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Deciding to switch over to digital meetings is easy. However, finding the best video conferencing software to run them gets a little more difficult.
GoToMeeting and Zoom are two major video conferencing software platforms designed to help companies break through communication barriers and host interactive virtual meetings.
Although both offer all the standard features you’d expect to find in a video conferencing solution, they differ on the execution front and have varying price structures.
So when it comes to GoToMeeting vs Zoom, who do you pick? In this post, we’ll do a detailed comparison between the two platforms to help you identify the best option for your business.
GoToMeeting vs Zoom: An overview
Both Zoom and GoToMeeting are highly reviewed and rated.
GoToMeeting is a product of LogMeIn, promising professional online meeting experiences with no downloads required. Anyone can join a meeting just by clicking a link.
With GoToMeeting, users benefit from an amazing 99.9% uptime guarantee, and a 14-day day free trial. You can also explore other GoTo variants like GoToWebinar in the same environment. GoToMeeting has a freemium offering which allows for up to 40-minute meetings.
Zoom is probably the best-known video conferencing solution on the market, with around 300 million daily meeting participants. With Zoom, companies can access things like virtual backgrounds, call recordings, and chat. There’s also a free plan for beginners.
Zoom also offers a wide range of extra tools, like webinars, conferencing features, hand-raising and more, to make meetings more immersive.
GoToMeeting vs Zoom: How their features stack up
Now that you have some idea of each platform, let’s look at how they compare in terms of usage, execution, and cost.
Ease of use
Both Zoom and GoToMeeting are amazingly simple and straightforward to use.
Zoom’s interface is a little cleaner for beginners, with easy-to-understand control panels and dashboards. You can adjust your video view depending on your preferences and toggle between meeting options on the main screen of your meeting. You can even set the control panel to appear when you hover your mouse over it.
GoToMeeting’s controls are static and appear in a separate window to your main conferencing screen. Again, the experience is amazingly simple to use, though you’ll have fewer customization options. One way to make navigating your meetings simpler on GoToMeeting is to shrink your controls, so they appear in a group at the top of the screen.
Both platforms offer intuitive user menus and dashboards, but Zoom’s clean and minimalist layout makes it easier to get around.
Administrative controls
Zoom and GoToMeeting are both designed to offer administrators absolute control over their meetings. This is a great way to ensure only the right people enter your sessions.
With Zoom, admins have the option to control participant audio with muting and unmuting. You can hide or show webcam streams and control chat options for your participants.
GoToMeeting admins can set session roles for each participant, including co-organizer and organizer options. You can decide who should be allowed to share their screen, as when attendees can talk with things like mute and unmute options.
In their Pro plans, GoToMeeting and Zoom offer a feature that makes attendees wait to be logged in. GoToMeeting calls it Meeting Lock, while Zoom refers to it as Waiting Room. This feature adds an extra layer of security to meetings by providing visibility into who’s requesting to join.
However, GoToMeeting lacks some of the more advanced features that are present in Zoom. In Zoom, if you choose “enable join before host” for a meeting, you can require a meeting password. This prevents unauthorized individuals from entering the meeting by requiring them to provide a password. Zoom also lets you put attendees on hold and temporarily remove them from the meeting.
In a nutshell, Zoom gives you more options to administer who joins the meeting, what displays on the screen, and who has the stage during the session.
Video conferencing
Video conferencing is a core feature of GoToMeeting and Zoom. Both platforms offer HD video, multiple webcam views, and multiple video feeds. You can adjust the quality of the video if you need to reduce bandwidth consumption too.
Zoom is excellent for a gallery view, with access to more than 49 webcam streams at once, compared to only 25 for GoToMeeting. It also gives you some unique ways to control your video with access to things like touch-up filters and virtual backgrounds.
Though you can’t soften your appearance on GoToMeeting, you’ll still have access to controls for your contrast, brightness, sharpness, saturation, and other components. There are also settings for backlight and white balance levels and a powerline frequency feature which means you can help to reduce the flicker on monitors if you have a low refresh rate.
Overall, Zoom has a slight advantage with its unique video settings. You get more flexibility when you hop on a call with Zoom, and you can use multiple feeds during the meeting.
To enjoy these video conferencing features, your hardware and internet connection need to be fast and solid. As long as you have a 3.8Mbps connection, you should have no lags or connection issues. Zoom can utilize up to 3.8 Mbps at the highest settings, while GoToMeeting recommends 2Mbps for HD video calls.
Screen sharing
A highly sought-after conferencing feature, screen sharing provides presenters with the option to showcase what tools and software can do. Both Zoom and GoToMeeting offer screen sharing tools.
With Zoom, you can share your content and screen easily, as well as choosing just a portion of your screen or a specific app to share. If you have a second camera or a smartphone screen to share, you can do this too. You’ll even be able to set your video up alongside your presentation.
With GoToMeeting, you get all the basic screen sharing features you’d expect, such as the ability to share portions of your screen or applications. However, there are fewer features overall than you’d get from Zoom.
Annotation and whiteboarding
For brainstorming sessions, Zoom and GoToMeeting also offer annotation and whiteboarding. In an online presentation, Zoom’s annotation and drawing tools are easy and fun to use. You can highlight an area, add annotations with text boxes, and draw in real-time.
Zoom’s whiteboarding solutions come with arrows and check marks to help collect and showcase information more intuitively. There’s also the option to share your finished whiteboarding service with your colleagues.
GoToMeeting offers more basic annotation and whiteboarding capabilities compared to Zoom. There aren’t any graphics built-in, so you’ll need to draw arrows and lines yourself.
So while GoToMeeting will serve your basic annotation needs, Zoom is the better choice as it offers more in-depth annotations and powerful drawing tools. Zoom also stands out for its easy access to whiteboarding: just click ‘Share’ at the bottom of your screen and then choose ‘Whiteboard.’
Calling and web dial-in
For companies who need to give their employees a wide range of ways to join a meeting, GoToMeeting and Zoom support participation through a microphone and speakers. Zoom even has its own dedicated VoIP solution in the form of Zoom Phone.
GoToMeeting and Zoom offer dial-in long distance conferencing options and “Call Me” options to connect with more participants. Call Me removes the need for participants to dial in; the web conferencing tool does the dialing for them by calling them at the scheduled time.
However, you need to pay a little more to access the Call Me feature on Zoom, whereas it comes with all plans on GoToMeeting. No hoops to jump through. No extra licensing fees on top of your GoToMeeting subscription.
Participant capacity
The size of your group will be a crucial factor in the GoToMeeting vs Zoom decision.
Zoom Meetings comes with a free plan that supports calls for up to 100 participants. If you’re willing to pay for a premium plan, you can get up to 1,000 participants with a “large meetings” add-on.
GoToMeeting’s free plan supports up to 3 participants, meaning you have a lot less flexibility than you would with Zoom. The most affordable paid option can deliver support for up to 150 participants, and you can boost that number all the way up to 3,000 if you have a paid enterprise account.
If you’re looking for the solution that will give you the most participant support for the lowest price, Zoom is the obvious choice.
Group chat
You may decide that you want to go beyond basic video and audio calls when you’re hosting your modern meetings. That’s why GoToMeeting and Zoom both come with group chat features. You can make a chat window during your meeting where anyone can type comments and questions and take notes during a conversation.
Zoom’s chat functions are a little more advanced than GoToMeeting’s options. You can design breakout rooms where smaller groups can discuss parts of a conversation quietly. There’s access to gifs, file sharing, image sharing, and more. Users can even create dedicated groups.
Recording and storage
Whether you’re recording your meetings for attendees who couldn’t attend or for compliance purposes, both GoToMeeting and Zoom offer recording and storage. Zoom’s local recording feature allows you to save meeting recordings on your device for free. You can also save up to 1GB of recording with the premium plan and purchase “add-ons” starting at $40 per month after that.
GoToMeeting definitely has the advantage here, with unlimited cloud recordings, storage, and transcripts starting from the mid-level plan. You can easily record and share meetings locally or in the cloud and store them for as long as you want.
GoToMeeting vs Zoom: Pricing
As with most software, it’s crucial to see how well the features stack up to the cost before making a purchase decision.
Zoom offers a set of four price plans (as of June 2021):
- Basic – free with up to 100 participants, 40-minute group meetings, and unlimited 1-1 meetings
- Pro – $14.99/month/license with up to 100 participants (increase up to 1,000 with large meetings addon), 30-hours group meetings, social media streaming, and 1 GB cloud recording
- Business – $19.99/month/license with up to 300 (increase up to 1,000 with large meetings addon), single sign-on, recording transcripts, company branding, all features of Pro, and more.
- Enterprise – $19.99/month/license with up to 500 participants, unlimited cloud storage, recording transcripts, all features of Business, and more.
GotoMeeting has three plans:
- Professional – $10.50/organizer/month with up to 150 participants, screen sharing, unlimited meetings, and more.
- Business – $14.25/organizer/month with up to 250 participants and unlimited cloud recording, note taking, all features of Professional, and more.
- Enterprise – Custom pricing with up to 3000 participants and unlimited cloud recording, note taking, all features of Business, and more.
If you’re a small business with a few employees, you can get by with the free Zoom option.
However, GoToMeeting is the more affordable video conferencing platform when you base your decision on overall pricing. Moreover, GoToMeeting doesn’t have a minimum host requirement on its higher-priced plans, while Zoom does. Still, Zoom’s free plan makes it a great option for running short meetings, something GoToMeeting doesn’t provide.
Conclusion
When comparing GoToMeeting vs Zoom, it’s clear that both platforms are great for video conferencing.
But while GoToMeeting has all the essentials, you might prefer Zoom for the richer set of capabilities it gives you. With all the video conferencing, screen sharing, and annotation frills, Zoom makes it easy to boost the remote meeting experience.
Plus, Zoom offers a free plan that’s hard to beat. While GoToMeeting offers a free 14-day trial, it doesn’t compare to the option to hold 40-minute meetings with up to 100 participants without spending a dime.
With that said, it’s also important to note that you may have a larger group of participants. In this case, GoToMeeting would be great for companies that don’t need all the bells and whistles Zoom provides. You may not need a touch-up filter or 49 webcam streams at once.
GoToMeeting has all the basic features to get you started. And if you’re already using other LogMeIn products (LogMeIn is the parent company of GoToMeeting), there might be no learning curve to making the most of the platform.
Deciding to switch over to digital meetings is easy. However, finding the best video conferencing software to run them gets a little more difficult.
GoToMeeting and Zoom are two major video conferencing software platforms designed to help companies break through communication barriers and host interactive virtual meetings.
Although both offer all the standard features you’d expect to find in a video conferencing solution, they differ on the execution front and have varying price structures.
So when it comes to GoToMeeting vs Zoom, who do you pick? In this post, we’ll do a detailed comparison between the two platforms to help you identify the best option for your business.
GoToMeeting vs Zoom: An overview
Both Zoom and GoToMeeting are highly reviewed and rated.
GoToMeeting is a product of LogMeIn, promising professional online meeting experiences with no downloads required. Anyone can join a meeting just by clicking a link.
With GoToMeeting, users benefit from an amazing 99.9% uptime guarantee, and a 14-day day free trial. You can also explore other GoTo variants like GoToWebinar in the same environment. GoToMeeting has a freemium offering which allows for up to 40-minute meetings.
Zoom is probably the best-known video conferencing solution on the market, with around 300 million daily meeting participants. With Zoom, companies can access things like virtual backgrounds, call recordings, and chat. There’s also a free plan for beginners.
Zoom also offers a wide range of extra tools, like webinars, conferencing features, hand-raising and more, to make meetings more immersive.
GoToMeeting vs Zoom: How their features stack up
Now that you have some idea of each platform, let’s look at how they compare in terms of usage, execution, and cost.
Ease of use
Both Zoom and GoToMeeting are amazingly simple and straightforward to use.
Zoom’s interface is a little cleaner for beginners, with easy-to-understand control panels and dashboards. You can adjust your video view depending on your preferences and toggle between meeting options on the main screen of your meeting. You can even set the control panel to appear when you hover your mouse over it.
GoToMeeting’s controls are static and appear in a separate window to your main conferencing screen. Again, the experience is amazingly simple to use, though you’ll have fewer customization options. One way to make navigating your meetings simpler on GoToMeeting is to shrink your controls, so they appear in a group at the top of the screen.
Both platforms offer intuitive user menus and dashboards, but Zoom’s clean and minimalist layout makes it easier to get around.
Administrative controls
Zoom and GoToMeeting are both designed to offer administrators absolute control over their meetings. This is a great way to ensure only the right people enter your sessions.
With Zoom, admins have the option to control participant audio with muting and unmuting. You can hide or show webcam streams and control chat options for your participants.
GoToMeeting admins can set session roles for each participant, including co-organizer and organizer options. You can decide who should be allowed to share their screen, as when attendees can talk with things like mute and unmute options.
In their Pro plans, GoToMeeting and Zoom offer a feature that makes attendees wait to be logged in. GoToMeeting calls it Meeting Lock, while Zoom refers to it as Waiting Room. This feature adds an extra layer of security to meetings by providing visibility into who’s requesting to join.
However, GoToMeeting lacks some of the more advanced features that are present in Zoom. In Zoom, if you choose “enable join before host” for a meeting, you can require a meeting password. This prevents unauthorized individuals from entering the meeting by requiring them to provide a password. Zoom also lets you put attendees on hold and temporarily remove them from the meeting.
In a nutshell, Zoom gives you more options to administer who joins the meeting, what displays on the screen, and who has the stage during the session.
Video conferencing
Video conferencing is a core feature of GoToMeeting and Zoom. Both platforms offer HD video, multiple webcam views, and multiple video feeds. You can adjust the quality of the video if you need to reduce bandwidth consumption too.
Zoom is excellent for a gallery view, with access to more than 49 webcam streams at once, compared to only 25 for GoToMeeting. It also gives you some unique ways to control your video with access to things like touch-up filters and virtual backgrounds.
Though you can’t soften your appearance on GoToMeeting, you’ll still have access to controls for your contrast, brightness, sharpness, saturation, and other components. There are also settings for backlight and white balance levels and a powerline frequency feature which means you can help to reduce the flicker on monitors if you have a low refresh rate.
Overall, Zoom has a slight advantage with its unique video settings. You get more flexibility when you hop on a call with Zoom, and you can use multiple feeds during the meeting.
To enjoy these video conferencing features, your hardware and internet connection need to be fast and solid. As long as you have a 3.8Mbps connection, you should have no lags or connection issues. Zoom can utilize up to 3.8 Mbps at the highest settings, while GoToMeeting recommends 2Mbps for HD video calls.
Screen sharing
A highly sought-after conferencing feature, screen sharing provides presenters with the option to showcase what tools and software can do. Both Zoom and GoToMeeting offer screen sharing tools.
With Zoom, you can share your content and screen easily, as well as choosing just a portion of your screen or a specific app to share. If you have a second camera or a smartphone screen to share, you can do this too. You’ll even be able to set your video up alongside your presentation.
With GoToMeeting, you get all the basic screen sharing features you’d expect, such as the ability to share portions of your screen or applications. However, there are fewer features overall than you’d get from Zoom.
Annotation and whiteboarding
For brainstorming sessions, Zoom and GoToMeeting also offer annotation and whiteboarding. In an online presentation, Zoom’s annotation and drawing tools are easy and fun to use. You can highlight an area, add annotations with text boxes, and draw in real-time.
Zoom’s whiteboarding solutions come with arrows and check marks to help collect and showcase information more intuitively. There’s also the option to share your finished whiteboarding service with your colleagues.
GoToMeeting offers more basic annotation and whiteboarding capabilities compared to Zoom. There aren’t any graphics built-in, so you’ll need to draw arrows and lines yourself.
So while GoToMeeting will serve your basic annotation needs, Zoom is the better choice as it offers more in-depth annotations and powerful drawing tools. Zoom also stands out for its easy access to whiteboarding: just click ‘Share’ at the bottom of your screen and then choose ‘Whiteboard.’
Calling and web dial-in
For companies who need to give their employees a wide range of ways to join a meeting, GoToMeeting and Zoom support participation through a microphone and speakers. Zoom even has its own dedicated VoIP solution in the form of Zoom Phone.
GoToMeeting and Zoom offer dial-in long distance conferencing options and “Call Me” options to connect with more participants. Call Me removes the need for participants to dial in; the web conferencing tool does the dialing for them by calling them at the scheduled time.
However, you need to pay a little more to access the Call Me feature on Zoom, whereas it comes with all plans on GoToMeeting. No hoops to jump through. No extra licensing fees on top of your GoToMeeting subscription.
Participant capacity
The size of your group will be a crucial factor in the GoToMeeting vs Zoom decision.
Zoom Meetings comes with a free plan that supports calls for up to 100 participants. If you’re willing to pay for a premium plan, you can get up to 1,000 participants with a “large meetings” add-on.
GoToMeeting’s free plan supports up to 3 participants, meaning you have a lot less flexibility than you would with Zoom. The most affordable paid option can deliver support for up to 150 participants, and you can boost that number all the way up to 3,000 if you have a paid enterprise account.
If you’re looking for the solution that will give you the most participant support for the lowest price, Zoom is the obvious choice.
Group chat
You may decide that you want to go beyond basic video and audio calls when you’re hosting your modern meetings. That’s why GoToMeeting and Zoom both come with group chat features. You can make a chat window during your meeting where anyone can type comments and questions and take notes during a conversation.
Zoom’s chat functions are a little more advanced than GoToMeeting’s options. You can design breakout rooms where smaller groups can discuss parts of a conversation quietly. There’s access to gifs, file sharing, image sharing, and more. Users can even create dedicated groups.
Recording and storage
Whether you’re recording your meetings for attendees who couldn’t attend or for compliance purposes, both GoToMeeting and Zoom offer recording and storage. Zoom’s local recording feature allows you to save meeting recordings on your device for free. You can also save up to 1GB of recording with the premium plan and purchase “add-ons” starting at $40 per month after that.
GoToMeeting definitely has the advantage here, with unlimited cloud recordings, storage, and transcripts starting from the mid-level plan. You can easily record and share meetings locally or in the cloud and store them for as long as you want.
GoToMeeting vs Zoom: Pricing
As with most software, it’s crucial to see how well the features stack up to the cost before making a purchase decision.
Zoom offers a set of four price plans (as of June 2021):
- Basic – free with up to 100 participants, 40-minute group meetings, and unlimited 1-1 meetings
- Pro – $14.99/month/license with up to 100 participants (increase up to 1,000 with large meetings addon), 30-hours group meetings, social media streaming, and 1 GB cloud recording
- Business – $19.99/month/license with up to 300 (increase up to 1,000 with large meetings addon), single sign-on, recording transcripts, company branding, all features of Pro, and more.
- Enterprise – $19.99/month/license with up to 500 participants, unlimited cloud storage, recording transcripts, all features of Business, and more.
GotoMeeting has three plans:
- Professional – $10.50/organizer/month with up to 150 participants, screen sharing, unlimited meetings, and more.
- Business – $14.25/organizer/month with up to 250 participants and unlimited cloud recording, note taking, all features of Professional, and more.
- Enterprise – Custom pricing with up to 3000 participants and unlimited cloud recording, note taking, all features of Business, and more.
If you’re a small business with a few employees, you can get by with the free Zoom option.
However, GoToMeeting is the more affordable video conferencing platform when you base your decision on overall pricing. Moreover, GoToMeeting doesn’t have a minimum host requirement on its higher-priced plans, while Zoom does. Still, Zoom’s free plan makes it a great option for running short meetings, something GoToMeeting doesn’t provide.
Conclusion
When comparing GoToMeeting vs Zoom, it’s clear that both platforms are great for video conferencing.
But while GoToMeeting has all the essentials, you might prefer Zoom for the richer set of capabilities it gives you. With all the video conferencing, screen sharing, and annotation frills, Zoom makes it easy to boost the remote meeting experience.
Plus, Zoom offers a free plan that’s hard to beat. While GoToMeeting offers a free 14-day trial, it doesn’t compare to the option to hold 40-minute meetings with up to 100 participants without spending a dime.
With that said, it’s also important to note that you may have a larger group of participants. In this case, GoToMeeting would be great for companies that don’t need all the bells and whistles Zoom provides. You may not need a touch-up filter or 49 webcam streams at once.
GoToMeeting has all the basic features to get you started. And if you’re already using other LogMeIn products (LogMeIn is the parent company of GoToMeeting), there might be no learning curve to making the most of the platform.
