Alternatives to Zoom in 2026: 9 honest picks for coaches

We make Drry, one of the alternatives below, so read accordingly. The best alternatives to Zoom for a coach are Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Whereby, Jitsi Meet, Riverside, StreamYard, the live rooms built into Skool and Circle, and Drry, and the right one depends on what the call is for: a quick chat, a free group session with no clock, a recording you will reuse, a live stream, or a class your members pay to attend. Every competitor figure below was read from the pricing or help page of that vendor in September 2026 and is dated in the page source; plans change, so check before you commit to anything, including us.

First, credit where it is due. Zoom is still the default for good reasons: it is reliable at large sizes, the apps are mature on every device, breakout rooms and webinars are well developed, and almost everybody you will ever invite has used it. If you are looking for a replacement, it is usually for one of three reasons: the free plan ends group meetings at 40 minutes, the paid plan is a per-person subscription for a tool you only use a few hours a week, or the call lives on a link outside the place your members actually spend time.

Zoom alternatives at a glance

Free tiers and limits as checked on the page of each vendor in September 2026. The limit column is the one that decides most switches.

Google Meet: the one everybody already has

Meet is the most common Google Meet versus Zoom decision for a reason: it opens in a browser tab, there is nothing to install, and your clients almost certainly have a Google account already.

• Best for: quick one-to-ones and small calls with people who live in Gmail and Google Calendar.
• Free tier: a personal Google account hosts up to 100 people. A one-to-one can run for 24 hours; a call with three or more people ends at one hour.
• What you give up: recording, on the free account: Google lists it as a feature of eligible paid Workspace and Google One plans. A weekly group class also hits the hour limit every single week.

Microsoft Teams: the one your corporate clients use

If you coach executives or sell to companies, Teams is often the tool on their side of the call, and meeting them there removes one small piece of friction.

• Best for: coaches whose clients are inside organisations that run on Microsoft 365.
• Free tier: Teams Free runs group calls for up to 60 minutes with up to 100 people, per Microsoft.
• What you give up: simplicity. Teams is a workplace chat app with meetings attached, so for a solo coach it is a lot of product around a video call.

Whereby: the permanent room

Whereby gives you a room at a fixed address that clients open in a browser, with no download and no new link to send each week. For recurring one-to-ones that is a genuinely nicer habit than a fresh meeting ID every time.

• Best for: one-to-one coaching on a standing link.
• Free tier: one room, up to 4 people, 30 minutes a meeting, no recording. Pro is $10.99 a month for three rooms, 100 people and no time limit.
• What you give up: the free tier is a trial in practice, since 30 minutes is shorter than most sessions.

Jitsi Meet: the free one with no clock

Jitsi Meet is open source, and the public service at meet.jit.si is free. As checked in September 2026 it names no time limit, which makes it the most honest answer to the free, no-time-limit question.

• Best for: free group calls and classes that run past an hour, and anyone who would rather not create accounts for their attendees.
• Free tier: all of it. Attendees join without an account; since August 2023 the person who opens a room signs in with Google, GitHub or Facebook.
• What you give up: polish and support. A free public service makes no promises about call quality at larger sizes, and running your own server to get those promises is a technical job.

Riverside: the recording studio

Riverside is built to record, not to meet. Each person is captured locally and uploaded separately, so the file survives a shaky connection, which matters when the recording is the product: a podcast, a course module, an interview you will cut into clips.

• Best for: recorded interviews and course video you plan to edit and reuse.
• Free tier: 2 hours of multitrack recording at up to 720p, with a Riverside watermark. Pro is $29 a month billed monthly; live streaming and webinars sit on higher plans.
• What you give up: it is overkill for a weekly group call, and the pricing is shaped around recording hours rather than meeting time.

StreamYard: the live-streaming studio

StreamYard sends a produced show to YouTube, LinkedIn and other destinations at once, with guests brought on screen from a browser. If your live session is really a broadcast to a public audience, this is the category you want.

• Best for: public live shows and free workshops streamed to social platforms.
• Free tier: the studio features with a StreamYard logo on the stream, up to 6 people on screen and 2 hours of local recording a month. Core is $44.99 a month billed monthly.
• What you give up: privacy of the room. It is built to publish to a platform, which is the wrong shape for a paid members-only class.

Skool Calls and Circle live: the community-native options

The newest category, and the one most relevant to a coach running a paid group: community platforms that host the call themselves, so members join from the same place they read posts and take courses, and there is no outside link to share or leak.

• Skool Calls: admins go live from inside a Skool group, with screen sharing, chat, and a recording you download afterwards (Skool keeps it for 14 days, so plan to move it into the classroom). Best if you already run on Skool; there is no free Skool plan to start on. See Skool alternatives if the rest of Skool is the reason you are shopping.
• Circle live: live rooms for interactive calls and live streams for larger audiences, both drawing on a monthly pool of live hours whose size, like the attendee caps, depends on your Circle plan. Best if you already run on Circle; it has no free plan either. See Circle alternatives.

Drry: calls on your community calendar (ours)

Our product, so treat this as a pitch with numbers you can check on the pricing page. Drry is a paid-community platform for coaches, and a session is an event on your community calendar that members join from there, in the browser, with nothing to install. The full picture of how it works is on our Zoom alternative for coaching calls page.

• Best for: coaches whose group calls, classes and one-to-ones are part of what members pay for, and who want the schedule, the reminders and the replays in the same place as the community.
• What it costs: rooms are not free. They start on Creator at $29 a month with 20 participant hours and up to 25 people in a call; Growth, at $99 a month, includes 50 participant hours and up to 100 people. A participant hour is one person in a call for an hour, host included, so 20 hours is about a weekly hour-long call with 5 people in it.
• What is included: screen share, in-room chat and recording from Creator, with the replay saved next to the rest of your content for the audience you choose. AI meeting notes arrive on Growth, and so do webinars (Growth only).
• What is free on every plan: the calendar, RSVPs, reminder emails, a booking page, and events that carry a pasted Zoom or Meet link. You can keep your current call tool and still run the schedule from your community.
• When the hours run out: nothing bills unless you switch on extra usage ($0.75 a participant hour, up to a cap you set). A session that cannot continue gets a 5-minute wind-down that only you and your admins see; members are never shown a countdown.
• What you give up: it is not a meeting tool for a whole company, a call tops out at 100 people, and there is no free video room. If you need free calls with no clock, Jitsi Meet is the better answer.

Free, with no time limit: the honest answer

This is the most common reason people leave Zoom, so here it is plainly, as checked in September 2026:

• Jitsi Meet is free and advertises no time limit for group calls. The one catch is a sign-in for whoever opens the room.
• Google Meet is effectively unlimited for a one-to-one (24 hours) and one hour for three or more people.
• Microsoft Teams stops free group calls at 60 minutes.
• Whereby stops free meetings at 30 minutes, and Zoom itself stops free meetings at 40.

So for free one-to-ones, Google Meet is hard to beat; for free group calls that run long, Jitsi Meet is the one. If you want replays, check recording before anything else: a free Google account cannot record a Meet at all, and free Zoom records to your own computer rather than to the cloud.

How to choose

And be honest about where Zoom still wins: very large meetings, breakout rooms for workshops, and clients who will only ever click a Zoom link. If that is your week, the calendar in Drry works fine with a pasted Zoom link, on the free plan, and that is a perfectly good place to stop. If you sell live sessions, our guide to hosting a webinar that sells covers the run from invite to offer.