Join.me is the most straightforward online meeting tool on the market. It offers one product and one product only: online meetings. With Join.me, you’ll be doing one of two things—hosting a meeting or joining a meeting.
Don’t be deterred by its no-frills approach to conference calls. Join.me has a range of great features such as excellent usability and facilitating participants joining from both desktop and mobile devices into the same meeting, plus instant screen sharing and collaborative whiteboard features.
Although the offerings are not as wide-reaching, Join.me stacks up well against its competitors in the online meeting space. With seamless integration with your favorite business apps and excellent call quality, you may find yourself charmed by this straightforward software.
But, don’t just take my word for it, let’s dig in to just how Join.me compares to other companies in the online conference calling space.
Join.me Pros and Cons
Pros
- Excellent usability
- Join from a desktop or mobile device
- Easy screen sharing across multiple devices
- Invite anyone to your meetings
- Collaborative whiteboard feature
- Great audio quality
- Decent video quality
Cons
- No recordings of video
- Application lacks security features
- Whiteboard only available on iOS devices
Join.me – A Part of a Bigger Family
Join.me is a part of a much larger family of services that all focus on providing communicative solutions for businesses worldwide.
Join.me is owned by LogMeIn, which is considered one of the world’s largest SaaS companies. Its products unlock the potential of the modern workforce by making it simple and easy for people and businesses around the globe to work simply, securely, and remotely no matter where they are located.
Under the LogMeIn banner, you will find a range of communication and collaboration tools such as the GoTo range, Grasshopper, and OpenVoice. Other products in the LogMeIn family have also included Join.me and Jive.
Over the last three years, LogMeIn has worked hard to establish itself in the unified communications and collaboration (UCC) market in an effort to compete with rivals Zoom and Cisco Webex, which already offer cleverly integrated portfolios.
LogMeIn went about acquiring different companies such as Jive, with the plans to integrate it with GoToMeeting to create the perfect cloud and video conferencing software.
As the acquisition and integration of products progressed, LogMeIn also absorbed Join.me into GoToMeeting, focusing their efforts on creating one easy and well-rounded online meeting product.
Existing account holders can still use Join.me to hold online meetings via desktop or mobile application, but new prospects will be directed to GoToMeeting to create a new account.
How Join.me Compares to Top Conference Call Services
Join.me is consistently hailed as the most simplistic and straightforward conference call services out there. Its intuitive interface is incredibly easy to use and gets straight to the point. You have two options with Join.me, you can host a meeting or join one. It’s perfect for freelancers, small businesses, and startups looking for a cheap online meeting platform to collaborate with remote teams.
If you’re looking for something a little more involved or that can offer more variety, there are tons of excellent conference call services out there. We wrote a post on the best eight conference call services on the market today.
RingCentral is perfect for teams looking for a video and phone conference call combo. While ClickMeeting is a great tool for webinars and presentations.
Of course, there is also GoToMeeting from the same family as Join.me that we know will offer a premium product, with a few extra bells and whistles.
Join.me Number of Participants
You must consider the maximum number of participants per conference call when researching the best provider for you. It’s arguably the most important factor to consider when determining which plan will best suit your needs.
If you’re a small business with only five employees, you can get away with a free or minimal plan for a little while, but what happens when you need to conference with prospective clients or outside contractors?
When Join.me merged with GoToMeeting, its Lite plan, which allowed up to five participants per meeting, was scrapped. I think you can understand why, especially when you find out that the Pro plan allowed 50 participants and unlimited call duration. The new plans now offer a lead-in Professional Plan with 150 participants per meeting, for $2 per month more than the previous Pro plan at $12 per month.
At only $12 per month, Join.me presents itself as an affordable option, even for small businesses or freelancers. Of course, there are free services like Zoom or RingCentral that cap participants at 100 people, but they also cap the call time at 40 minutes.
If it were us, we’d pay the small fee to ensure that we aren’t going to get cut off in the middle of a highly collaborative meeting because of a time limit. What a buzzkill!
Join.me Video Conferencing
On a global scale, we turn to video conferencing more and more as remote work, learning, and socializing become more common and convenient, especially during a global pandemic.
Furthermore, most of us are visual beings. We communicate with body language, facial expressions, and hand gestures far more than we realize. So, when you have voice-only conferencing, some important details may get lost in translation.
That’s why it’s worth finding a conference call provider who can also offer video conferencing capabilities.
Join.me offers feature-rich, unlimited duration video conferencing. What people love about Join.me is that each participant can join from a different device, even for video conferencing.
For example, let’s say the entire team has joined from a desktop and have their cameras switched on. But one participant is unable to participate via desktop and so joins via mobile. They can choose to dial into the conference without video or enter the conference using their phone’s camera.
This is a cool feature that really highlights the flexibility and simplicity of this service.
Most conference call providers do include video conferencing these days. Great alternatives to Join.me include GoToMeeting for small businesses, ClickMeeting for larger webinars, and Microsoft Teams for internal collaboration. You can read about all our top picks here.
Join.me Video and Audio Quality
Video and audio quality can make or break a successful conference call. We have all experienced conference calls where we’ve spent the first few minutes asking if everyone can hear you.
Let’s also not forget the awkward moments when your colleague’s face freezes halfway through their turn to talk in an unfortunate facial expression. Our point is, clear audio quality and optimal video clarity cannot be overstated.
In general, Join.me receives excellent feedback surrounding these two factors. The odd review does indicate that video quality can decline as more participants join the meeting, so this is something to keep in mind if you’re planning to hold large meetings with Join.me.
Join.me also features the ability for presenters to mute and unmute participants at any time during the meeting. They can also choose who will have their webcams live and who will not should they need to. These features allow the presenter to control the level of video and audio quality without booting participants out of the meeting.
If you are purely interested in video calls, our research suggests Zoom is the best overall quality. Both the picture and audio quality are consistently extremely clear.
Join.me Call Recording
Having the ability to record your calls is hugely advantageous. Even better if the provider offers the ability to share the recording easily.
Call recordings mean that participants who missed out on the conference can catch up in their own time. It also means that you can look back on the meeting when you need to clarify finer details or check your understanding of a topic.
Interestingly, Join.me does include call recording. But only for the audio portion of the call, not the video. And while the video portion of your call is not recorded, any components involving screen sharing are.
At the end of the day, these are the two most important aspects to be recorded. We just found this to be an unusual approach to call recording.
On the other hand, providers like GoToMeeting include unlimited cloud recording of both audio and visual elements on its Business and Enterprise plans. We anticipate that following the merger with GoToMeeting, any new users to this software will have these same features.
Join.me Call Scheduling and Setup
Avoiding confusing back-and-forth between meeting participants is key to getting your meeting off on the right foot. Thankfully, all the best conference calling providers make it super easy to schedule your call by integrating with your favorite calendar app, Join.me included.
You can seamlessly integrate existing calendars from Google Chrome, Microsoft Outlook, and Office 365 with Join.me for easy call scheduling.
We love when software does this. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to work out a complicated calendar or scheduling system within your new software when you already have one in place.
Join.me Phone Conferencing and Online Meetings
Join.me is a simple yet effective call conferencing software. It is perfect for small businesses, startups, and freelancers looking for a cost-effective, no-frills approach to collaborating with remote teams.
The product is very clear: Do you want to hold a meeting or join an existing one?
The simplistic nature of this service is precisely what has made them successful. The concept behind Join.me is to get everybody on the same page, even when they’re not in the same room. In a nutshell, Join.me offers instant screen sharing, allowing you to share and review documents, train team members, or demo products for prospects.
Meeting participants don’t even need an account with Join.me to join your meeting. Furthermore, when they are invited to join the meeting, they’ll be asked how they’d like to join, whether by phone or browser. This flexibility to accommodate meeting style means your meeting can go ahead, regardless of whether participants have reliable internet access.
Join.me’s mobile whiteboard is a key highlight of its product. The mobile whiteboard allows teams to collaborate in real-time on any project. Participants can all draw, edit, annotate, and add images to the whiteboard simultaneously. With Join.me, remote collaboration has never been so easy.
Pricing starts at $12 per month for the Professional plan, which includes up to 150 participants per meeting. However, to get all the features we’ve discussed here, you should consider signing up for the Business plan, which starts at $16 per month for up to 250 participants.
To wrap it all up, would we recommend Join.me for your next conference call? If you’re a small business or start-up with minimal participant requirements, absolutely!
Especially if you’re looking for straightforward, no-frills software to communicate and collaborate with your team.
However, if you are looking for a provider with a few more bells and whistles, GoToMeeting or RingCentral are great alternatives. Regardless of which provider you choose, make sure to keep some of the key factors and methodologies we discussed here today in mind to ensure the provider of your choice can deliver premium call conferencing solutions.