Asterisk [0] and a combination of SIP soft phones and Polycom physical hardware.
Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#12https://appear.in/
Appear.in is great, but I don't think it's good enough for more than 5 people (which is what the poster is asking about) unless everybody's bandwidth is great.
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#13Freeconferencecall.com
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#14I set one up on Twilio for an employer, cost is slightly more than the ~$1/month per DID with minutes charges. It's a small conference with an unchanging set of attendees so I just have it protected with a static pin.
I am in the process of setting up FusionPBX somewhere else at the moment, which I am hosting on a ~$7 a month VPS (lunanode.com). This will support all phone functions for this organisation, and also offer conference calling. PSTN trunking through voip.ms. Monthly cost is slightly more than $12 (including charges for ~5 DIDs and minutes).
> and what website do you use to quickly find a good breakdown of services for a given problem?
I make heavy use of AlternativeTo.net.
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#15To be the boring voice here... Skype for Business.
The calls themselves are fine, but the applications are garbage. I'd advise against the platform.
Haven't tried MS Teams yet.
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#16Google Hangouts has always worked well for me and it's free. I'm curious why the paid alternatives are better.
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#17Zoom.us
Same here. Zoom has been great for our company. We found google hangouts to be very unreliable and buggy (audio constantly not working, pixelated videos, etc). Zoom has a free tier for calls up to soemthing like 45 min. Most of our company is on the free tier and we have pro accounts for the sales and account teams who spend more time on calls. The zoom rooms (for conf rooms) is a bit pricier but you can use your own hardware.
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#18Any Jitsi users out there? I found the demo rather flaky, but haven't installed my own server yet.
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#19chime.aws
terrible Linux support. Its hard to understand how a company whose products are built on a Linux platform and who use dogfood this product for all their internal needs, doesn't have good Linux support.
Re: Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?
#20Google Hangouts has always worked well for me and it's free. I'm curious why the paid alternatives are better.
Because hangouts is buggy as hell. Just this morning, I was on a call with folks who could hear me, but I couldn’t hear them. They even closed their browser and tried to login again. No luck! Hangouts is never my first choice for a conference call.