Best Webex Alternatives for Business Video Conferencing

Today’s hybrid teams rely on omnichannel cloud communication platforms like Webex to connect and collaborate in real time.

Video conferencing replaces in-person meetings, team chat messaging prevents cluttered email inboxes, and VoIP voice calling offers automated customer self-service.

The Webex alternatives in this post offer competitive advanced features and team collaboration tools at a variety of price points.

What is Webex?

Cisco Webex is a communication and collaboration cloud platform known for unifying voice calling, video meetings, team chat, analytics, and in-meeting features like file sharing and whiteboarding in one desktop and mobile app.

Webex’s VoIP business phone system includes call management features like call merge, IVR, call forwarding, call hold, call queueing, do not disturb, visual voicemail, and audio conference calls for up to 6 participants.

One-click video calling transitions voice calls or chat conversations to web conferencing, where background noise removal, speech enhancement technology, and AI gesture recognition ensure excellent video quality. Custom backgrounds and layouts, automatic transcription, virtual whiteboards, breakout rooms, and post-meeting highlights are especially standout Webex video chat features.

What are the Best Webex Alternatives?

Below, we’ve compared the top Webex alternatives:

• Microsoft Teams
• Zoom
• GoTo Meeting
• Dialpad
• Nextiva
• RingCentral
• BlueJeans
• Google Workspace

Microsoft Teams: Best for Document Collaboration

Microsoft Teams is a messaging and collaboration app with a video conferencing platform, VoIP phone, and real-time chat.

Its feature-rich desktop and mobile apps integrate with over 250 third-party platforms (Zoho, Salesforce, Slack, social media platforms, etc.) while providing standout native features like virtual cafes, 30-hour web conference time limits, and chat-based task automation.

Key Features

• Meetings “Together Mode”:  During meetings, place each participant’s video stream in a shared virtual scene, such as a coffee shop, creating a fun and team-oriented tone

• Microsoft Apps web collaboration: Teams share, access, and simultaneously edit web versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. This allows teams to prepare presentations, data, and text while chatting and managing to-do lists through the Tasks app.

• Tasks App: Unifies all of your tasks from Outlook, To Do, and shared tasks in Planner to offer an at-a-glance workflow overview. Sort tasks by importance, due date, and task type, or view the tasks assigned within each of your chat groups.
• Power Virtual Agents App: Design omnichannel AI bots with natural language understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to manage customer-facing and internal team tasks, access knowledge bases and calendars, and route customers to appropriate agents

Other features:

• Webinars with up to 10,000 attendees (Business Standard plan)
• Meeting screen sharing, breakout rooms, and virtual backgrounds
• Meeting recording and transcription
• Chat search
• Add external users to chat groups

Microsoft Teams Pricing and Plans

What Users Like and Dislike about Microsoft Teams

Why Microsoft Teams is a Good Alternative to Webex

Microsoft Teams’ network of over 250 built-in apps lets users customize their experience and enhances core channels with features like annotations, bot creation, business flow builders, and team collaboration within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Zoom: Best for Video Features

Zoom One, built around the popular Zoom Meetings, provides a video-optimized internal collaboration platform.

The free Basic plan, the Pro plan, and the Business Plan include only chat, video, and whiteboard features–Zoom Phone and SMS come with the Business Plus and Enterprise plans. All plans include Zoom Meetings features like whiteboards, breakout rooms, in-meeting instant messaging, emoji responses, and more.

Key Features

• Whiteboards: Zoom Whiteboards gives groups a blank canvas with drawing, annotation, and ideation tools to bring ideas to life. Perfect for touch screen presentations or remote brainstorming, whiteboards have multicolored paint brushes, shapes, smart connectors, sticky notes, and comments. They are shareable and editable both in and outside of virtual meetings.

• Automated video captions: Zoom Meetings and Webinars auto-generate live voice transcriptions that are accessible in the Zoom cloud post-meeting

• Real-time reporting: Zoom offers omnichannel historical and real-time usage statistics with insight into current call queues, your team’s favorite Zoom features, usage by country and agent, and more
• Meetings features: Zoom Meetings include participant engagement features like filters, up to 9 user spotlights, pinned screens, audience polling and surveys, meeting co-hosts, meeting waiting rooms, and more

Other features:

• Meetings recording
• Barge/Monitor/Whisper/Takeover
• IVR
• Branded email templates for meeting invites

Zoom Pricing and Plans

What Users Like and Dislike about Zoom

Why Zoom One is a Good Alternative to Webex

Zoom’s video features exceed the competition to cover use cases from education to eCommerce, health, finance, events, sales, the justice system, and much more. The downside? Companies that also want VoIP calling will have to upgrade to the Business Plus plan.

GoToMeeting: Best for One-Click Capabilities

GoTo’s business collaboration platform, GoTo Connect, combines VoIP calling, video meetings, and chat with call management capabilities like a drag-and-drop dial plan editor, advanced ring strategies, do not disturb, and unlimited call queues. GoTo Meeting includes useful collaboration features, but only hosts up to 150 participants maximum–less than the competition.

Key Features

• Custom call flows: With the visual plan editor, create custom call flows that map out the incoming caller’s self-service journey. Combine tools like auto attendants and voicemails, with actions like scheduling appointments and prompting for a password, to route callers to the correct destination or service.
• Call forwarding: Desktop and mobile (Apple iOS, Mac, Windows, Android) call forwarding to internal and external phone numbers, agents, call groups, voicemail boxes, etc

• One-click video conferencing: Switch from a chat into a group or one-on-one meeting with a single click
• Meeting scheduling: Easily create, schedule, add co-organizers to, and set a duration for one-time or recurring video meetings. View all meetings in your calendar app, and set automated meeting reminders.

Other features:

• Virtual Voicemail
• Screen, application, web browser, and desktop sharing
• Call monitoring
• Call analytics

GoTo Connect Pricing and Plans

What Users Like and Dislike about GoTo Connect

Why GoTo Connect is a Good Alternative to Webex

GoTo Connect offers all the essential collaboration features–voice, video, chat, SMS, call routing, IVR, and analytics–with a whopping 50+ country calling area on the Standard plan. However, GoTo Connect is a little pricy, and the Basic plan restricts each account to one usage of several call center features, like ring groups, call queues, and auto attendants.

Dialpad: Best for Small Teams

Dialpad’s Business Communication platform packs a surprising breadth of advanced features, even into their cheapest plan. All Dialpad plans include unlimited calling, SMS, chat, and 5-hour video meetings with up to 10 participants. While large teams should take note of the small video meeting capacity, Dialpad’s advanced AI and meeting engagement features make it a great option for a small business.

Key Features

• Video-conferencing: Dialpad video conferences feature personal meeting IDs and allow users to join from any desktop or mobile browser with no download. Schedule meetings directly from your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 calendar. In meetings, enjoy unlimited audio recording, a waiting room, chat, virtual backgrounds, and whiteboarding.
• Real-time call transcriptions: Dialpad AI transcribes calls in real-time, providing an in-meeting transcript history and access to shareable post-meeting transcriptions. AI notes important meeting moments, keywords, and action items, turning them into agent-assigned tasks post-meeting.
• Live speech coaching: During live voice call transcription, Dialpad AI identifies keywords indicating customer sentiment and intent, triggering in-call agent assistance pop-ups with suggested topics, actions, and information pulled from the internal knowledge base
• Post-call summaries: After each phone conversation, agents automatically receive a call summary email containing the recording, participant list, transcript, action item to-do list, a highlights list, and notes

Other features:

• Voicemail transcription
• Unlimited video meetings
• Real-time analytics and reporting
• Single sign-on security

Dialpad Pricing and Plans

What Users Like and Dislike about Dialpad

Why Dialpad  is a Good Alternative to Webex

Dialpad’s plans include everything a small company needs in a collaboration platform, plus video features like a waiting room, whiteboarding, and virtual backgrounds. Dialpad’s AI is the most agent-supportive on this list, with live transcriptions, real-time coaching, and automatic post-call summaries.

Nextiva: Best Real-Time Agent Support

Nextiva’s Business Communications plans unify Nextiva’s VoIP business cloud phone system, team chat, video conferencing software, and SMS into one dashboard on desktop and mobile apps. A side menu displays agent notifications on each channel, plus an inbox that compiles inbound notifications across channels.

Key Features

• Call Pop: Inbound calls trigger a pop-up on the agent screen  showing key customer data (contact info, last survey response, sentiment, account value, CSAT score, etc.) This data is pulled from Nextiva’s native CRM tool or your preferred third-party CRM software.
• Automations: With the Enterprise plan, automate cross-channel outbound customer communications–welcome messages, surveys, campaign sequences, and more. Set action triggers and use templates that auto-fill with customer information.

• Virtual voicemail, voicemail-to-text, and voicemail-to-email: Agents access voicemail audio recordings or transcriptions from desktop/mobile devices, email, or via SMS text–then return customer calls with one click
• Customer journey AI: Natural Language Processing analyzes conversations, providing live agent assistance and customer experience scores in an interactive graph format

Other features:

• Call recording
• Multi-level auto attendant
• Unlimited fax
• Free local and toll-free number

Nextiva Pricing and Plans

What Users Like and Dislike about Nextiva

Why Nextiva is a Good Alternative to Webex

Nextiva offers workflow and outbound messaging automations, analytics, and agent-support tools that Webex does not. Given that Nextiva’s Essential plan doesn’t include chat and video conferences, the Enterprise plan provides the best overall value.

RingCentral: Best AI for Video Meetings

RingCentral’s MVP (messaging, video, phone) UCaaS platform brings team chat, VoIP, and video meetings into a mobile or desktop application. In chat, teammates can share files, whiteboards, and task-management to-do lists. One-click HD video supports high-quality meetings with up to 200 participants, whiteboards, chat, and AI capabilities.

Key Features

• Messaging built-in task management: RingCentral chat conversations feature built-in project management for team members to assign tasks and due dates, and update task status. Each conversation’s Tasks tab tracks all tasks assigned within that chat, displaying assignees, completion status, task category, and a task-specific chat.
• Team huddle: Each group chat contains a team huddle, a persistent online meeting room
• Live meeting transcription: During video meetings, start live transcription with one click. Latecomers can scroll back through transcriptions to catch up or search for keywords. All transcripts are stored in the RingCentral cloud and downloadable afterward.
• Advanced meeting insights: Post-meeting insights from RingCentral AI include a summary of meeting keywords, snippets, topics, video highlights, and full meeting transcripts

Other features:

• One-click call flipping
• Video auto-follow
• Whiteboard
• Breakout rooms

RingCentral Pricing and Plans

What Users Like and Dislike about RingCentral

Why RingCentral is a Good Alternative to Webex

RingCentral offers advanced voice, messaging, and call routing features like video transcription and post-meeting insights, multi-level IVR, and task management functionality built into messaging.

BlueJeans: Best Audio Quality in Meetings

BlueJeans, Verizon’s desktop and mobile video meeting software, offers a highly affordable Standard plan where up to 100 participants can meet for an unlimited amount of time. In addition to 5 hours of meeting recording, BlueJeans offers advanced video features like spatial Dolby audio, analytics, transcription, and AI meeting support.

Key Features

• Smart Meetings: Smart Meetings combines participant efforts and AI support to record and create meeting highlights, summaries, and key action items to facilitate documentation and follow-through. Tag important discussion points within the transcript, rank and upvote tagged highlights, assign tasks with email notifications, and access meeting recaps that brief the whole meeting in just a few minutes.

• Dolby Voice and HD video: Dolby-engineered HD voice technology suppresses background noise, optimizes bandwidth, equalizes loud and soft speech styles, and makes speech clear and decipherable even with simultaneous speakers. Bluejeans’ spatial audio conferencing tool originates each speaker’s voice from a distinct location within the computer speakers’ sounds, giving the impression that participants are in different locations, like in person

• Breakout sessions: Hosts can create and monitor up to 75 random or pre-assigned breakout sessions per meeting
• Interactive collaboration: Collaborate with screen sharing, co-annotation, or infinite-canvas whiteboards with custom text, brushes, shapes, images, sticky notes, and more for up to 25 simultaneous users

Other features:

• 25-screen gallery view
• Virtual backgrounds
• Join from any device
• Meeting transcription

BlueJeans Pricing and Plans

What Users Like and Dislike about BlueJeans

Why BlueJeans is a Good Alternative to Webex

Tools like Dolby spatial audio, a collaborative whiteboard, meeting transcriptions, and meeting insights take the BlueJeans video conferencing solution to a higher level than Webex meetings.

Google Workspace: Best Overall Interconnectedness

Google Workspace is a communication platform that unites a wide library of Google Apps–Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Google Meet (formerly Hangouts), Chat, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and more. It includes additional business-grade services not included in these apps’ free plans: custom business email domains, extra cloud-based storage in Gmail and Drive, longer group meetings with advanced interactive features, a Google Chrome extension, extra security features, and more.

Key Features

• Custom email: Create a personal email for team members, with a custom email domain, then access all business emails in the familiar Gmail and Workspace layout

• Advanced collaboration tools: Hundreds of users can simultaneously co-edit, share, and chat within files from Google Sheets, Slides, and Docs–or connect via Google Jamboards, Google Workspace’s digital whiteboard.

• Calendar sharing and appointment booking pages: Share calendars and availability with an open audience, allowing customers and teammates to view available times and book appointments, consultations, and meetings
• Work Insights: Admin can customize a Work Insights dashboard, a reporting tool providing digestible charts and insights about Google Workspace team use, work patterns and productivity, and cross-team collaboration

Other features:

• Advanced chat rooms
• Up to 500 video participants
• Noise cancellation
• Meeting phone dial-in

Google Workspace Pricing and Plans

What Users Like and Dislike about Google Workspace

Why Google Workspace is a Good Alternative to Webex

Google Workspace provides a wider range of apps and capabilities than most competitors, with unmatched interconnectedness. Transitioning between Docs to Calendars to Gmail, you hardly notice that you’re switching apps. Document sharing and collaboration feel just as seamless.

Webex Pros & Cons

Webex’s video meetings support advanced features like post-meeting transcriptions, hand gesture recognition, collaborative whiteboard, meeting recording, live polling, chat, and breakout rooms. The VoIP phone system includes basic call management features, while the messaging allows file sharing, emojis, and the option to create group threads.

However, compared to the competition, Webex lacks some important calling and messaging features that competitors offer: ring groups, analytics, call reporting, AI agent support tools, and task management features.

Webex Alternatives FAQs

Here, we’ve answered some of the most common questions about Webex alternatives.