Webex vs. Yugma vs. GoToMeeting – Who wins?
November 2, 2008
Yugma, the new alternative to WebEx
Yugma is the new online conferencing service that kills Webex in terms of quality and pricing (Comment me if you feel different). Someone mentioned the Yugma service over at InsideCRM online magazine and I decided to check it out. These guys are good from what I see. We know that WebEx’s lowest plan starts $39 a month for only 15 users. GoToMeeting starts at $49 a month and Turbo meeting is a piece of horse manure (personal experience), so don’t use it. Check the chart from Yugam out below. More features, and conference attendees for less. They impress me (not easy to do) and here are their feature sets, tell me what you think.
| Services | Pro-20 | Pro-100 | Pro-500 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attendees you can invite | 20 | 100 | 500 |
| Pricing Monthly | 19.99 | 69.95 | 89.95 |
| Desktop Sharing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free Teleconferencing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Public and Private Chat | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Customizable Widget | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Windows, Mac and Linux | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| MS Outlook and Skype compatiblity | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Share Mouse & Keyboard controls with other attendess | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Change Presenter | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Annotations & Whiteboarding Tools | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Schedule Sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Web Session Recording, Playback and Hosted Webcast | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Shared File Space (100MB) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Webinar feature (Professional 100 & 500 only) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Priority Customer Support | Email, Phone and WebEmail | ||
Collaboration vs. Sharing
Since Yugma excels in its screen sharing capacity, the real power of Yugma lies in its real time collaboration capabilities.
With Yugma, multiple people can collaborate in any program, sharing mouse and keyboard capability in real time. The whiteboard feature of Yugma allows for virtual brainstorming sessions, either in or outside of meetings. The annotation tool allows for one or multiple people to edit or provide comments on work in progress.
While many of “the other guys” focus on old school meetings like structured collaboration, Yugma focuses on two types of collaboration: spontaneous (this happens often) and structured collaboration.
Yugma Professional Features
Yugma Professional offers a extreme set of features to meet the needs of any business. Here are the brief highlights of just some of the features you get with Yugma Professional:
Yugma Viewer
Allow meeting participants to quickly connect and view your meetings without having to download or register for Yugma.
Mouse & Keyboard Sharing
Collaborate in any program in real time with one or multiple people, whether they are in the same office or across the globe.
Annotation and Whiteboard tools
With these easy-to-use integrated tools you can brainstorm in real time, edit documents, or just add some flair to your presentations
Session Scheduling
Schedule your meetings and send invites in advance. Keep track of your scheduled sessions on Yugma’s integrated calendar.
Session Recording, Playback, an Hosted Webcast
Record important meetings or demos for later viewing. No codecs or file compatibility issues, your recorded sessions will be hosted by Yugma and playback in any browser.
Shared File Space
Avoid important files getting trapped in virus or spam filters by posting files for clients or colleagues in Yugma’s shared file space.
Yugma Enterprise Features
In addition to all the powerful features you get with Yugma Professional, Yugma Enterprise users also get some key features to help manage Yugma across a larger organization, such as group account administration, consolidated billing, and a branded meeting portal page.
For more information about our Enterprise Service, check out their website at yugma.com.
Yugma’s Satisfaction Guarantee
Yugma is commited to providing our Professional and Enterprise customers the best service and support. We promise 99.9% or better service availability. If you are not satisfied within the first 30 days of your one year contract, we’ll refund your remaining balance.
We also provide live technical support during business hours via phone, email, and live chat. Email and voice mail inquiries made during non-business hours will receive a response as soon as possible the next business day.
Yugma for Business Pricing
Yugma Professional starts at just $19.95 a month for 20 attendees. We have service plans to fit any size business, up to 500 concurrent users.
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That’s a wrap, these are new huys I will be using for my online conference from here on out. I doubt I will go back to Webex or GoToMeeting ever again. It seems the new guys like to push the envelope while the old guys rake in the menoy and don’t really bring anything innovative anymore. Do you agree?
You forgot to mention as the host of your Yugma session, you can make any attendee the Presenter at any time. Online conferecing continues to improve & Yugma leads the way.
Those are very good tools, however, in many cases those platforms are used just to allow the team to review the same document together in real-time and “be on the same page”.
The recently launched http://www.showdocument.com does exactly that, quickly show documents to friends and colleagues.
It allows co-browsing on any document, user uploads a document and invites friends to view it with him live
All the participants in the session see each others’ drawing, highlights, etc.
I love Yugma! I have attended webinars for about a year using both Yugma and WebEx “Go To Meeting”… and while both function fine… Yugma works better. Plain and simple. Especially on my Mac… GTM had issues earlier on with Macs, though they may have updated and fix these issues.
I am planning on using Yugma for distant tech support, online webinars and educational workshops, as well as business meetings.
Just FYI…the price is now less expensive than you mentioned!! Woohoo! You can use Yugma’s personal account (up to 10 attendees + 1 presenter), for free, forever. However it does limit some features to a 15-day trial… Then the have Professional 10 ($9.95/mo), Pro 30 ($29.95/mo), Pro 100 ($69.95), and Pro 500 ($89.95/mo). Not bad… Pro 10 will suffice for my needs.
Plus we have to mention that Yugma’s site design is way better than GoToMeeting’s!
) It’s friendly with Mac, Windows and Linux! Love it!
Brian,
Thanks for the feedback about your personal experience with Yugma. I think they have a bright future.
We do webinars for hundreds of participants at a time. No integrated VoIP is something that we cannot live with. GoToWebinar gives us decent screen updates, VoIP and dial-in numbers. This is something that is sorely missing from Yugma.
You are correct, if you need to do something of this scale with integrated VoIP then Yugma is not for you. Most small businesses don’t need this feature so it’s not a big deal.
Hi All!
Rebecca here from Yugma, thanks for the Yugma blogging! There are some new updates for Yugma that I want to inform everyone about.
Yugma Free now lets you invite 20 attendees to a session! All current Yugma Free subscribers have been automatically upgraded to the new service.
Also, Yugma now offers a full-sharing program (in beta) for Linux users! There is also a new plug-in for Outlook that makes joining and scheduling meetings even easier. You can check out both of these on our download page:
http://www.yugma.com/download/allproducts-jvm.php
Feel free to send any questions or feedback that you may have to info@yugma.com
Thanks again!
Rebecca,
Thanks for the update, I will have to check it out.
I’ve been using Yugma for about 6 months, and I have to say that it still has serious issues. Today was the third time in the last few months that I’ve gotten a “sever not responding” message just as I was launching a sales presentation. This time it probably cost me a sale because the client thinks I have poor judgement for not choosing Webex or GoToMeeting.
I like Yugma’s price and their look. I was willing to deal with some glaring U/I problems and a funky Mac installation. I even held in there when some clients complained about having to enter their email address to access a session and when others reported performance problems with Yugma keeping up with what was happening on my display. But a service that fails as frequently as this one does, especially when I need to close a sale, just won’t keep my business.
It could be different on a Mac, could be the cause of many of your problems.
Our company only uses Macs.
If this is an issue, I would like to know before we commit.
John,
Sorry, this blog is just a hobby so I confess I didn’t review for every platform, just on a PC.
Yugma’s “server not responding” is not a Mac issue. I corresponded directly with Yugma regarding their January 16, 2009 outage. According to their reply, “the outage today… was in fact an issue with our database server.” They go on to claim “steps have been taken to permanently correct the cause of the issue.” However, I’ve experienced this problem with enough repetition that my business can’t tolerate it any more. Sorry Yugma, too little, too late.
“bandle” is correct. I’ve used Yugma for a good 2 years to train college interns as well as for my sales staff worldwide and that was my number one issue. The server crashes too often…and every time it crashes, you have to provide your participants a new session id. This used to drive both me and my interns nuts, however, back then they were the only game in town.
At first, I thought may be the FREE customers were on a different set of servers than the premium customers and perhaps by signing up for the Premium service that this would solve the problem. So when I called to ask if I could be guaranteed that the crashes would stop once I start with the premium service, I was told that it had nothing to do with it.
They have an excellent product, however, they seem to be very shortsighted in their business approach. Their priorities are misplaced. It’s like having a great horse, good horse shoes, but inferior nails. As the maxim goes: For the sake of a nail, the shoe was lost; and for the sake of a shoe, the horse was lost.
They forgot one thing and that is: the reason they give the FREE service is give others an opportunity to try the product before they buy. Therefore it’s absolutely critical that the experience be “out of this world” so that the FREE customers will not only become premium customers but also refer a gazillion number of their friends and associates.
Although I have personally referred close to a 1000 interns, employees, friends and colleagues to Yugma in the past, it has always been with the following disclaimer: Do not use it for an important business meeting or, if you do, be sure to let the participants know in advance that things might crash and you may have to reissue them a new session id due to the popularity of the product and that Yugma is in the process of upgrading their servers.
The only problem with that is that this dog won’t hunt after months and months of the same issue when you’re dealing with the same people over and over again.
My advice to Yugma is the following:
1. The most important thing is the user experience, therefore, invest heavily in powerful servers and backup servers that can handle 10 times the traffic and high-speed internet backbone connections. That should be the #1 priority. Stop all the excuses…this dog won’t hunt anymore.
2. Give ALL your customers their own [[ permanent ]] session id. That’s what DIMDIM does. That way, in the event the server crashes or you lose your connection, you can go back in and all your event participants won’t have to sign out and then have to sign back in with a new session id.
That’s why we always used Yugma with Skype separately. When Yugma crashes, first we have to sign back in to obtain a new session id and then we notify everyone via skype of the new session id and then all the participants have to log out and log back in with the new session id. NOT GOOD AT ALL….
Depending on the size of the audience, we may not even use SKYPE since it is UNRELIABLE with more than 3-5 participants…yep, it crashes often too with respect to group conferences…As well, a lot of people can’t use both–SKYPE and YUGMA–at the same time which has more to do with their own computer RAM and processing power….and in all fairness has nothing to do with Yugma in that particular case.
Which is the reason why we always use a teleconference number along with Yugma and use SKYPE as a backup in case we want to send out a file etc..
I’ve given up on pestering them…I now use DIMDIM which is an excellent product. However, that being said, do NOT use DimDim for VIDEO conferencing. In fact, I do NOT recommend VIDEO conferencing [[ for serious BUSINESS purposes ]] for ANY product on the market today. Once G4 is deployed worldwide—may be within the next 4-8 years—then VIDEO conferencing for [[ business ]] purposes will make sense. Bandwidth is going to be an issue for some time to come.
Dimdim works for Mac (both hosting and attending) and we’re constantly working to keep pace with the demands for our service.
-k
Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager
Dimdim Web Conferencing / http://www.dimdim.com
e: kevin@dimdim.com / twitter: @meetdimdim
Facebook: http://dimdim.com/facebook
Rebecca…I assume you keep tracking these blogs…
Please can you respond faster to “bandles” major problems 16th Jan and then 20th Jan. If this is correct then you have a serious problem and I and everyone else needs to know before proceeding with your product. Everything one reads about your product is great especially as it is new and apparantly better than the major brands.
However since you are monitoring these blogs you should have responded effectively by now. Please do so to either satisfy everyone or does this mean that your product is seriously flawed.
As a very small business I make sales presentations to the largest brand name companies across America. Mine is typical of the way forward into the future…the small guy winning in the largest business arenas because of the web etc and we need a product like yours. But now there is real doubt.
Has Rebecca left the company?
wow great people in this discussion
I have being looking ofr a webinars forum any recommendation would be apprecaited.
I have used GoToMeetings for years and hate the fact that my clients have to put in their email address to get started, and the download.
I dream of only sharing part of my screen as I demonstrate by flipping to multiple screens but don’t want anyone to see my ms control bar on the bottom like skype alerts, normally i use a dual monitor and only share the second one.
I do use skype to save my audio and patch back together. the goto meeting code is tough one, as near as I can tell I can not edit it.
I have tried Connect Pro, and still after my third try can not really figure it out as to what screen I am sharing and it seems quite pricey and perhaps slow?
I will try out this Yugma out, but with caustion
Bill
any suggestions apprecaited
This is Rebecca from Yugma.
If anyone runs into any technical problems while using Yugma, please send an email to support@yugma.com or try out live support feature (look for the Ask Live Online button in the upper right corner of the Yugma website).
There are some tricks for improving Yugma’s performance that you can do you your end. Yugma runs best when the presenter is using a wired connection, avoid using wireless and especially shared wireless access points. You may also want to test your upload speed, 256kbps is the minimum to present and 512kbps is recommended for a normal session, 1024kpbs is recommended for when video is shared. A good site to test your upload speed is http://www.speedtest.net (Please be aware that your upload speed is most likely much lower than the download speed your ISP advertises.) Other issues that impede performance are Java issues, firewalls and proxy servers, if you would like to try troubleshooting on you own, you can visit the Yugma forums: http://forum.yugma.com/
Our servers have just recently been expanded and upgraded, and we switched to a network with high standards and a good feed into the rest of the internet, so we are doing everything we can to allow everyone a smooth connection. We are also working on a feature that will allow a host to reconnect to their session if the connection is dropped, this feature is currently being tested by our development team.
We welcome dialogue about the Yugma product online but handle support issues through the support channels that we have made available to our users (online chat, the forum and support@yugma.com). If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to contact Yugma directly.
I agree that Yugma is an excellent tool. I have been using online collaboration tools since the early 80’s with IBM PROFS, and the similar DEC program, and then with the advent of the IP network (early ARPANet and MILNet, then latter the open-use Internet) have always kept my eyes on tools or services that enabled full-featured distributed-team or distributed-audience tools. Yugma is at the top of the list for capability, capacity, and price.
I also had significant problems with “server not available”, so I investigated causes, starting from my PC going outward. The major cause of my session disconnects between my computer and my server was my own internal company network’s wireless (11g) capability. When I used my wireless service, sometimes just a second-long break in wireless signal strength or speed was enough to break the session/server link. A wired connection gave me none of these disconnection problems.
Yugma is unstable. Meetings drop sporadically. Lose one meeting, and the time it takes everybody to reconnect erodes any cost savings over WebEX.
Thanks for the review, I have recommended Yugma based on this as well as the fact that I am a Linux user and as Yugma uses Java its platform agnostic.
Also worth taking a look at YuuGuu
see: http://www.yuuguu.com/pricing/yuuguu-pricing
I have not used it yet but it would be worth adding to your review.
Thank you.
How do i use a webcam or show my vídeo with Yugma?