Google has announced that it will offer all the premium features of its popular video conferencing app, Google Meets, for free. The company has revealed that all the features, which were earlier available for enterprise customers, will be available to all G Suite customers free of cost.
The company has revealed that customers can avail these benefits till September 2020. With this, customers will be able to add up to 250 participants in a video call. Furthermore, one could also live stream for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain. Additionally, the customers will be able to record meetings and save them to Google Drive.
With Google making these premium features free of cost, should its competition worry? In order to give an answer to this question, let’s first take a look at the subscription plans for its competitions:
Microsoft Teams offer
The Microsoft Teams is another popular app for video conferencing and more. The app currently comes with Microsoft 360 subscription and it offers features according to the subscription model. To start with the basic plan, you get an unlimited number of users for video calling and one also gets guest access to Teams, send file attachments up to 2GB per user and more.
The Microsoft 365 Business basic is priced at Rs 125 per month and includes all the features of free along with screen sharing, background blur, scheduled meetings, meeting recording, video conferencing meetings up to 250 people and online events up to 10,000. The Microsoft 365 Business Standard is priced at Rs 660 and it offers all the features of Business Basic along with other features like multi-factor authentication, advanced auditing and reporting and more. Lastly, Office 365 E3 offers all the things along with audio conferencing and phone system and PSTN calling options.
Zoom premium offers
The Pro subscription comes with $14.99 and it allows to create personal meetings IDs for Zoom Meetings and comes with video conferencing for up to 24 hours. The Business model comes with $19.99 per month and it offers transcripts of Zoom meetings recorded in the could. Then there is Zoom Enterprise, which is priced $19.99. The subscription allows up to 400 participants, unlimited could storage, dedicated customer success manager and bundled discounts on Webinars and Zoom Rooms.
Slack premium subscription plans
Slack provides a free account that allows 1:1 video and voice calls between teammates and one can share files with others as well. The app offers 10,000 searchable messages and provides unlimited options to create channels for every project, topic or group. The Slack Standard and all other plans offer group voice and video calls of up to 15 teammates.
So, Google Meet free premium features could pose a challenge to others?
The answer is Yes. The premium features from Google Meet like video conferencing up to 25 people can be a problem with other players expect Zoom. Microsoft Teams and Slack offers the same feature, put it behind the paywall. Zoom allows you to call up to 100 participants, but the Free version allows you to call for 40 minutes only. Furthermore, Zoom is currently in limelight for lots of reasons including its safety and issues. Microsoft Teams seems to offer more with its bundled plans, but it can be expensive for both small organizations or normal customers.
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Slack, on the other hand, has a different approach. It only allows up to 15 participants for group audio and video calls. Furthermore, the feature is also kept behind the paywall. Furthermore, you get an option to record and upload meetings directly to Google Drive, which is again a paid feature for most of the applications. With this, multiple users will surely get attracted towards Google Meet platform as it provides the most used premium features for free and it is more reliable as compared to apps like Zoom.