(Editors' Note: Verizon has announced that it will shut down its BlueJeans product line beginning on August 31, 2023.)
BlueJeans Virtual Meetings has been a strong contender in the video conferencing software market for some time now, and its quality has only improved since Verizon acquired the company in 2020. Although BlueJeans' browser-based client lacks a few features, its robust dedicated apps are available for virtually every platform, including Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. That broad platform support is enough to make BlueJeans a shoo-in for many businesses, particularly if they conduct a lot of video meetings with customers, contractors, or partners whose technology adoption might not match their own. For that and many other reasons, BlueJeans reigns as an Editors' Choice pick for multi-platform video conferencing software.
BlueJeans' Pricing and Plans
BlueJeans' Standard plan starts at a reasonable $9.99 per month per host when billed annually. This tier supports up to 100 participants, and meetings can last as long as you want. However, it lacks some of the features found in the higher-price tiers.
The Pro plan at $13.99 per host per month when billed annually, and it increases the participant head count to 150. This level includes 25 hours of cloud meeting recording per host, plus integrations with Microsoft Teams, Okta, Slack, and Splunk.
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Next up is BlueJeans Enterprise, which costs $16.66 per user per month. BlueJeans states that this is its most popular offering, and it includes unlimited recordings, automated closed captioning and transcription, and brand customization. Enterprise ups the meeting participants to 200.
Finally, the BlueJeans Enterprise Plus plan lets you customize the service to your needs with additional options and add-ons. However, you must contact the company to get a quote for this custom tier.
BlueJeans lacks a free tier, which is something that Zoom Meetings (our overall Editors' Choice pick for video conferencing) offers. However, the company offers a 14-day, free trial (no credit card required) if you'd like to explore the app's feature set before making a commitment.
Getting Started with BlueJeans
When you log in to BlueJeans, you're greeted with the well-designed meeting hub. Along the interface's left-hand side, you'll find buttons to schedule a meeting, join a meeting, or start a personal meeting. Scheduling a new meeting is a simple, straightforward experience. BlueJeans lets you enter comma-delimited email addresses for sending meeting invites or copy the meeting link for use in a calendaring system. The app also lets you generate a calendar invite for Outlook, which is a nice touch.
Scheduled meetings appear in the middle of the screen, making it the first thing your eye is drawn to upon logging in. Along the interface's right-hand side, you'll find a recorded meetings archive, which is a useful feature. Zoho Meeting and a few other video conferencing services make you dig a bit to find past recordings.
You can join a meeting using BlueJeans' Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, or Windows apps, which is a major point in its favor. Although downloading and installing the app is a snap, you may find this a hurdle if you work in an environment where IT has severely restricted your ability to install apps.
Fortunately, a browser-based client is available that replicates the apps' core experiences. That said, it can't reproduce every feature. For example, conference attendees who connect via their browsers won't be able to share whiteboards, create virtual backgrounds, initiate transcription, or share videos. If you expect participants to frequently join conferences via their browsers, you might want to look into a video conferencing service that's more browser-centric, like Google Meet.
Finally, for participants who can't join via video, BlueJeans makes dial-in, toll-based phone numbers available in more than 40 countries. Toll-free numbers are available in the US and Canada.
Meetings and Chat
BlueJeans' meeting interface has changed significantly since we last reviewed it, and it's a huge improvement. The wonky menus have been replaced with a streamlined and familiar set of buttons across the top when you move your mouse in that direction. Otherwise, the buttons stay hidden to prevent distractions during the meeting.
The app includes a button for starting a recording and creating a Highlight. The former is what you expect, but Highlight requires a bit of explanation. Highlights are markers that you can set in the meeting, so you can return to a specific point at a later date. You can attach comments to a Highlight, too. Like Cisco WebEx, the Editors' Choice pick for small businesses video conferencing services, BlueJeans has transcription functionality.
If you choose to share your screen, you can annotate it using intuitive drawing tools. This functionality puts BlueJeans in the same category as Intermedia AnyMeeting, our Editors' Choice pick for video conferencing apps with strong collaboration tools. Our one gripe? The lack of mouse and keyboard sharing. GoTo Meeting and Microsoft Teams excel in that area.
Moderator controls let you mute and unmute all participants, as well as turn off someone's video. In a nice touch, BlueJeans includes a waiting room. We've seen too many meetings where someone requests to join, and the request is sent to the background to be ignored. Having it explicit and visible is a major win.
BlueJeans' chat supports all the common emojis, plus direct messages. An apps section lets you see and edit meeting Highlights, open the whiteboard, annotate the screen, start a breakout session, or upload and share a video.
Most of these features are self-explanatory, but breakout sessions require a bit of explanation. Although generally geared toward webinars and training, breakout sessions are for leaving the main room for a short time and participating in small group activities before rejoining the main meeting. It's refreshing to see its inclusion, since even people who don't need full webinar capabilities might like the idea of breakout rooms.
Settings and Troubleshooting
BlueJeans' settings include everything you'd expect from a video conferencing app, including input options, and noise and muting options for when people join the meeting. It's worth noting that BlueJeans has placed a special emphasis on security. You can lock down a meeting to prevent a screen-share takeover, enforce a waiting room by locking the meeting, and make it so that only a moderator can share their screen. Beyond this, all meetings are AES-256 bit encrypted, and the link requires that the moderator accept your participation. As a result, it's harder to achieve unauthorized meeting access.
For technical people tasked with tracking down network issues, BlueJeans leads the video conferencing pack (with Zoho Meetings coming in second place). The command center not only gives you important statistics about meeting participation, but it presents clues as to why someone might have rated it as a bad experience. You can sort and search users based on their experience, and important metrics, including loss, frame rate, bitrate, and jitter, can be seen at a glance. Anything that went wrong appears in red, so a network analyst knows where to look for problems. Newly added is the concept of an "M-Score," which gives a simple, numeric score to a meeting's quality. From there, you can use additional tools to narrow down trouble spots.
Readers' Choice/Business Choice 2022: Video Conferencing Services
Top-Tier Video Conferencing for Businesses of All Sizes
BlueJeans has many useful features, but presents them in a way that doesn't overwhelm users. Even better, it's available on all major platforms, which makes getting everyone together for a meeting a breeze. That said, BlueJeans requires every meeting participant to download and install an app if you want to use every feature, so if you are firmly against that, consider a more browser-friendly option, such as the excellent Google Meet. If that isn't an issue, BlueJeans is an Editors' Choice pick for cross-platform video conferencing apps that you should check out.
Featuring transcriptions, breakout rooms, and support for nearly every popular platform, BlueJeans makes it easy to create and moderate video conference calls.
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