 6
        Twitter Integration
      • 6
        Google Docs Integration
      • 6
        BitBucket integration
      • 5
        Jenkins Integration
      • 5
        GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback
      • 5
        Guest and Restricted user control
      • 4
        Clean UI
      • 4
        Excellent multi platform internal communication tool
      • 4
        GitHub integration
      • 4
        Mention list view
      • 4
        Gathers all my communications in one place
      • 3
        Perfect implementation of chat + integrations
      • 3
        Easy
      • 3
        Easy to add a reaction
      • 3
        Timely while non intrusive
      • 3
        Great on-boarding
      • 3
        Threaded chat
      • 3
        Visual Studio Integration
      • 3
        Easy to start working with
      • 3
        Android app
      • 2
        Simplicity
      • 2
        Message Actions
      • 2
        It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC
      • 2
        So much better than email
      • 2
        Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams
      • 2
        Great interface
      • 2
        Great Channel Customization
      • 2
        Markdown
      • 2
        Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations
      • 1
        Great Support Team
      • 1
        Watch
      • 1
        Multi work-space support
      • 1
        Flexible and Accessible
      • 1
        Better User Experience
      • 1
        Archive Importing
      • 1
        Travis CI integration
      • 1
        It's the coolest IM ever
      • 1
        Community
      • 1
        Great API
      • 1
        Easy remote communication
      • 1
        Get less busy
      • 1
        API
      • 1
        Zapier integration
      • 1
        Targetprocess integration
      • 1
        Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock
      • 1
        Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT
      • 1
        I was 666 star :D
      • 1
        Dev communication Made Easy
      • 1
        Integrates with just about everything
      • 1
        Very customizable
      • 0
        Platforms
      • 0
        Easy to useL
      CONS OF SLACK
      • 13
        Can be distracting depending on how you use it
      • 6
        Requires some management for large teams
      • 6
        Limit messages history
      • 5
        Too expensive
      • 5
        You don't really own your messages
      • 4
        Too many notifications by default

      related Slack posts

      Lucas Litton
      Founder & CEO at Macombey · | 24 upvotes · 341K views

      Sentry has been essential to our development approach. Nobody likes errors or apps that crash. We use Sentry heavily during Node.js and React development. Our developers are able to see error reports, crashes, user's browsers, and more, all in one place. Sentry also seamlessly integrates with Asana, Slack, and GitHub.

      See more
      Jakub Olan
      Node.js Software Engineer · | 17 upvotes · 470.1K views

      Last time we shared there information about our decision about using YouTrack over Jira actually we found much better solution that our team have loved. Linear is a minimalistic issue tracker that integrates well with Sentry, GitHub, Slack and Figma which are our basic tools. I would like to recommend checking out Linear as a potential alternative to "heavy" issue trackers, maybe at enterprises that may not work but when we're a startup that works awesome!

      See more
      Microsoft Teams logo

      Microsoft Teams

      2.4K
      144
      Chat-based workspace in Office 365
      2.4K
      144
      PROS OF MICROSOFT TEAMS
      • 29
        Work well with the rest of Office 365 work flow
      • 24
        Mobile friendly
      • 19
        Free
      • 12
        Great integrations
      • 12
        Well-thought Design
      • 10
        Channels
      • 9
        Easy setup
      • 6
        Unlimited users
      • 5
        Strong search and data archiving
      • 5
        Easy to integrate with
      • 4
        Web interface
      • 4
        Multi domain switching support
      • 3
        Same interface on multiple platforms
      • 2
        Great voice quality
      CONS OF MICROSOFT TEAMS
      • 17
        Confusing UI
      • 12
        Bad performance on init and after quite a use
      • 10
        Bad Usermanagement
      • 6
        No desktop client (only fat and slow electron app)
      • 6
        Can't see all members in a video meeting
      • 5
        Unable to Mute users
      • 5
        No Markdown Support
      • 4
        You don't really own your messages
      • 4
        MIssing public channels
      • 4
        Forced WYSIWYG
      • 3
        Stubborn, unused friendly
      • 3
        Challenging Onboarding
      • 3
        No linux support
      • 1
        Audio support problems

      related Microsoft Teams posts

      Jon Waite
      Scrum Master at Costco Wholsale · | 3 upvotes · 86.5K views

      Looking for the pros and cons for a tool we can use best for cross-team collaboration (software development). Has anyone compared Google Hangouts Chat with Microsoft Teams? What were the advantages of either??

      See more
      Jack Graves

      We use Microsoft Teams as our primary workplace collaboration tool. It enables our team to work remotely and still collaborate on projects - with integration to JIRA and Confluence, the tool enables us to create War Rooms when problems occur and also provides information-sharing capabilities. Replaced HipChat.

      See more
      Jira logo

      Jira

      61.8K
      1.2K
      The #1 software development tool used by agile teams to plan, track, and release great software.
      61.8K
      1.2K
      PROS OF JIRA
      • 310
        Powerful
      • 254
        Flexible
      • 149
        Easy separation of projects
      • 113
        Run in the cloud
      • 105
        Code integration
      • 58
        Easy to use
      • 53
        Run on your own
      • 39
        Great customization
      • 39
        Easy Workflow Configuration
      • 27
        REST API
      • 12
        Great Agile Management tool
      • 7
        Integrates with virtually everything
      • 6
        Confluence
      • 6
        Complicated
      • 3
        Sentry Issues Integration
      • 2
        It's awesome
      CONS OF JIRA
      • 8
        Rather expensive
      • 5
        Large memory requirement
      • 2
        Slow
      • 1
        Cloud or Datacenter only

      related Jira posts

      Johnny Bell

      So I am a huge fan of JIRA like #massive I used it for many many years, and really loved it, used it personally and at work. I would suggest every new workplace that I worked at to switch to JIRA instead of what I was using.

      When I started at #StackShare we were using a Trello #Kanban board and I was so shocked at how easy the workflow was to follow, create new tasks and get tasks QA'd and deployed. What was so great about this was it didn't come with all the complexity of JIRA. Like setting up a project, user rules etc. You are able to hit the ground running with Trello and get tasks started right away without being overwhelmed with the complexity of options in JIRA

      With a few TrelloPowerUps we were easily able to add GitHub integration and storyPoints to our cards and thats all we needed to get a really nice agile workflow going.

      I'm not saying that JIRA is not useful, I can see larger companies being able to use the JIRA features and have the time to go through all the complex setup to get a really good workflow going. But for smaller #Startups that want to hit the ground running Trello for me is the way to go.

      In saying that what I would love Trello to implement is to allow me to create custom fields. Right now we just have a Description field. So I am adding User Stories & How To Test in the Markdown of the Description if I could have these as custom fields then my #Agile workflow would be complete.

      #StackDecisionsLaunch

      See more
      Jakub Olan
      Node.js Software Engineer · | 17 upvotes · 470.1K views

      Last time we shared there information about our decision about using YouTrack over Jira actually we found much better solution that our team have loved. Linear is a minimalistic issue tracker that integrates well with Sentry, GitHub, Slack and Figma which are our basic tools. I would like to recommend checking out Linear as a potential alternative to "heavy" issue trackers, maybe at enterprises that may not work but when we're a startup that works awesome!

      See more