Global communications and connectivity giant, Cisco, has a wide variety of collaboration and conferencing tools.

The Cisco Webex Meetings solution (starting at USD 13.50 per month for the starter offering) is a favourite among small to mid-sized businesses. This is because the tool offers a plethora of services bundled together, which you can access depending on your needs. These include training services, webinars, and support centres. There is also a limited-time-only free plan as well as a free trial of its paid features for you to try it out for a while and make up your mind if the tool is the right one for you.

Cisco Webex Meetings is easy to use and has several interesting features who you probably might not find on other video conferencing services. All the plans include dial-in numbers with coverage in 45 countries. This means that as you expand your business and grow capabilities, you don’t have to necessarily leave the Cisco family of products and massive ecosystem of services.

Inside Cisco Webex Meetings

Let’s look at some of its key features.

Make meetings easy and hassle-free: The rich video quality with customisable layouts means you can participate in meetings across locations and team sizes. Cisco Webex Meetings is also device-agnostic; so, whether you’re on a mobile phone, laptop, tablet, or workstation, the experience is seamless and consistent. Cisco Webex Meetings is extremely flexible in its device compatibility, ensuring you can join in from any standardised video conferencing system – and not just Cisco.

Collaborate like never before: With Cisco Webex Meetings, you can also present anything – sharing the entire screen or a single document/application window. And, you can record meetings with the MP4 file of the meeting directly emailed to you once the session is complete. Finally, with Cisco’s new Facebook Live integration, you can also broadcast a meeting for your followers/friends/associate.

Talk to anyone, or just about everyone: Cisco Webex Meetings works with your calendar and supports all popular options like Outlook, Office 365, Google, and more. In other words, you can schedule meetings with just a single click. Like any big player, Cisco has integrations with all leading ISVs in the market – you can launch meetings from Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, as well as LMS solutions like Canvas and Moodle. Also, it doesn’t matter how little or how many; Cisco has solutions for a 2-member gig and right up to 100,000+.

All you need, in one place: Cisco Webex Meetings has several Productivity Tools for easy meeting scheduling, starting, and joining. If you’re the kind that you have so many meetings across that day that you might forget a few, the Call Me option means that you can join by simply picking up the phone. There’s no need to download anything – all one needs to do to join a meeting is tap on a button, and hey – you’re up!

Why Cisco Webex Meetings Makes a Difference

If screen sharing and regular video calls are what you’re looking at – in tandem with your current dial-in conference service – Cisco Webex Meetings is what you need. There are loads of features for high-quality conferencing like VoIP and several toll numbers. The UI is simple, smart, and clean; the best deal is Cisco has its ear to the ground and has significantly brought the price down, meaning it isn’t impossible to afford anymore for SMBs.

Finally, going through the free trial is an excellent way to make up your mind. However, if your requirement hinges more around webinars and not team collaboration, you’re probably better off trying something else.

What We Think

As mentioned, Cisco Webex Meetings offers a pretty generous free plan, and there’s also been a significant price drop, making it much more cost-optimised than it was. Before we put in a final word, let’s glance through the pricing scenario.

The free version can be used by up to three people, and it includes a 30-day trial run of the Plus plan. Cisco Webex Meetings Free also offers you the following:

• One host license
• Voice-over-IP (VoIP)
• Audio connection (no dial-in numbers)
• Desktop and document sharing
• A whiteboard feature
• Standard-quality video
• 250 megabytes (MB) of cloud storage

Once you have signed on for the trial, you can move to 25 attendees, HD videos, and dial-in numbers. There’s also help documentation, user guides, how-to videos, a knowledge base, and a detailed FAQ.

Finally, here’s our take: if you’re a young company on the make and are looking at ramping numbers over the next few years, it’s always wise to invest in a proven product and rely on the capabilities of a recognized provider. Cisco is known across the world for its connectivity solutions and the smartest thing about Cisco Webex Meetings is that it offers a compelling selection of the various features you require to conduct glitch-free online collaboration sessions. A pretty smart buy, we think!