Pros & Cons
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- Minimalist dashboard
- No time limits on video conferences
- 24/7 phone and web support for all customers
- SmartNotes distill meeting summaries to their essentials
- Commuter Mode eliminates on-the-go distractions
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- No free plan
- Odd process for enabling annotation while screen-sharing
- Post-meeting summaries, transcripts, and recordings aren't immediately accessible
GoTo Meeting Specs
| 24/7 Phone Support | |
| Audio Recordings | |
| Blur Backgrounds | |
| Calendar Integration | |
| Cloud Storage | |
| Free Version Offered | |
| In-App Messaging | |
| In-App Private Chat | |
| Multi-Language Support | |
| Share Desktop | |
| Share Mouse / Keyboard | |
| Social Media Integration | |
| Transcription | |
| Video Recordings | |
| Whiteboard Tools |
GoTo Meeting is a reasonably priced video conferencing platform that lets you conduct an unlimited number of meetings for as long as you like. Advanced features, such as a distraction-free Commuter Mode, timestamped (and searchable) transcriptions, and highly accurate meeting note suggestions, are all impressive points in its favor. However, GoTo Meeting can be somewhat difficult to navigate, and its tools aren't all as straightforward as they could be. As such, we more highly recommend our Editors’ Choice winners for the category, Webex by Cisco and Zoom Workplace, which cost about the same, offer permanently free tiers, and work more intuitively.
How Much Does GoTo Meeting Cost?
GoTo Meeting doesn't offer a free plan like Google Meet, Webex, and Zoom Workplace, but you can try out the service with a 14-day trial.
The Professional tier costs $12 per user per month (billed annually). As mentioned, you can conduct an unlimited number of meetings for as long as you want. That's notable since most other services set time limits. Of course, you aren't likely to ever reach the 24-hour meeting limit that's common among alternatives. Otherwise, this plan supports up to 150 participants per meeting and includes standard features such as breakout rooms, hand raising, and screen sharing.
The Business tier costs $16 per user per month (billed annually). It adds GoTo Meeting’s best features, including AI meeting summaries, auto-generated notes, and transcription. At this level, meetings can include up to 250 participants, and you get unlimited cloud meeting recordings. Most SMBs should go with the Business plan since its features justify the slight price bump over the Professional tier.
For comparison, Google Meet is available through a Business Starter Google Workspace plan that costs $7 per user per month (billed annually). It caps the number of participants to 100 and doesn't include features such as breakout rooms or hand raising. You have to upgrade to the Business Standard plan ($14 per user per month, billed annually) to unlock those capabilities and Gemini AI-powered features like note-taking, summarization, and translation. Google Meet also supports webinars at this tier; GoTo Meeting locks this behind a $20-per-month add-on, which is also the only way to access live polling, Q&A, and real-time translation with the service.
Webex's Meet plan ($12 per user per month, billed annually) slightly undercuts GoTo Meeting's Business tier. It offers competitive AI features, live polling, and Q&A, but restricts meetings to 200 people and makes you pay extra for real-time translation ($300 per license per year).
Zoom Workplace's Pro plan costs $13.33 per user per month (billed annually). It limits meetings to 100 attendees but includes an AI companion for summarizing meetings, transcribing recordings, and pulling out action items. Zoom Workplace charges extra for translated captions ($5 per license per month).
Getting Started With GoTo Meeting
Creating a GoTo Meeting account is quick and easy. I just had to enter some basic contact information and provide a verification code that the service sent to my email. After that, I was able to load GoTo Meeting's minimalist dashboard in my browser. I immediately saw how to start or join a meeting, view my meeting calendar, and review past meetings.
In addition to its browser interface, GoTo Meeting offers desktop (macOS and Windows) and mobile (Android and iOS) apps. The desktop app took around three minutes to install, and its interface matches that of the browser version exactly. Note that you must use the desktop app if you intend to draw on the screen while screen sharing. That was the only major desktop-specific feature I came across in testing. For comparison, almost all of Webex’s best features are desktop-only.
Whenever I started a meeting via GoTo Meeting’s browser interface, it always gave me the option to switch to the desktop app. However, in my two initial tests of this feature, the desktop app wouldn’t open until I reinstalled it using the “Switch to the desktop app” link from the browser. Even then, I continued to encounter problems switching between the desktop and browser instances. I had to regularly uninstall and reinstall the desktop app to get around the issue.
On the plus side, you can easily contact support should you face this or any other issue. GoTo Meeting provides all subscribers with 24/7 support via phone and web. For comparison, I struggled to reach Webex's support team in testing. The quality and accessibility of GoTo Meeting’s customer service are on par with that of Intermedia Anything.
Starting and Running Meetings
I found it simple to create and start a meeting using GoTo Meeting’s “+ Create” button or the flyout menu’s “Instant Meeting” option. When you create a meeting, you can turn on breakout rooms, enable guests to request remote control (useful for customer service or IT assistance), and set a custom meeting link. You can also add your photo to your meeting’s start page and personalize its color.
Inviting meeting guests wasn’t intuitive. Unlike practically every other video conferencing platform, I didn’t encounter a native function for doing so. I ended up just adding a GoTo Meeting event to my Google Calendar after creating it. At least meeting IDs are short and sweet. You can integrate GoTo Meeting with a variety of communication and calendar apps to ease this process.
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Four view options are available in meetings: Active Cameras, Everyone, Hide Everyone, and Who’s Talking. That's a better variety than with other platforms I’ve tested. Some elements, such as the emoji, mute, and screen share buttons, are at the bottom of the video client, while others, such as the chat module and participant list, are at the top right.
I like that I could instantly blur my background or change my virtual background from the Camera tool’s flyout menu, a workflow that's more efficient than on other platforms. I also appreciate how easy it was to mute people or send unmute requests to my guests, who couldn’t do the same for me (strangely, guests can mute hosts with Google Meet).
GoTo Meeting also lets you set your blur or virtual background in the pre-meeting preview. You can even preset a percentage to zoom in or out. The preview menu has a helpful toggle for an efficiency mode that lowers the audio, video, and screen quality to reduce the strain on your device.
Screen Sharing, Collaboration, and Chat
Screen sharing with GoTo Meeting is intuitive, but enabling annotation features isn't. It took me a bit of time to figure out that I had to use the pop-out to the right of the screen-share tool to enable drawing. Once I did, the drawing tools worked fine. You get five paint colors, three brush sizes, and transparent and solid paint for flexible markup options. GoTo Meeting also has an option to auto-fade all drawings to keep your screen cleaner.
I didn't have any trouble chatting with other meeting guests. Public messages appear in green, and private messages appear in red. This makes for a clearer distinction in message type than with some other video conferencing chat modules. I also liked that I could pin messages and download the chat history during the meeting as a text document. The chat interface lets you react to messages with emoji.
After test meetings, GoTo emailed me a link for downloading my chat history as a Word document alongside my meeting’s timestamped, searchable transcript and video recording. This link also included suggested notes generated by GoTo’s SmartNote feature. This tool saved me invaluable time summarizing the meeting and writing out action items.
However, emails sometimes arrived up to 15 minutes after my meeting ended. Even more frustrating, it sometimes took over half an hour for all this content to show up in the desktop app’s Past meetings section.
GoTo Meeting includes whiteboards via a Miro integration, just like Google Meet. Miro’s whiteboards give you everything necessary for collaboration, including free-draw tools and shapes to which you can add text.
As mentioned, you enable breakout rooms in the meeting preview window. However, you can't do so during a meeting, and this feature doesn't work with end-to-end encryption. GoTo Meeting has plenty of other security measures in place that are always active, however, such as AES-256 bit and SSL encryption for connections, risk-based authentication, and SOC2-certified data centers.
GoTo Meeting’s live closed captions feature worked well overall. It impressively generated accurate closed captions for my Spanish, a language I speak with a bad accent. Closed captions are also available in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Russian. You can change the font size and color of captions but not drag and drop them like with Webex. The latter is also the only video conferencing platform I've tested that offers sign language interpretation.
Additional Features
If you’re using the GoTo Meeting mobile app, you can enter Commuter Mode for a distraction-free video conferencing experience. You see only the name of the person talking, the mute button, and the button for leaving the session. This could be very useful if you need to join a video call while you are commuting or otherwise in transit.
With GoTo Meeting’s Call Me feature, you can enter your phone number to join a call via phone instead of dialing in yourself. This might not sound like anything particularly unique at first, but I liked how seamlessly this allowed me to move from my phone to my computer. I can see this being useful if you frequently take meetings while you do other things around the house or need to join from an area with poor internet connectivity. GoTo even automatically disconnected my phone when I moved my microphone settings back to my computer.
Verdict: GoTo Meeting Is Powerful, But Could Be Easier to Use
GoTo Meeting is unique in that it doesn't place limits on how many meetings you can host or how long they run. We also like its AI-powered meeting notes and action items, accessible customer service, and uncluttered dashboard. However, a few of its tools don't work as smoothly as they should, and it lacks a free tier. For these reasons, Webex by Cisco and Zoom Workplace remain our Editors' Choice winners for the category. Both offer competitive features and better user experiences for around the same price.