In today’s on-the-go business landscape it is not uncommon for your team, clients, or suppliers to be located in different zip codes — or even multiple time zones. Therefore, when it is important to stay in touch, online videoconferencing tools for teams are the best way to facilitate collaboration with ease.

Virtual meetings are essential for startups that want to meet face-to-face with anyone, anywhere and save thousands on business travel.

While you are possibly already familiar with Skype, GoTo Meetings and WebEx, there are several newcomers that have carved out niche followings and growing user bases. Therefore, if you are looking to flex your virtual business muscles with some freshly minted newcomers, here are six of our favorite online videoconferencing tools that every small business or startup can easily use:

1. Meetings.io

If your small business is looking to host effortless video meetings with clients, co-workers and teams Meetings.io is a great option.  Their easy to use platform requires absolutely no software or signups, works on all web browsers and best of all, it is free.

The promising free group video call service lets groups of people in different locations hold Internet-based conversations with each other and is as easy as clicking on a link, with nothing else required.

2. Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts let you video chat with up to 9 people, face-to-face, host virtual meetings to increase your team’s productivity using their screen sharing and Google Docs tools, and go live in front of a global audience. Google’s videoconferencing service, is a major plus for those who are already logged into their Gmail, which makes it simple to just “hangout.”

Also users boast about Hangouts technology in that it effortlessly switches back and forth between the person who is chatting, cleverly skipping your personal webcam to avoid awkwardly staring into your own face on your laptop screen.

3. VSee

VSee aims to make videoconferencing and screen sharing easy with their remote teamwork platform. The service boasts HD video capability, one-click application sharing, drag-and-drop file transfer, and low bandwith — which means users can connect from anywhere, even their 3G or 4G mobile smartphones.

Their unique value proposition is security. According to VSee Storyteller, Anne Chang, “Unlike traditional videoconferencing systems, VSee uses end-to-end encryption without a man-in-the-middle listener. In many videoconferencing architectures, media is sent to a server. Although encryption is applied from your computer to those servers, the servers have full access to your video stream. In contrast, VSee uses end-to-end encryption where no server, even VSee’s own, has the decryption key.”

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