Best Video Conferencing App with Screen Sharing

Screen sharing is one of the most essential features of a video conferencing platform for seamless collaboration.  It enables meeting participants to share content, presentations, documents, and other visual information during a call. 

Imagine being on a video call with your teammates and sharing ideas from your archives becomes a problem, screen sharing improves that experience, allowing meeting participants to display content for everyone to see without complicated third-party applications—eliminating the need for multiple file downloads or back-and-forth explanations. Using this feature with your conferencing platform makes meetings engaging and productive. 

There are countless video conferencing software today with different functionalities including screen sharing which can make picking the right platform difficult.

In this blog, we will provide you with a list of the best video conferencing applications with screen-sharing features.

1. Zoom: The Industry Leader in Video Conferencing

Zoom Workplace (commonly known as Zoom) is a proprietary videotelephony software program developed by Zoom Communications. Zoom is one of the most popular and widely used video conferencing tools worldwide, especially known for its reliability, ease of use, and comprehensive features for meetings, webinars, and virtual collaboration.

It offers a free plan that allows up to 100 concurrent participants with a 40-minute time restriction. Users can upgrade by subscribing to a paid plan, with the highest plan supporting up to 1,000 concurrent participants for meetings lasting up to 30 hours, featuring incredible screen-sharing capability. 

Screen Sharing Features

• Multiple Participants: Zoom allows all participants to share their screens simultaneously, making it easy for everyone to collaborate during meetings.
• Screen Annotation: Participants can annotate the shared screen in real time with text, shapes, or drawing tools to highlight points or provide feedback.
• Full-Screen/Window Sharing: You can choose to share an entire desktop screen or just a specific window/application, which is ideal for privacy and efficiency.
• Remote Control: During a screen-sharing session, the host or other participants can take control of the presenter’s screen to assist with troubleshooting, demonstrations, or collaboration.

2. Microsoft Teams: A Powerful Collaborative Tool

Microsoft Teams is a unified collaboration platform used for real-time communication, meetings, file sharing, and app integration. Serving as a central workspace for teams to stay informed, organised, and connected. It is designed to facilitate instant messaging, both one-on-one and in groups. Microsoft Teams provides focused spaces within teams for conversations and file sharing, organised by topic or project. 

In addition, it enables video and audio conferencing, including screen sharing and recording. It’s especially favoured by businesses already using Microsoft Office 365 due to its seamless integration with other Microsoft tools.

Screen Sharing Features

• Share Desktop or Application: Teams allows you to share your entire screen or a specific window/application.
• PowerPoint Live: This unique feature allows presenters to share PowerPoint presentations with added controls, such as slide navigation and notes while allowing participants to focus on specific slides.
• Collaborative Annotation: During a screen share, others can annotate the shared screen, making it ideal for collaborative meetings.
• Content Sharing in Chats: Users can share documents, images, and videos in chat messages, and these can be viewed during a call, enhancing collaboration.
• Remote Control: Just like Zoom, Teams allows meeting hosts to grant remote control of their screen to other participants for collaborative editing or troubleshooting.

3. Google Meet: Simple, Secure, and Reliable

Google Meet is a video communication service developed by Google. It is one of two apps that constitute the replacement for Google Hangouts and Google Chat. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Google announced Meet was to be made available to all users, not just Google Workspace users, which it previously was. The use of Meet grew by a factor of 30 between January and April 2020, with 100 million users a day accessing Meet, compared to 200 million daily users for Zoom as of the last week of April 2020.

Google Meet is Google’s video conferencing solution, known for its simplicity and seamless integration with the Google Workspace ecosystem (Docs, Drive, Gmail, etc.).

Screen Sharing Features

• Share Entire Screen or Specific Window: Google Meet allows users to choose between sharing the entire screen or just a particular window or tab.
• Multiple Screens for Multiple Users: Participants can also share their screens during a meeting, making it easy for teams to collaborate.
• Present Google Slides: If you're working within Google Workspace, you can easily present Google Slides during meetings with automatic integration into Meet.
• Live Captions: Google Meet offers live captions in real-time, improving accessibility for participants, especially during screen-sharing sessions where there's a lot of content being presented.
• No Download Required: Being a web-based tool, Google Meet does not require any software installation. You can start a meeting and share your screen directly in a browser.

4. Skype: Reliable video calling platform

Skype is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing, and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debit-based calls to landlines and mobile telephones (over traditional telephone networks), and other features, making it available on various desktop, mobile, and video game console platforms. 

Skype, once a dominant video calling platform, remains popular for smaller group meetings, personal calls, and quick video chats. It has evolved to include business features like screen sharing, file sharing, and video conferencing.

Screen Sharing Features

• Screen Sharing for Individual and Group Calls: Skype allows users to share their entire screen, a specific window, or even a browser tab during one-on-one or group calls.
• Live Annotations: Users can annotate shared screens in real-time to make the collaboration process easier.
• Present PowerPoint Slides: You can share PowerPoint presentations during Skype meetings and even use a remote control to navigate slides.
• Remote Control: Skype supports remote control of the screen, so you can help others troubleshoot or work together on the same screen.

5. Slack: Smart team communication and workflow integration

Slack is a cloud-based team communication platform developed by Slack Technologies, which has been owned by Salesforce since 2020. Slack uses a freemium model and is primarily offered as a business-to-business service, with its user base predominantly team-based businesses, while its functionalities are focused primarily on business administration and communication.

Slack is primarily known as a team messaging app, but it also offers video conferencing capabilities, including screen sharing, making it great for teams that rely heavily on text-based communication but also need occasional face-to-face meetings.

Screen Sharing Features

• Instant Screen Sharing: Slack allows you to share your screen in direct messages or group channels during a video call.
• Share Specific Window or Entire Screen: You can choose to share either the entire screen or a specific application window, just like other platforms.
• Remote Control: In Slack, you can give control of your screen to another participant during screen sharing, which is helpful for collaboration or troubleshooting.
• Integration with Google Drive and Dropbox: You can easily share documents and files from Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud-based services during a screen share.

6. Cisco Webex: The Enterprise-Grade Solution

Cisco Webex offers a robust enterprise-level solution that is hard to overthrow. Webex has been a key player in the video conferencing world for years, and its features are streamlined for companies that need reliable, scalable, and secure video communication. Webex’s screen-sharing feature ensures a high-quality screen projection with minimal lag, making it suitable for businesses to collaborate effectively without delays. 

Screen Sharing Features

This meeting application also offers other intelligent features like:

• Advanced collaboration tools such as whiteboarding, real-time annotation, and the ability to share files and content during meetings, which is particularly helpful for training or product demonstrations.
• Multi-screen support is great for users who need to present multiple documents or presentations simultaneously.

Conclusion

Whether you need a video conferencing platform for professional meetings, team meetings or to connect with your family and friends, you have unlimited options available. Now that you have the list. The next step is to compare their screen-sharing functionalities to choose the platform that best suits your needs.

Ultimately, it's about balancing functionality, security, ease of use, and cost to find the perfect fit for your meetings.