Video conferencing that deals well with multiple simultaneous speakers?

Question

Every year my family and I have a big group call with 10-20 participants. We used Google Meet this year, and everyone had a lot of audio problems when more than one person tried to talk at once (I've observed the same issue when using Google Meet at work). That's fine for a business environment where there's often just one presenter, but for a big group of people trying to have a spontaneous conversation it's not good.

We've used Skype before, which worked ok -- we only tried Meet because of the no-download-required feature.

What's the best video conferencing software for conversations among a big-ish group of people, instead of presentations?

Answer 1

You might appreciate tawk.space - with demo instance at https://tawk.space/ - which describes itself as a cafe like space where you hear those closer to you.

Answer 2

(20 participants is a low number of participants)

BigBlueButton (centralized, open source)

I like BigBlueButton, that is Open Source, so you can find multiple providers, even local ones.

My beloved organizations use BigBlueButton for 80+ participants for their assemblies. It has a collaborative whiteboard, breakout rooms, and all bells and whistles I usually need.

BigBlueButton is usually faster even if people has low connection, since it's centralized server-side. If you have a good server, that's fast.

https://bigbluebutton.org/

https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigBlueButton

Jitsi Meeting (peer to peer, open source)

https://meet.jit.si/

Or, Jitsi Meeting. Also Open Source. But Jitsi Meeting is peer to peer, so it's probably lightweight server-side, but it may be slower if participants have a slower connection.

Anyway, you will not find difficulties in finding Jitsi Meeting websites that work perfectly for 15-20 participants.

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All my mentioned solutions are Free Software, so are available in multiple ways:

• just as gratis courtesy service
• as "self-host", so, you can just install that (at no cost) on your own server by yourself.
• as paid "as a Service" (so, somebody else takes care of everything, and it just works, and it gives to you reliability, etc.)
• as paid "On Premise" support (so, somebody else install for you the software in your infrastructure, if you already have a server that you want to use, and you just pay for assistance from an human being)

Note that instead Google Meet can only be delivered "as a service", but it's a non-open-source service. Same note for Zoom and Microsoft Teams.