Quick test of Breeze and Marratech

Had a quick look at 2 video and audio collaboration tools, Breeze and Marratech. Thanks to SWITCH, who offered others to take a look using their trial license.

Overall…

Marratech sound quality is much superior to Breeze. Marratech sound had no delay and a clear sound. Conversing with more than 1 person using Breeze (delay, broken up signal) would be very difficult. For this reason alone I prefer Marratech – too bad that Marratech has stability problems during application sharing.

—

Random impressions…

Breeze’s user interface is simple and clean. Marratech’s normal mode is also simple, expert mode takes a few clicks to know where to find what in which window.

Marratech has stability problems during application sharing. Several users had to reconnect after freezes.

Breeze is limited if you are a presenter with a Macintosh: screen sharing is not possible from a mac. Plus, uploading of files from the local hard disk doesn’t work for Mac, you have to first save files to a server and then upload them from there.

Marratech lets Mac users upload from their own hard disk, but only pdf files. (Converting to pdf is easy with OS X, fortunately.)

Both have whiteboards that all can contribute to.

Marratech allows to save the session locally, Breeze requires you to save it to the server.

Marratech has a special feature allowing 2 people to connect directly via IP address using the Marratech client program only (no server needed). For 1 on 1 collaboration where document sharing or cobrowsing were necessary, this could work well (and is free!).