We, the developers and designers and hustlers of Startuplandia use toucan almost exclusively for internal technical standups.

https://app.toucan.events/

https://zoom.us/

Oh what you say, you don’t use zoom?

Is that because A. you all are massive hipsters or B. cause being better than zoom is apparently a low bar ?

Oh why I think it is a bit of both, yes, John D used to be a massive hipster (and has the single speed + cocktail bar to prove) and yes, toucan is generally better than zoom.

Well, how do you actually define ‘better’ ?

(Aghast) You want me to define my marketing-speak?

Yes…

Well, in our specific use case (small technical screensharing sessions), we define better as…

  1. Toucan never crashes (Platform Stability +1 Toucan)
  2. Toucan plays a cool little sound of the rainforest when you start the session (Emotional Feedback +1 Toucan)
  3. Toucan has a visually clean interface (The iPhone of Video Tools +1 Toucan)
  4. Toucan has an excellent layout for monitoring self, others and the screen that others see when screensharing (Functionality +1 Toucan)
  5. Toucan rhymes with both “YOUCAN” AND “TWOCAN” talk about motivational (Marketing IQ +1 Toucan)
  6. Zoom has better audio AND video quality than google hangouts (Technical Attribute +0 cause who cares about hangouts)
  7. Zoom as a company is worth 90Bn ? (Irrelevant metrics +1 Wall Street)
  8. Zoom interface hasn’t noticeably changed in over 2 years? (Is that even possible? -1 Zoom)
  9. Zoom has a pretty smart domain name, Zoom.us (Marketing IQ +.5 Zoom)

So after careful analysis, you see Toucan has 5 points, Wall Street has 1 point and Zoom has -.5 points. (Would you rather pay $0 for 5 points or 90BN for -.5 points? +1 Wall Street)

We’ll let this “data” speak for itself, but if you want to see a more in depth discussion and demonstration of the above points, watch the below demonstration video to get a sense of what we are talking about.

An if the video wasn’t enough for you, check out the below screenshot of some general developer feedback about using Toucan vs Zoom (I was actually shocked that everyone shared my sentiments as I’m usually the weird outlier)

#balanced

I like Toucan because I’m sure it will not fail randomly as Zoom does on Linux. I don’t have any other points in favor/against it

#ouch

Toucan for sure…zoom on Linux update almost weekly with fresh new bugs

#surprising

What annoys me the most with zoom is that little window opening up on top of everything, and that can be even harder when you’re on a single monitor… Just the fact that toucan runs on a browser for me it’s a win

Disclaimer: We know the people who built toucan, they are super smart engineers, smarter than us, we didn’t write this post just cause they built toucan, we tried toucan cause they said it was nice, and yes, we agree, and then the founder of toucan asked us since we are strong users if we wanted to be in the newsletter, so this is some hopefully well placed content marketing. We also agree that if you want some boss product engineers (and designers) you should say [email protected]