Webex by Cisco offers a range of enterprise-grade business communications solutions. Overall, it’s products work well but feel outdated and tend to lack more innovate functionality.
It’s most popular products are Webex Meetings and Webex Calling. It also offers a range of other tools, including webinar and events management, contact center software, workspace solutions, and a full low-code developer platform with communications APIs.
You can use the links above to jump ahead to a specific product if you’d like.
Webex Overall: An Enterprise Solution that’s Challenging to Use, Hard to Implement, and Lacking Customization
Webex is one of the oldest companies in the communications space—it’s been around since 1996. It began as a meeting and webinar tool but has since added a wide range of enterprise collaboration solutions.
Most of its users are businesses with more than 1,000 employees, many of which are very happy with the suite of products overall. According to Webex itself, 95% of the Fortune 500 use it in one way or another. Many big names, like T-Mobile, AT&T, Rent-A-Center, Nasdaq, and Paychex, occupy its customer list.
For simple video conferencing, it’ll work just fine. Don’t like Zoom for whatever reason? Go for it.
But if you’re a serious business user or have complex needs (like most enterprises do), we don’t recommend it unless you have an experienced IT team or go through a managed service provider.
Even then, it may not be the best option for you. Here’s why.
It Used to Be the ONLY Option—Today, It’s One of Many
Many of its existing customers adopted it when it was the ONLY option for big business and have stayed with it over time.
Today, there are more than a handful of modern, easier to use, and just as feature-rich alternatives to choose from (which we’ll cover in the comparison section below). Many of these alternatives are hyper-focused on collaboration and phone systems, whereas Cisco has a dozen other products and is constantly expanding into new spaces.
It doesn’t give it’s increasingly outdated collaboration and communications suite a lot of attention.
Sure, it’s a reliable platform that works just fine. But it falls further behind its newest competitors every day in terms of ease of use, customization, and cutting-edge technology.
Corporate, Clunky, and Outdated
If you look through Webex’s release notes, you’ll notice there’s not a lot going on. On top of that, some of the things that ARE going on are regularly delayed, never mentioned again, or are about how they’re just now starting to implement standard features that you’d expect to see in a modern day collaboration system.
For example, the ability to call someone using their extension was announced in December of 2023. In January of 2024, there’s an update saying it’s delayed. And then there’s nothing else after that.
It’s hard to believe that this didn’t exist before. Same with agent availability, screen pop, and live queue statistics for the contact center solution. Release notes says these were released in April 2024, yet they’re standard features with most modern call center platforms.
Not only is the system outdated, but the features that do exist feel clunky when compared to something more modern, like Zoom or RingCentral. This is true across just about every product.
Webex has been around for a very long time. And it shows.
The Most Powerful Features Cost A Lot
Most of Webex’s powerful features are only available on enterprise plans with custom pricing. Things like barge, call queue, call recordings, live streaming, voicemail to email, and developer tools are reserved for the highest paying users.
With other providers, these features are standard across most (if not all) of their plans.
There are also advanced feature add-ons, even if you’re on the most expensive plans. Workforce management, translations, and even Webex Calling on the contact center plan all cost extra.
If you need these, it’ll push the cost of Webex even higher, making it less affordable than other alternatives.
Limited Customization, Integration, and Automation Opportunities
Most enterprise communications solutions are highly customizable—Webex isn’t. For example, you won’t be able to create custom workspaces for different roles (like you can with TalkDesk or 8×8) or update the interface at all.
There are some minor branding options with webinars and events, but that’s it.
On top of that, call routing options are limited for Calling and Contact Center plans and don’t necessarily give companies the flexibility they need to make the system work across multiple teams.
Furthermore, there aren’t many pre-built CRM integrations outside of Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive.
Automations are also rigid, difficult to set up, and limited when compared to other enterprise solutions that let you do just about whatever you want.
How Webex Compares to its Closest Competitors
RingCentral, Zoom, and GoTo are Webex’s closest competitors in terms of product offerings.
They all have video conferencing, VoIP phone systems, webinar and events management, solutions for physical spaces, and contact center platforms.
In terms of trustworthiness, Webex has been around for a long time and has a generally good reputation. However, it’s far from offering the most modern, feature-rich, and user-friendly products in the business communications space.
RingCentral is far more innovative with more integrations and advanced customization opportunities.
Zoom and GoTo both offer unlimited international calling options with their phone and contact center plans, which is something Webex doesn’t have. Zoom’s really the frontrunner for video conferencing and ease of use, but Webex and GoTo work okay for this too.
If you’re looking for a top-tier phone system or contact center solution, Nextiva’s our favorite option. It doesn’t offer webinar or events management, but it’s best in class for voice functionality across the board. It’s video and collaboration tools are great, too. Nextiva’s also laser-focused on acquisitions and improving the (small set of) products it already offers rather than coming up with new products.
Cisco (the owner of Webex) buys up companies left and right, but most of them aren’t in the collaboration or communication spaces, which is a signal to us that they’re really not all that focused on improving these products.
Webex Meetings: Works Well for Large, Formal Meetings
Webex Meeting has all the standard things you’d expect, including whiteboarding, breakout rooms, recordings, reactions, virtual backgrounds, and screen sharing. It’s your typical meetings platform with all the basics.
Despite it’s outdated interface and slow loading speed, it’s sufficient for regular business meetings.
Webex Video Conferencing: The Good
Free plan for short meetings: If you don’t need to meet for longer than 40 minutes with more than 100 people, the free plan is a viable option. It includes unlimited team messaging and file sharing plus all the standard video conferencing features. In comparison, Zoom’s free plan has the same attendee and time limitations but includes lightweight video editing and collaborative document tools as well.
Cospace by Nextiva, on the other hand, lets users meet for as long as they’d like, but limits meetings to five participants and comes with far fewer features.
High attendee limits on paid plans: Going with a paid plan boosts your time limit to 24 hours and allows up to 200 attendees. Zoom still limits you to 100 participants on the cheapest paid plan, so Webex Meeting gives you twice as many at a lower cost. Webex’s enterprise plan goes all the way up to 1,000 participants—most platforms don’t allow that many people unless you use their (more expensive) webinar and events solutions instead. That could be a viable option for large all-hands meetings, training events, and other formal meeting environments with a lot of participants.
Cohosting options: Users can assign multiple cohosts to help manage participants,, start, stop, and schedule meetings on their behalf. Cohosts get all the same privileges as the host.
Polls, quizzes, and Q&A: A lot of video conferencing tools don’t include interactive elements. They’re far more common with webinar and events platforms for audience engagement. However, they’re included in all paid Webex Meetings plans to help keep teams engaged, too.
Basic layout options: Hosts can set standard layouts, pin videos or users, and customize their own layouts. Attendees can also adjust their configuration however they’d like, too. No matter the plan, users can view up to 81 cameras at a time.
Voice commands: All paid plans include the Webex Assistant, which is preprogrammed with a range of voice commands to do various tasks during meetings. You can use it to take notes, record decisions on paper, highlight particular notes, create a list of action items, lower or increase the volume, turn cameras on or off, mute participants, and more.
Many of the note taking and action item tasks are done automatically with other solutions, so it does take a bit more work to make the same thing happen here. But voice control over audio, video, and participants is a nice feature we haven’t seen with many other providers.
Captions and highlights in four languages: Users can enable automated captions in English, French, Spanish, and German. They’ll also be able to create automated highlights in any of those languages, too.
Strong noise cancellation: Many people rely on headphones for noise cancellation, but Webex has a digital version built into every plan (even the free one). You can turn it on or off for specific meetings or configure it for all your meetings going forward.
Built-in messaging and file sharing: This isn’t anything special to Webex—most video conferencing tools have some form of team chat. Users can create 1:1, threaded, or group conversations. It also includes presence indicators, the option to bring in guests, quoting, and message reactions.
Potential Drawbacks of Webex Meetings
Translations are an add-on: A lot of video conferencing tools have started including AI translations in their paid plans. Webex currently charges extra for it, no matter what plan you’re on. It’ll cost you $300 per license per year.
Only 10 GB of storage for recordings: All paid plans, except the enterprise plan, limit you to 10 GB of cloud storage for meeting recordings. That’s really not that much considering that other providers give you as much as you want (within reason). You can always save your recordings to local storage or an external cloud, but that’s an extra step you’ll have to take.
Limited to 10 virtual backgrounds: Until recently, users could only add three virtual backgrounds. Today, you can add up to 10—other solutions don’t limit the number you can upload.
Layouts aren’t very customizable: Sure, users and hosts get a bit of control over the layout with the ability to pin videos and set global configurations. But there aren’t that many layouts to choose from (only five on desktop and two on mobile). It’s pretty limited compared to other tools that let users create their own configurations with drag-and-drop functionality.
Not as well known: Usually we wouldn’t say this matters too much, but that’s not the case here. If you’re using Webex for meetings with external users, they will likely experience a bit of a learning curve getting used to the platform.
Streaming is limited to enterprise plan: With Zoom, you can livestream meetings on any paid plan. With Webex, you have to be on the most expensive tier.
Not many innovative features: Webex is definitely not a cutting edge solution. It’s just now starting to implement AI features, and things like collaborative documents, video editing, and remote desktop control are nowhere to be found.
Webex Meeting Plans and Pricing
Webex Meetings starts at $144 per license per year. It’s $2.50 more per user per month if you choose a monthly plan. This is the only paid meetings-only plan, so there’s not a ton of room to grow or add new features if you’re only using it for video conferencing. You can jump to the enterprise plan, but that’s a black box—you won’t know how much it’ll cost until you talk to their sales team.
The paid plan is roughly a dollar cheaper than Zoom’s cheapest plan—Webex allows 2x as many attendees for the price, but offers fewer features.
Webex Suite is a Meetings and Calling bundle that starts at $270 per user per year.
We’ll talk more about the calling features below, but the price is $0.01 more per month per user than Zoom’s equivalent bundle, so they’re virtually identical in price.
Check out our complete guide to the best video conferencing platforms for more details.
Webex Calling: A Simple Phone System for Larger Businesses
Webex Calling is a very basic phone system with standard capabilities, like call waiting, ring groups, holding, transferring, and forwarding. There’s not really a lot about it that stands out, especially for enterprises—its target audience.
However, it may work well if you have a lot of users (at least 500+) with very basic needs.
Webex Phone System: The Good
Simple plan structure: There’s one calling-only plan. It includes unlimited domestic calling, a basic auto attendant, per-minute international calling, and a lightweight contact list plus the free version of Webex Meetings. If you need more advanced calling features, you’ll have to upgrade to a custom enterprise plan where you’ll be able to get more granular with the capabilities you need.
Supports six-way calling: Most providers support three-way calling, but Webex supports up to six. This can be helpful if you need to bring others into conversations without having to jump on a video call.
Unlimited extensions at no cost: You can set up as many extensions as you’d like. Some solutions charge per extension or limit the number of extensions you can have, so it’s nice that there are no limitations at all. Extensions can be anywhere from two to six digits. You can also set up extensions for external numbers to make it easier to call them.
Push to talk: This is something we found buried deep within Webex’s documentation. Like with RingCentral, users can enable walkie talkie capabilities on their devices for fast and easy communication at any time.
You can also set up designated workspaces with push-to-talk as well.
Webex Go: This feature lets users make and receive calls using the native calling app on their mobile devices. They’ll be able to choose from their primary number of their Webex number when making calls and access some of Webex Calling’s features (extensions, conferencing, etc.) using an interface they’re already familiar with. This feature’s only available on the enterprise plan.
Optional all-in-one collaboration bundle: If you have users that need longer meetings with more participants or advance Meetings features, you can upgrade them to Webex Suite. It includes all the same calling features plus an upgraded version of Webex Meetings.
This plan is comparable to an entry-level collaboration plan with providers like Nextiva, Dialpad, and RingCentral. These all come with a full suite of UCaaS features, but tend to cost less than Webex Suite.
Contact center plans you can move to if needed: Need more from your phone system? Webex offers an advanced contact center platform with advanced call routing, an interaction flow builder, supervisor tools, and more. It’s not our favorite solution on the market, but there is room to grow without switching away from Webex when you need more.
Potential Drawbacks of Webex’s Calling Solution
You can buy it right now but you shouldn’t: Webex’s website doesn’t do a great job of explaining what comes with each plan. Sure, there is a list of features and seemingly straightforward pricing. But there are additional features, like SMS, faxing, hot desking, and push-to-talk that aren’t mentioned anywhere on the site except the documentation. There are probably others, too.
Aside from different calling plans, there are different license types too, all with their own sets of features. To muddy the waters even more, some of these features cost extra for certain license types. Nothing on their website says anything about this. Many phone users say they became confused after signing up and the implementation ended up taking longer than they’d hoped because of that. Just because you can purchase a phone plan without having to talk to anyone doesn’t mean you should.
Limited support for non-Cisco phones: Webex supports a massive range of Cisco devices but has a short list of supported non-Cisco devices. Furthermore, you get less control and functionality when you use devices outside of the Cisco ecosystem. For example, you won’t be able to deploy devices in bulk or manage their settings from the app.
At a small scale, going to each device individually may be fine but can be a major time suck if you have hundreds or even thousands of phones to update.
Configuring features is a challenge: Just reading through Webex’s documentation is confusing—even for folks who know a decent amount about phone systems. Setting up text messaging permissions, basic fax capabilities, and even adding new extensions seems way more confusing than it needs to be.
Many standard features are only on the enterprise plan: After looking at dozens of phone systems, a lot of them include very lightweight call center functionality like queue, barge, and call recording on most of their plans. However, you have to be on Webex’s enterprise plan if you need any of them. The same is true of voicemail to email—this is a very common feature you’ll find with even entry-level phone systems so it seems weird that it’s gated to the most expensive tier.
Webex Calling Plans and Pricing
Webex’s calling-only plan is $15.30 per user per month. That jumps up to $17 per user per month for a month-to-month contract. Compared to super advanced phone systems like RingCentral, it seems affordable.
But when you look at the price and feature sets of Webex vs Zoom, Zoom offers way more value per dollar.
Zoom has tons of advanced phone features, like IVR, ACD, supervisor tools, and call recording, all for virtually the same price as Webex. Dialpad’s phone system is also the same price, but has far more AI functionality.
Overall, Webex does have relatively low per-user pricing compared to more robust options, but it’s expensive for what you get.
See our favorite business phone systems to learn about other options.
Additional Webex Products and Services
Webex’s video meetings and phone systems are its most commonly used products. But it also offers a range of other tools, including a webinar and events platform, contact center software, workspace solutions, and a full developer suite of APIs and low-code tools.
Workspaces
Webex and Cisco offer a full suite of devices and hardware to equip physical spaces with all the tools they need. There are standard options like phones, conference bridges, and headsets. But some of them are pretty cool, like the touch screen digital whiteboards that let you annotate, take notes, present, and collaborate in person as well as with others connected via Webex Meeting (or another video conferencing solution).
Some of them have built-in wide-angle cameras and spatial audio capabilities plus AI image processing to capture everyone in the room.
Overall, the company’s physical devices are more innovative than their software thus far.
Webex Connect—CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service)
Webex Connect is an advanced customer experience solution for teams with developers and experienced IT staff who want to embed communications capabilities into existing apps or build their own from scratch.
There are a few pre-built apps you can use, including marketing campaigns, live chat agent support, and automated customer notifications. From there, you can make changes and build them out as much as you need. You have the ability to bring in 16 different channels plus leverage a low-code builder to flesh out automations, connect tools together, and centralize everything in one place.
Pricing is entirely custom, but definitely suited towards larger businesses.
Webinars and Events
Webex can handle very large webinars and multi-day online, virtual, or hybrid events—even those up to 10,000+ attendees. With webinars, you’ll be able to create customized registration and landing pages but you won’t be able to customize the interface itself unless you upgrade to the events solution.
Both plans include a full suite of moderation tools, audience engagement features, breakout rooms, and streaming options.
The (more expensive) events plan comes with a mobile event app, which is a cool feature we don’t often see. Like Webex’s other products, it’s hard to understand which features come with which plan, so it’s best if you reach out to them before signing up for anything.
In terms of pricing, there’s a special offer running right now for 75% off Webex Webinars for up to 1,000 participants. This lowers the cost to just $675 per license for the full year. Without the discount, it’s a bit cheaper than equivalent plans with Zoom but more expensive than GoTo Webinar and RingCentral.
The same is true as you scale up, too. It ends up being right in the middle.
See our complete guide to the best webinar solutions for more details.
Contact Center Software
Despite Webex Contact Center being one of its newer products, it still mirrors the outdated and clunky interface you’ll find with its other products. It’s analytics are also notably poor. On top of that, they’re just now (April of 2024) adding standard features like agent availability and screen pop.
With such critical features being left out until now, it’s hard to imagine what else is missing.
Overall, it works okay but has a long way to go be on par with more innovative and cutting edge solutions, including Nextiva, RingCentral, TalkDesk, and Dialpad.
Check out our full list of the best contact center software to learn more.
