BlueJeans Review, Pricing & Features

What is BlueJeans?

BlueJeans is a video conferencing software tool that enables web conferencing, video conferencing, and webinars. Though smaller than other video conferencing companies, BlueJeans is a fully functional conferencing tool that is utilized by small businesses, large businesses, and academic institutions alike.

BlueJeans is similar to other full-featured video conferencing tools like Zoom and Skype. Your decision will likely depend on how much you’re willing to pay each month and the participant limits you need for your calls.

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Table of Contents

• What is BlueJeans?
• BlueJeans Review Summary
• BlueJeans Pricing & Cost
• BlueJeans Key Features
  • Creating Meetings
  • Meeting Features
  • Hosting Meetings
  • Security
  • Additional Features
• BlueJeans Customer Support
• BlueJeans vs. Competitors
• Is BlueJeans Right For You?

BlueJeans Review Summary

BlueJeans was founded by Alagu Periyannan and Krish Ramakrishnan in 2009. In 2020, BlueJeans was acquired by Verizon. The platform offers paid plans only, unlike most of its competitors, which have a free plan with limited features.

BlueJeans has most features required of video conferencing software tools, albeit with strict participant limits. The highest-tier plan only allows for 250 participants at most, and though most small businesses won’t need more than that, other platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams allow up to 1,000 participants in meetings.

BlueJeans does not offer a free plan, which is its biggest downside. Skype, Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams all have a free option with features that will support most small businesses. Though BlueJeans pricing is manageable with plans starting at $12.49 per host per month, it’s more of an upfront investment than its alternatives.

Overall, BlueJeans works well and is fairly feature-rich. It’s the chosen video conferencing tool for many academic institutions due to its webinar capabilities. However, for small businesses, we found that there are other tools, like Microsoft Teams or Zoom, that are a better value.

BlueJeans Pricing & Cost

BlueJeans pricing begins at $12.49 per host per month for video meetings and the most popular plan costs $19.99 per host per month. Because the difference in price is so little between the two plans, we recommend opting for the more expensive plan for more features and a higher participant limit.

There is separate pricing for BlueJeans webinars, and plans range from $99 to $599 per month.

BlueJeans Key Features

Throughout this review, we’ll provide an overview of BlueJeans’ features, usability, and customer service availability. Comparisons between BlueJeans and other video conferencing software tools will be provided throughout. We’ll also include images of BlueJeans to give you a sense of what it’s like to work with the platform before you purchase it.

To learn more about how we research and rate software tools, read about SoftwarePundit’s review methodology.

Creating Meetings

Upon signing up for BlueJeans, you will be given a unique meeting link that you’ll use to invite participants to your personal meeting. One downside to this is that we found that participants can join meetings without the host there, which could cause privacy issues. You will want to ensure that you change this in the settings.

You can send participants the link, and they will be prompted to download the BlueJeans application to their device, though they can join from a browser as well.

Meeting Features

BlueJeans has low attendee limits compared with some competitors, but it offers webinars, which Google Meet does not. There’s group and individual chat, video recording, screen sharing, remote control capabilities, and more.

Attendee Limits

With the least expensive BlueJeans plan, up to 100 participants can join a call. Most video conferencing software platforms offer this for free, so it’s a bit abnormal that this requires payment. Paid plans enable up to 200 people to join a call at once.

Chat

During a meeting, hosts and participants can message the entire group or individual participants. It’s helpful to have both options in case chats need to be exchanged in private rather than with the group.

Background Changes

With BlueJeans, users can choose to have their video cameras off and change their video backgrounds to protect privacy during meetings.

Hosting Meetings

During a meeting, the screen will look something like this. Participants’ screens are shown in the middle, and to the right, hosts can view the list of participants, the chat, applications, and settings.

You can start a recording at any point during a call. You can also lock the meeting at any time.

Closed Captioning

Certain BlueJeans plans come with the ability to turn on closed captioning, which will generate subtitles in real time.

Screen Sharing

Depending on your security settings, all participants can share screens during a call. You’ll be able to share a specific window or your entire screen. If you do not want participants to be able to do this, you can turn their screen sharing access off.

Apps

The applications that are immediately available to utilize during BlueJeans calls are:

Ending Meeting

You can end meetings instantly or schedule a time for the call to drop participants all at once. This is a somewhat unique feature that you’ll want to pay close attention to, because if you hang up the call as a host, your participants will still be able to stay in the meeting. In other software tools, like Zoom, it’s more apparent how to end the meeting for the whole group.

Security

Security features in BlueJeans get more advanced with the higher-tier plans, which makes sense if large corporations or academic institutions want the utmost security. All meetings, regardless of your plan, are encrypted and allow for meeting locking and participant removal.

Meeting Password

Like most video conferencing software tools, BlueJeans allows hosts to lock a meeting with a password. This ensures that only participants who have been given the password can access a meeting.

Waiting Room

Even if attendees have been invited, hosts can set up a waiting room that prevents users from being able to automatically join a call. When users are in the waiting room, hosts can choose whether or not to admit them one by one.

Some more security settings and video settings are seen below:

Additional Features

A brief list of additional features is shown below. These features are generally considered nice to have, though are not crucial to most businesses.

BlueJeans Customer Support

BlueJeans offers more support avenues than huge competitors like Google and Microsoft. There are live Q&A sessions every day, and customers can submit cases through the profile, call a support phone number, or use the live chat features on the BlueJeans website.

BlueJeans Alternatives & Competitors

BlueJeans competes with many popular video conferencing software tools, though it’s not nearly as popular as the alternatives listed below.

Is BlueJeans Right For You?

BlueJeans is a video conferencing software with all the features most small businesses would require for successful meetings. There are advanced security features and moderator controls, as well as a separate webinar plan available for purchase.

BlueJeans’ most significant downside is that there is no free plan, as there is with most other video conferencing tools. The participant limits are also a bit lower compared with alternatives. However, the pricing is reasonable and BlueJeans is a reliable software.

If you are interested in trying BlueJeans, sign up here.