The best apps for video calls on your Mac

WebEx is very much an enterprise offering, with enterprise level pricing, but there is also a free tier which will allow you to have up to 100 participants meet for up to 50 minutes.

The free version lacks the business-focused features, including up to 200 participants in 24 hour meetings (which is offered in the Meet plan $15 per user, per month. In the U.K. there is a Starter plan for £11.50 a month and a Business plan for £16.50 a month). In the Meet plan you also get 10GB cloud storage for recordings per user (this is one difference between the U.K. Starter and Business plans – the starter is 5GB vs the Business 10GB). Subscribers also get captioning and transcription and noise cancelling. File transfers are also included. There is also a real-time translation add-on, but that costs extra. You can download the Webex Meeting app on the App Store.

Webex offers screensharing, business users can also share a whiteboard for collaboration and file share, making it an appealing choice for small and large businesses. You can schedule meetings in advance or, with a single click, launch one immediately. Participants join the meeting by either clicking a URL you send them or visiting the WebEx site and entering a meeting number. We like that you can show more emotional reactions than other services that are limited to the ‘raise a hand’ emoji. You can even gesture to the camera to trigger an emoji, for example clapping to the camera will add the clapping emoji.

Another great feature is breakout rooms, but other services, such as Google Meet, Teams and Zoom, also offer this.

Once you’ve set up a meeting, participants can connect in four ways: via phone, WebEx’s own built-in VoIP tools, videoconferencing, and built-in text chat. There’s 128-bit SSL encryption, with even more security available to enterprise users. In fact Cisco allows enterprise users to run meetings on their own intranets.