As popular as it is, FaceTime is surprisingly limited. It has few sharing and collaboration tools, which include screen sharing, watching movies, and listening to music together using SharePlay, but won’t let you work together on a document or presentation. You also can’t record the call (though to be fair, many video chat apps don’t allow recording). Finally, FaceTime is Apple device-only, so while those running iOS 15 or later can invite Android-using friends to calls in progress, Windows users can’t get in on these conversations at all. Messenger is cross-platform with apps for Android and iOS, as well as Windows and Macs. There’s even a standalone video call device called Facebook Portal. Zoom includes great sharing and collaboration tools, and you can even record meetings and share them with others. And meetings can be started ad-hoc or scheduled in advance. The app can handle group video calls with up to 50 participants by leveraging Facebook Messenger’s Rooms feature (WhatsApp is now owned by Facebook). Unfortunately, that means you can only video chat with users on the mobile app (either iOS or Android), rather than browser or desktop users. It’s equipped for business calls as well as personal video chats; you can use it to share your screen, share files, and even display live subtitles to caption what is being spoken. But once you’re past that, you can set up rooms with up to eight people and choose from among a slew of games to play together. Bunch has, at current count, seven games to choose from including a trivia game, a Flappy Bird clone, billiard, and more. Unfortunately, Instagram tops out at a total of six people, but that’s probably plenty for most situations nonetheless. There’s no desktop or web chat, so it’s limited just to mobile apps though. Discord remains a great tool, like Slack, to keep running in the sidelines while you game, code, or otherwise collaborate on a project. There’s essentially no platform that’s not supported, from PC and Mac to Linux, iOS, and Android. The app supports truly enormous group video with up to 200 people at a time, complete with voice and video filter effects, all for free. There is a Marco Polo Plus subscription; for $5 per month you get a few extra features like HD video support and video playback speed controls, but most people can probably be perfectly happy with the free version of the service. Of course, the app supports group video calling. It can handle up to 20 people at once, and makes great use of the screen by letting the current speaker take over the entire display, so you’re truly focused on whoever is talking. One problem you’ll probably have with Viber is, given the popularity of most of the other apps in this list, convincing enough of your friends and family to try it out.
