Pricey, but backed by a rich ecosystem
Webex is a longtime player in the video conferencing software field, having been founded in 1995 and acquired by Cisco in 2007. That makes it a little different from some of the newer, general-purpose video conferencing solutions we reviewed this year, such as our overall Editors’ Choice, Zoom Meetings. Although Webex works in that capacity, it’s also tightly integrated with Cisco’s full ecosystem of conferencing tools and hardware, including its video conference room technology. Buying into that vision will cost you, but what Cisco offers is still comprehensive and compelling enough that it earns our Editors’ Choice award for small to midsize enterprises. If you’re not sure that’s the right fit for you, be sure to check out our other Editors’ Choice picks, including BlueJeans (for multi-platform video conferencing) and Intermedia AnyMeeting (for general SMB video conferencing). Cisco Webex’s Pricing and Plans
Like the other products in this roundup, Cisco offers tiered pricing for Webex. There is a free tier that provides meetings of up to 50 minutes for up to 100 participants. These meetings include most of the basic video conferencing features you’d expect, such as screen sharing, breakout rooms, and whiteboarding. Unfortunately, it lacks many of Cisco’s more advanced, business-oriented features. The Meet plan costs $15 per user per month, or $13.50 per user per month when billed annually. This plan ups the number of meeting participants to 200 and meetings can last up to 24 hours. It also adds features, such as 10GB of cloud recording storage per user, closed captioning, meeting transcription, background noise canceling, and file transfers. The Call plan is similar to the free tier, except it adds a bunch of voice-over-IP (VoIP) calling features, such as hold and transfer, call forwarding, conference calls, and visual voicemail. This plan goes for $17 per user per month, but no annual pricing was available at the time of this writing. The Webex Suite – Business tier costs $25 per user per month, and is equivalent to the Meet plan and the Call plan combined. Sadly, the real-time translation add-on is only free for a 15-day trial. Once that’s up, it’s billed at an additional $25.00 per user per month, which is completely unreasonable considering that Google Meet includes this feature in its closed captioning at no added charge. All of this makes Webex pricey compared to some of the other products we reviewed this year. For example, BlueJeans, our Editors’ Choice for multi-platform conferencing, only charges $16.
