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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

It's fascinating to see people's experiences.

I've been using WebEx in enterprise/corporate environment for couple of years intensively, and it "just works". I can download desktop client, but I can also just run it on browser.

Zoom always wants to install weird clients that violate policies and cause my corporate laptops to refuse or bork.

I recognize my experience may be a minority one, but I'm surprised, genuinely, at this perception that it's "the one video conferencing software" that works.

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The issue is that WebEx might just work for you, but if there is one person for whom it doesn't work then that is the limiting factor.

What people struggle to understand is that Zoom made it easy accross ALL operating systems. While Webex might "just work" on a subset of Windows and Mac hosts.

I use Linux as my day to day OS and WebEx is a nightmare (which sticks well to the stereotypical enterprise tool from Cisco).

> Zoom made it easy accross ALL operating systems

Many solutions don't require a local software. That's an onboarding hurdle. Zoom's dial-in system also requires host approval, which lead to mayhem across every Zoom call I've been forced to join today. Most importantly, someone inviting me to a Zoom call says something about how they value security.

Zoom's audio quality is better. But it's not irreplaceably better. In terms of UX and reliability, it's been a mixed bag. In terms of security and branding, it's awful.

Zoom is worse across most operating systems. It is worst of all on MacOS, where it downloads an installer without asking me. I then have to click a link saying that it didn't work, whereupon, it will download the installer again without asking me before finally giving me the option to join the call without installing that buggy app.

or is the difference that any other tool runs in the browser (which might be old or locked down), while Zoom childishly just gets admin-privilege to turn the tables in its favour?

The Zoom client works really well, Webex works okay for me most of the time but not all the time and has a lot of little problems I find annoying.

- Overall webex UI is very slow/laggy, subjective - yes, but I think it'd be obvious to any regular person.

- It makes my self-view a tiny floating box (this drives me crazy, I want it to be the same size as the others).

- Gallery view doesn't work well, sometimes the speaker is duplicated in sharing content speaker view and again in gallery view.

- Audio switching doesn't work as well between putting airpods on and off.

- More video/audio failures than Zoom in general (enough to be annoying).

I'm not sure why Zoom is the only one that does Gallery view right - the others all seem to mess this interface up (maybe because they can't handle the traffic?)

I've used Webex for 5 years or so, and haven't experienced the issues you have.

Also, when I was evaluating conferencing systems for my micro-ISV, I tried several - the screen sharing on Zoom was laggy as hell, moreso than I saw with anything else. It was 1-2 years ago, so things might have changed since then.

WebEx on MacOS will, if left open and idle, randomly tell my headset that a phone call is starting, then it will disconnect it shortly after. Sometimes it disconnects two calls in a row (my headset announces when a call ends).

And every so often by virtue of being open in the background, WebEx manages to somehow crash my BT headphones.

Other than that, no real complaints.

Yeah, Webex's background app has a weird habit of holding onto the microphone on Windows also. Why do they even need a background app? I have a calendar already. Just be a client when I need you.

Go into the Preferences, Video Systems (last item), uncheck "Automatically discover nearby devices"

The default behavior of Webex is to grab the microphone and keep it always-open looking for audio signals from Webex-compatible hardware.

I found this because I was bothered that even though I wasn't on a call Windows was telling me that Webex was actively using the Microphone, so I dug in. IIRC the post that guided me to this, on Apple devices with their earbuds it apparently also significantly degrades the sound due to some codec issue (or did in the past).

I had to use Cisco Jabber at my last role and it really made no sense to me that you couldn’t save messages.

Also in the enterprise world, Webex has worked perfectly for me over the past 5 years or so.

I also have a B2B micro-ISV, and chose Webex for that too, largely because it just works, but also because it's almost expected in corporate circles.

softwaredoug is probably referring to an older version of those other conference packages.

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