Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The new Skype version has been terrible, at least on macOS.

What are some good alternatives that offer group calls and screen sharing?



https://jitsi.org/

Surprisingly good. No account required, no limit on number of people, good screen sharing, works everywhere(because web-based).


That's because they rewrote their native Cocoa application in Electron and threw away years of work that they had put into it making it decent along with it.


I don't know what those years of work were accomplishing, but they didn't make Skype decent.

Skype was decent a decade ago, and it has declined since then.


That may be true, but the Cocoa version was still better in terms of performance and usability.


That's nothing the sharp decline that was version 8.0.


The new Skype is so bad, we joke that it must be malware. The design was bad already, but holy eyesore. At least the MacOS version works.

On android, when I log in as my account, the only contacts I have are those from my sisters account (???) and none of my subscriptions are there so I can't even make calls that require Skype credit even though my account has credit. I had to add my wife as a contact and none of my chat history with her showed up. As close to unusable as it comes...


I wonder what the engineering team is doing over at Skype HQ. I can't even see my message history with the latest overhaul/update. I would migrate to a new platform but most of my friends are already on Skype, thus migrating to another would be a hassle.


Hangouts, FB Messenger.


Hangouts has terrible performance and I won't force people into using anything FB related.


We found that Hangouts was the most resilient, followed by FB Messenger. All better than Skype. (Of course all 3 are terrible from a lot of aspects, mainly they come with having a Google or FB account.)

Slack is good for 1-1 calls though.

And of course there are possibly hundreds of free and open source alternatives, but I don't know of any that can be easily used from a browser.

I hope the Mattermost video-audio chat ( https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment/webrtc.html ) gains enough momentum to become a well established alternative.


Slack could be a good option, it has group calls and screen share, but my company won't pay for it.


Discord has both!


Discord




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: