Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

Trying to determine what people would prefer to use for online meetings and informal meet-ups. Here's some pros/cons of the ones I've actually used:

Zoom: Most used, many people already have it for work, free but requires signing up for an account and installing the program, supports Windows, Mac, mobile phones.

Jitsi Meet: Less known, Open source, free and no account needed, works in most browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Brave, etc) with no plugin or software to install, also Windows, Mac, phones.

Feel free to share your experiences as well. I've not really used any other options. If you don't want to have meetings online or wouldn't participate, please just keep that to yourself. This isn't intended to be a discussion of how tired everyone is of being at home or how they already spend too much time in online meetings already. Unless someone has another idea on how we can meet without freezing our butts outside this is the reality for now.

Has Jitsi upgraded to allow it to be run under Windows 10? That's why I prefer Zoom, which I can run on my PC. Jitsi I have to run on my Android phone, which is not as convenient, and it's a battery drainer.

I use Zoom for work and it mostly works fine. My kids use Google meet for school and that mostly works fine too, maybe better than zoom? Never tried Jitsi.


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Tony, I run Jitsu just fine on Windows 10. I've successfully ran it on Firefox, Chrome, and Edge.

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I have used Zoom, and it's pretty good.

However, the free version limits you to 40 minute meetings.

If we decide to go with Zoom, I'd propose that the Club get the full package to allow meetings longer than 40 minutes.

I am a board member on a non-profit that has used Zoom since before COVID, as our board members are geographically dispersed, so physical meetings aren't practical. We even held our annual charity live auction using it this year, with great success.

I'll see if I can get Jitsi to work on my PC now. When we did our online happy hours before on it, I couldn't get it to work on my Windows based computer and had to switch to my android phone.