Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams are the two main players when it comes to business video conferencing and they both offer a wide variety of options to integrate other platforms in order to increase the productivity and efficiency every organization needs. But which one stood on top? We will find out in this article!

Using Parse Hub, the free web scraper, we scraped the data related to the video conferencing platforms.

Video conferencing has a lot of benefits. It is cost-effective and is used to connect all employees together. It also helps with the efficiency of meetings. The video conferencing software allows employees to share their screens and collaborate on projects.

Mid-level to large organizations were using various video conferencing platforms to communicate within the organization, but the majority of meetings were in person because the concept of working remotely was not mainstream prior to Covid-19. However, it changed completely after the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the world, forcing more than 50% of organizations to work remotely throughout the globe, increasing the need for video conferencing platforms, which is now a necessity for many organizations.

Cisco Webex was widely used in various industries prior to Covid-19. It required a significant amount of time to set up before even starting the session, from connecting with other tools to even sending meeting invites, everything must be done manually, which was a major barrier. That's when businesses decided to look for better options that are secure, simple to use, and support integrations to boost productivity.

The Rise of Microsoft Teams

While most of the major video conferencing platforms are present in the market for well over a decade, Microsoft Teams is the most recent introduction which was launched in March 2017. The company was trying to acquire “Slack”, an instant messaging platform for $8 billion US dollars, but soon enough they shifted their focus and build Teams.

Microsoft Teams is a communication and collaboration platform that combines email, chat, voice calls and video calls in one place. It offers many features such as threaded conversations with full-text search capabilities. It also integrates with other apps like Planner to create tasks or Office 365 for document editing.

Microsoft Teams got popular after the Covid-19 pandemic impacted the world in 2020. The journey from 20 million active users in 2019 to over a quarter of a billion active users in 3rd quarter of 2022 placed Teams as the second most used online communication service for businesses and companies.

We scraped the Daily Active Users for MS Teams from 2017 to 2022 using the Parsehub tool and plotted the data in a graph to show the growth of active users.

Key benefits of MS Teams:

MS Teams is super easy to configure and could be done in a few clicks. It is designed to handle cross-platform applications and provides a quick and easy connection to Microsoft 365 and Outlook so that users may set up meetings and immediately join them.
Over a quarter of a billion people use Microsoft Teams, making it the most popular business communication service in the world.
The last time Microsoft updated this figure, it said over one million organizations use Teams. 91 of the Fortune 100 use the messaging platform.
Microsoft Teams usage spiked during the pandemic, as can be seen in the chart below, with meeting minutes increasing threefold in less than a month.

The Fall of Cisco Webex

Webex was launched in July 2000 and then acquired by Cisco in 2017 for $3.2 billion US dollars. It was the industry leader in terms of video conferencing amongst mid-level companies and large companies, generally known for its reliability and consistency. Cisco bought WebEx in order to compete with Microsoft and other integrated vendors.

Cisco Webex is a video conferencing service that provides many features such as screen sharing, video recording, whiteboard, chat and much more. It also has an intuitive interface that makes it easy to use.

Webex did not grow at the anticipated rates in 2019 when covid impacted the IT sector's foundation. Additionally, this platform could have been more appealing to Webex users who eventually switched to other software like MS Teams or Zoom. According to the companies' criticism about leaving Webex, there were a few other drawbacks outside the application's architecture.

Some facts about Cisco Webex:

Webex has one of the best security systems in the industry
Although it has many good merits, it takes too much time to set up every session as each time organizer has to implement everything manually
Even simple task like implementing meeting sessions with the calendar is a tedious task
On the other side, attendees have to click on multiple links before joining the session
It takes a lot of effort and time to set all the things in place because everything has to be integrated/setup manually, which is a major step back in today’s environment

Concluding Thoughts

As a result of our web scraped data, we can see that Microsoft Teams led the race of video conferencing compared to Cisco Webex. Its user-friendly interface and versatility resulted in time savings for clients. In addition, when compared to Cisco Webex, the subscription cost for MS Teams is lower and hence, preferred by individuals and business owners. Although this article was about MS Teams vs. Webex, Zoom leads the industry as the world’s most popular video conferencing platform to date.

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