This comparison website has been assembled by a company named Publicare, an online marketing agency based out of Frankfurt Germany. Publicare has taken 22 web conferencing platforms and ranked them on a scale of 1-10, on various categories: User friendliness, Number and scope of features, Pricing/cost transparency, etc. In addition to a numbered ranking, Publicare posts comments about their testing of the product and provides links to the vendor website, or free trial. Publicare’s efforts have yielded a comprehensive, informed and useful comparison of platforms that can be of great benefit. First time users of Webinar technology will admire the overall ranking system to quickly identify various costs and strengths of platforms, while seasoned webinar jockeys can dig deeper to uncover specific features that may help determine future purchasing decisions.

We should point out that this comparison is aimed at the collaboration use-case of webinars – smaller, less structured environments where collaboration is key (note WebEx MeetMeNow 2.3 is tested, not WebEx Event Center; no distinction is called out between Live Meeting Standard or Professional for example). Our use of webinar technology – the “One to Many” model – therefore is not discussed or ranked. Furthermore, we feel it’s this focus on collaborative environments that has lead Publicare to not include some of the streaming platform providers who are doing business in the “One to Many” world, like ON24, Stream57 or TalkPoint. Finally, the creation and maintenance of this website is funded by affiliate partnerships – if a visitor visits one of the ranked platforms and happens to purchase the software, Publicare receives a small finders fee. Publicare is quick to stress that this financial support does not affect their rankings, but is simply a means to recover some of the cost.

Overall, this is a great comparison tool, and we are grateful to Publicare for their time and efforts. While the comparisons are not an exact match to our business model, they none the less provide valuable information and insight into an otherwise cluttered, and noisy marketplace. Take a look, enjoy, and let us know what you think.

First in this post let’s understand what we are talking about. The next post will talk about how to improve performance. And finally, a post to talk about the “why this matters” and how this affects which web-conferencing software platform to use for your online event.

Download
Download is a measure of how fast your connection delivers content to your computer or local area network. This is the important number to test – it will determine how many or how smoothly different web-conferencing functions will work (audio, downloading content, video, presenter video, etc.)

Upload
Upload is the measure of how fast content is delivered from your computer or local area network to others on the Internet. This is important to note if you are a presenter who is uploading content to your web-conferencing platform. Especially when trying to upload those last-minute presentations or changes!

Kbps
Kbps transfer rate = kilobit per second transfer rate. There are 8 bits in a byte, so we would divide kbps by 8 to get KB/sec transfer rate.

Transfer Rate

Transfer rate is speed at which data can be transmitted between devices. This is sometimes referred to as throughput. As files to download become increasingly larger, the highest data transfer rate is most desirable. Finally, I like to note that the simplest and most easily available method to measure your connection speed to the Internet is to simply download a large file and see what is the transfer rate reported in your standard download progress dialog box.

Latency
In a network, latency, a synonym for delay, is an expression of how much time it takes for a packet of data to get from one designated point to another. In some usages, latency is measured by sending a packet that is returned to the sender and the round-trip time is considered the latency. Low latency is extremely important for businesses and power-users. It’s not all about bandwidth! Conventional wisdom says that increasing bandwidth will lead to improved performance. In fact, the transmission control protocol (TCP) limits the number of concurrent bytes transmitted, regardless of the size of the transmission pipe and effects latency. More on this topic in another post.