The 5 best Vowel alternatives for more productive meetings and teamwork

Imagine this: You found an awesome new video conferencing solution, rolled it out across your teams, and made it part of your workflow. Then, one day, you can't use it anymore.

Luckily, that doesn't mean you can't find another tool with similar—or better—features. If you’re looking for a Vowel alternative, that probably means you need AI functionality to transcribe meetings into actionable notes and features that let you communicate quickly and easily with your team. 

Meetings and productivity are greatly improved when you give your people a place to find each other, get work done, and communicate in context. Vowel was a great alternative to traditional video conferencing, but there are other options available that can help your team collaborate, not just communicate.

In this article, you'll learn about the best Vowel alternatives out there, including key features, pricing, and who they're best suited for—so you can keep your team working effectively without missing a beat. 

Looking for a virtual workspace that fosters team collaboration?
Switchboard’s collaborative digital workspace lets your team find each other, communicate in context, and get work done. 
Sign up for free. 

Vowel alternatives: overview 

As you're well aware, a new tool can be a big investment in terms of both money and onboarding time. So it's important to pick the right one. You also need to look for features that support both side-by-side, real time working as well as async collaboration.   

The table below offers a visual comparison of the features offered by Switchboard, Fathom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Jitsi Meet. It will help you grasp the key differences at a glance before we dive into the details.

Not one for charts? Don't sweat it, keep scrolling for a more detailed product comparison. 

Top 5 Vowel alternatives for more productive meetings and teamwork 

With those features in mind, we’ve put together a list of five Vowel alternatives to make teamwork the best part of work. We analyzed each platform’s top features, pricing, and who it’s best for to help you decide which one is best for your team. 

1. Switchboard: best for highly collaborative teams

Switchboard is a collaborative digital workspace that organizes all the apps and tools your team uses into meeting and project rooms—and makes everything instantly multiplayer. It helps you improve team connection, collaboration, and productivity through intuitive rooms that let you organize everything by project. 

People can work together in co-working sessions, meetings, and asynchronously on a wide range of documents and apps inside a persistent virtual room. Teams communicate in real time with video, audio, chat, polls, and emoji reactions without having to share their screens.

You can work side-by-side allowing everyone to scroll, type, and browse the same document at the same time—or open up your own private, personal view. You can also create virtual rooms for brainstorming, host spontaneous meetings with your team, and connect with clients in an interactive space.

Throughout the meeting or work session, you can explore any file in the room, moving around and viewing whatever you want without getting in the way of others. Best of all, Switchboard saves everything you’ve added to a room between sessions, so you never need to repopulate the room again. That means you always know where to find the information you need for a specific project, even between meetings.

The platform also helps your team capture and summarize new ideas using AI. Let's say you’re holding a brainstorming session and the team writes their ideas or feedback on a bunch of sticky notes in your Switchboard room. The AI will summarize those notes, saving you time and helping you keep your internal comms and thought processes organized. Each room also is equipped with ChatGPT to quickly ask questions and generate ideas.

Key features: 

• Shared online workspace and persistent rooms for recurring meetings or project work
• Web-based canvas to add  browser-based apps, websites, PDFs, and images side by side—and make them instantly multiplayer 
• Built-in whiteboard (and works with all browser-based whiteboards)
• Screen sharing for native apps—including multiple screen shares inside one room
• Presentation mode, to get people to focus on your view 
• Sections to organize content, like dragging and dropping items into a visual folder 
• Meeting recording
• Chat for users to type messages for all participants to read 
• Sticky notes that users can add and edit; AI summaries of sticky notes 
• Voting app to poll participants in the room 
• Icebreaker question generator to kick off meetings in a fun way 
• Timer to keep you on track 
• Desktop app for macOS 
• Video conferencing
• In-app support
• Google Calendar integration
• Room permissions for members and guests
• Host not required for members to enter a room
• Up to 50 participants 
• Modern, secure, hosted, cloud infrastructure; SOC 2 Type 2 compliant

Pricing: 

• Free: Includes limited features, rooms, and members for small teams or individuals.
• Pro: $15 member/month for up to 200 rooms and 500 members plus Switchboard AI and additional storage.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

Best for: 

Highly collaborative companies looking for a comprehensive and team-oriented solution to traditional video conferencing tools. It’s designed for teams that need a better way of collaborating no matter where they are—sitting side-by-side in an office, spread across time zones, or following a hybrid model. It's a great option for teams that need a dedicated, interactive space for projects and meetings.

Pro tip: With Switchboard, you can create “watercooler” rooms for spontaneous hangouts and build team camaraderie. For example, you can share creative ideas or suggestions that may not be directly related to ongoing projects but can spark new initiatives. 

2. Fathom: best for companies that need to add AI functionality to their traditional video conferencing tool

Rather than being a stand-alone collaborative workspace or video conferencing tool, Fathom is an AI plug-in meeting assistant that acts as an add-on to video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and MS Teams. It records, highlights, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings using AI and machine learning.  

When you connect Fathom to a traditional video conferencing tool you can focus on the conversation instead of taking notes or keeping track of important action items. When the meeting's over, you get an automatic summary of meeting highlights and notes. These can be stored in the same place you hold your meetings, which saves you space. Fathom even syncs call notes to all the right places in your customer relationship manager (CRM). You can also save and send video clips from your meetings, and make playlists of relevant recordings to keep clips and meetings organized. 

Key features: 

• Call recording and analysis
• AI and machine learning capabilities
• Speech-to-text functionality
• Voice files
• Shareable video clips 
• AI-generated meeting minutes and notes
• Copy/paste summaries and action items to Google Docs, Gmail, or your task manager
• Speaker identification
• Integrations with popular apps
• Automated data entry from video clips and meetings
• Searchable call repository 
• Keyword alerts 

Pricing:

• Basic Fathom app with limited functionality: Free. 
• Fathom Team Edition: starts at $19/user per month.  

Best for:

Fathom is a great option if you want the AI functionality that Vowel provided, like automatic transcripts and meeting notes. However, since Fathom isn't a video conferencing service, it's best for companies already using Zoom, Google Meet, or MS Teams since it currently only works with these platforms. 

3. MS Teams: best for large companies and corporations

Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams Rooms are online meeting platforms that let you host collaborative work sessions, webinars, and video conferences with your team. The free version is suitable for basic virtual meetings, while the paid versions offer advanced features such as hosting large-scale presentations and organizing interactive breakout sessions.

MS Teams is integrated with Microsoft 365, which means you can access and work on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations directly from the platform. This helps make sure everyone's working on the latest versions of files—and can put their best foot forward on every project.

Microsoft Teams and MS Teams Rooms are also highly customizable and let you create channels and workspaces tailored to your specific needs. This way, you can organize your work based on what makes sense for your team, and make the most of face-to-face, real-time communication. 

Key features: 

• Up to 1000 participants per meeting
• Unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours
• Unlimited in-app instant messaging 
• Whiteboard
• Live captioning in 28 languages 
• Breakout rooms
• Meeting recording
• Screen sharing

Pricing: 

• Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams Rooms with limited functionality: Free   
• Microsoft Teams Essentials: $4/month per user
• Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $6/month per user
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard: $12.50/month per user 
• Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro (without Audio Conferencing): $40/month per room 

Best for: 

Microsoft Teams is great for all kinds of businesses that are already using Microsoft products and want to host webinars and create collaborative meeting rooms. It's especially useful for large organizations that need to connect with many people around the world, like stakeholders, board members, and clients. 

4. Google Meet: best for medium-sized companies using Google Workspace

Google Meet (previously Google Hangouts) is a good alternative to Vowel if you’re already using Google Workspace (previously, G Suite). It’s user-friendly and lets you host high-quality video and audio calls. It comes with a straightforward app and plenty of dialing options so your people can join meetings wherever they are. Paid plans also let you transcribe and record meetings, which mirrors Vowel's AI capabilities. 

To make your meetings more engaging, Google Meet has multiple audience participation features like hand-raising, polls, emoji reactions, and virtual whiteboards. These options get everyone involved and let them work together to develop projects and tasks in real time. 

Key features:

• Up to 500 participants on paid plans
• Closed captioning during calls (only available in English)
• In-app whiteboard capabilities and Miro integration
• Screen sharing
• Event live-streaming
• Meeting recording on paid plans
• Breakout rooms
• Seamless integration with Google Chat

Pricing: 

• Google Meet is free to use with access to basic features
• Business Starter: $6/month per user
• Business Standard: $12/month per user
• Business Plus: $18/month per user
• Enterprise: custom priced  

Best for: 

If you’re already using Google Workspace, Google Meet is a handy solution that’s easy to use, reliable, and a good choice for companies that get most of their work done in real-time over async. However, since Google Meet doesn’t let you work together on the same documents and apps between and during meetings, it’s more limited when it comes to collaboration.   

5. Jitsi: best for teams that prioritize easy setup and strict controls  

Jitsi Meet is a browser-based, open-source video conferencing platform. This means you don't need to worry about dealing with complicated installations and setups or paying for pricey software licenses.

The platform uses WebRTC technology, which is known for its high-quality video and audio performance, even on slower internet connections. All communications on the platform are encrypted, meaning only participants can access meeting content. Jitsi Meet also offers advanced moderator controls, like the ability to mute or kick out participants, and password-protect meetings. 

Although useful for live streaming, it's best for one-way communication like client meetings and company-wide, top-down meetings, and leadership presentations.

Key features: 

• Digital whiteboards
• Screen-sharing capabilities
• In-meeting chat
• Meeting recordings
• Live streaming 
• Emoji reactions

Pricing:

• Jitsi Meet is currently free with all features included.

Best for: 

Jitsi Meet is best for customer- and client-facing teams, with features like the YouTube integration and live streaming. However, it’s not the best for true team collaboration as you can’t save everything in your meeting room or share files. This means sharing ideas and brainstorming with your team may be more challenging.

Vowel alternatives: Get the right tool for meetings and project work 

Getting up to speed on a new tool can seem like a lot of work. Especially when you need to get your whole team on board and figure out new ways of working together.

Vowel was a great alternative to traditional video conferencing tools, using AI to create automated meeting transcriptions, agenda templates, and built-in notes. Fortunately, there are other options available, like Google Meet, MS Teams, and Jitsi. All are great if what you need to do is communicate quickly and efficiently with your teams and clients. 

However, you can improve meetings and productivity even further when you give your team a place to find each other, communicate in context, and get work done. To do this, you’ll need to replace Vowel with a platform that lets you run more interactive meetings and projects where everything is saved in one place. 

Switchboard improves team productivity with dedicated persistent rooms for meetings and project work that save your work, so you keep everything organized by project and pick up where you left off next time. Its AI functionality also takes the grunt work out of extracting insights from your notes, getting you off to a head start. 

Looking for a virtual workspace that fosters team collaboration?
Switchboard’s collaborative digital workspace lets your team find each other, communicate in context, and get work done. 
Sign up for free.