The 6 Best Free Online Meeting Tools to Collaborate With Your Team

Thanks to free online meeting tools, you can collaborate with team members no matter where they are. Next time you need to have a quick meeting or collaborate with team members, there’s no need to pay for expensive solutions.

Let’s look at the best free online meeting apps all teams can take advantage of.

1. Google Tools: Docs, Drive, and More

With the Google Docs suite, your team can work together on spreadsheets, presentations, forms, and more. Using comments, you can leave a note on someone else’s work to request a change or leave yourselves a note for later. Google’s suite of office apps also includes a chat function for ad-hoc discussions.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Google Drive, which is Google’s cloud storage platform, lets your team set up its own file storage system. Each person gets 15GB of free space with a personal plan, which should be enough to keep everything in one central location.

Bringing in more Google tools allows for even stronger collaboration. You might set up a shared Google Calendar for your team to keep track of events and meetings, or use Google Duo for easy group video calling. If your team doesn’t already use Apple or Microsoft tools for collaboration, Google’s offerings are a great starting point.

2. Jitsi Meet

Chances are that your team can’t all be in the same place all the time. For those times when you need to discuss matters over a video call, it doesn’t get much easier than Jitsi. It’s one of our favorite conference call apps and lets you create a meeting room in your browser with a large number of participants.

The service doesn’t require any downloads or plugins, and nobody has to create an account. Simply enter a meeting room name and everyone can connect via audio, video, and a text chat. It even supports dial-in numbers for those who aren’t at a computer.

Jitsi supports extra features like sharing your screen and recording the session. If you don’t want to pay for a premium offering, this is an excellent free meeting app for most teams.

3. Slack

Slack is an all-in-one team communication tool that provides a place for friendly banter, important discussions, file sharing, and more. By dividing communication topics into channels, members of your team can stay involved with the information they need and ignore items that don’t pertain to them.

You can directly message any team member or create private groups for side conversations. Slack provides easy text markup tools, powerful search, a team directory, and all kinds of useful integrations with other apps.

Using Slack for communication is superior to emailing back and forth all the time or using a group chat in something like WhatsApp. Both of those are hard to follow and don’t scale well as you add team members. With threaded conversations, @mentions for different groups, the ability to make calls from within the app, and a lot more, Slack is the communication app every modern team needs.

The free plan allows for an unlimited amount of members but limits you to 10 app integrations and the most recent 10,000 messages. It also restricts your team to one-on-one video calls, as group chats are locked behind the premium plans. However, you can always use another solution for this.

If Slack feels too busy for you, find out how Slack compares to Twist, an interesting alternative to Slack.

4. Microsoft Teams

Speaking of Slack not working for your team, Microsoft Teams is also worth a look. It’s a similar service, offering chats organized into channels and direct messages. Like Slack, its free plan allows for unlimited users.

However, Teams offers more for free than Slack. You get 2GB of file storage per user, which is a huge increase from Slack’s 5GB overall. Notably, Teams also gives you unlimited chat history, so you won’t lose access to conversations that happened long ago. It also has no restrictions on group video calling.

Microsoft Teams might not be as well-known as Slack, but offers a lot for no cost.

5. Taskade

Taskade is a relative newcomer to the team collaboration scene. It aims to provide a “unified workspace” where your team can keep track of tasks and work together with ease. After adding your task list, choose to display them in various forms like a list, board, or mindmap.

With Taskade’s free plan, you’ll have everything you need to get started, including due dates and video calls. You can upgrade to remove a few limitations, but it’s not necessary for small teams. Taskade is a great choice if you need a team meeting tool mainly to focus on organizing and completing tasks.

6. Miro

If you need an interactive meeting tool with a whiteboard, Miro can help. It’s a powerful collaboration service for brainstorming, designing workflows, drawing maps, and much more.

Miro offers multiple ways to work with your team on a virtual whiteboard, mimicking in-person brainstorming sessions that can bring about great results. Like most collaboration apps, it hooks in with tools like Dropbox and Slack to offer valuable integrations.

The free plan offers you three boards, basic collaboration tools, and allows for anonymous viewing. You’ll need to upgrade for more, but you should give this online whiteboard a try to foster teamwork without any markers or running out of board space.

Scheduling Tools for Better Meetings

Hopefully, you’ve found a free meeting app that works for your team. However, just because you have a suitable service doesn’t mean that everything will always go smoothly. Many other factors go into a successful meeting, including proper planning.

For help with this, check out the best meeting scheduling tools so you don’t waste time planning your next session.

Free Meeting Tools for Easy Collaboration

With these tools, any small team can manage their data, work together to create documents, and stay in constant communication. While free tools can’t match the features of enterprise software, these apps will certainly suffice for teams of just a few people. No matter how you work, you’ll find value in them.

For more like this, check out the best free collaboration tools for working from home.

Image Credit: nd3000/Shutterstock

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