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Google Hangouts [EOL] vs HCL Sametime comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 27, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Google Hangouts [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
HCL Sametime
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Virtual Meetings (25th)
 

Featured Reviews

Mariana-Piñeres - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer Success Manager Latam at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Recording and transcription enhance global client meetings
Google Hangouts sometimes consumes significant resources. When comparing it to WhatsApp on desktop for calls, there are instances when Google Hangouts freezes or stops working, but switching to WhatsApp runs smoothly. This might be related to the resources Google Hangouts requires. The service occasionally experiences lag issues where the image gets frozen or the voice transmission becomes interrupted. When these issues occur, possibly due to internet connectivity or other factors, WhatsApp continues to function properly while Google Hangouts does not perform well.
Bogdan Chechlowski - PeerSpot reviewer
Kierownik Biura Informatyki at EIB SA
Stable product, communicate very fast and allows to see who's online in the office or work environment
It was used for communication through text messages, primarily Being able to see who was online and communicate very fast was a good feature.  The security was quite good. However, when we tried to implement it for email at a high level, we had to use another solution, FortiMail Gateway. I view…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The best features of Google Hangouts include the option with Gemini to record and create call transcriptions and provide a meeting summary."
"The facility is always online and very easy to share the screen using the solution."
"Google Meet has excellent audio quality, good images, and a robust set of features."
"The technical support team for Google Hangouts has been pretty responsive and could solve whatever challenges arise, within a day or two."
"Google Hangouts is easy to use and has good performance."
"Very good voice and video calling options."
"I think that Google Meet allows for easy interaction and has additional features, such as background blurring, among others."
"The solution is useful for virtual meetings; I like that we can do voice or video calls, there are screen-sharing capabilities, it is straightforward to set up, very easy to use, stable, scalable, and the pricing is good."
"The security was quite good."
"A very good communication and real-time collaboration software, it is simple, fast, reliable, keeps history and the best feature of all is its intelligence."
"Audio and video calls provide faster communication than chat."
"This solution saves time and cost in communicating with team members, streamlines tasks in my organization by encouraging us to chat directly with the relevant person, and strengthens professional relationships through increased communication among peers."
"I can view the status and availability of colleagues or team members, which makes it easy to approach them when they are available."
 

Cons

"The user interface is an area with shortcomings and needs improvement."
"Support could be a bit faster."
"We don’t have any complaints."
"Can be improved by including a larger library of video filters and adding custom filters."
"One improvement could be integration with Google Calendar to help find available timeslots when scheduling meetings with many participants."
"Google Hangouts could work on making the service better for slow connections."
"I would like to see more focus on features for interacting with the participants in a group chat, such as screen sharing."
"Sending documents and other things is not an option."
"It lacks some features compared to modern solutions. For example, it doesn't allow sending screenshots or other files."
"It seems that the software might in the future, support the software telephony exchange but at the current time, it is not doing that and because of that one key feature of real-time communication is missing from it."
"The webinar should be integrated into Sametime for a larger number of participants."
"Sametime hangs sometimes and therefore needs to get restarted."
"The interface is too colorful and looks like Windows XP."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We access the solution through Google Workspace. It is inexpensive to use."
"This solution is available for free with the opening of a Google account."
"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."
"For individual use, there's no license requirement as such. For storage or some other purposes, if I go beyond 15 GB, then I need to buy something."
"There is no license cost."
"We are using the free version of Google Hangouts."
"There is a need to make certain payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product and some other tools that are included in the suite offered by Google. Google Hangouts alone as a product is available for free."
"We pay an annual license to use the solution."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Outsourcing Company
18%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise18
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Hangouts?
Google Hangouts comes as a package, so it's difficult to say or comment on the price of this particular product.
What needs improvement with Google Hangouts?
Sometimes when we have a call and need to share audio or play a video, we find it challenging to switch from sharing the complete desktop to only a particular Chrome tab, as it doesn't support audi...
What is your primary use case for Google Hangouts?
My main use cases for Google Hangouts are for calls and coordinating with my team. I find the recording feature in Google Hangouts very useful, as it normalizes what happened in the call, even thou...
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Also Known As

No data available
Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus Sametime
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Connect2Cloud, Superior Group, Daifuku Co. Ltd., Seaward, The City of Fort Worth, Christian Brothers Services, Berlitz, Deutsche Notes User Group, Danske Fysioterapeuter, Slumberland, La Vacanza, Rheinmetall AG
Find out what your peers are saying about Zoom Video Communications, TeamViewer, Microsoft and others in Virtual Meetings. Updated: October 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.