| Progress | Whereby | |
|---|---|---|
| Browser-based meetings, no downloads | Yes — guests join by link, no account | Yes — its signature strength |
| AI meeting notes and action items | Yes — transcript, summary, and action items emailed to attendees | No in Meetings; transcription is a metered developer-API feature |
| Guest lobby and admission control | Yes | Yes — knock-to-enter |
| Custom-branded standalone room URLs | No — rooms live inside your project workspace | Yes — permanent branded rooms on Pro (Whereby is stronger here) |
| Booking pages to schedule the call | Yes — Calendly-style public booking link with Google Calendar availability | No — pair with a separate scheduler |
| Project around the meeting (board, docs, chat, files, e-sign) | Yes — one workspace per project | No — meetings only |
| Price | Free during open beta | Free plan limited to one room and short sessions; Pro ~$8.99–10.99/user/mo |
What Whereby gets right
Whereby basically invented the frictionless browser meeting. A permanent room URL you can put in an email signature, guests who join with zero downloads and zero accounts, and a calm, unfussy interface — for a quick client call it's about as painless as video gets. It's also a Norwegian company with a genuinely strong privacy and GDPR posture, which is a real point in its favor if you or your clients are in Europe. And its Embedded API is a serious product in its own right: if you're a developer adding video to your own app, Whereby is one of the best tools for that job.
Our angle: the meeting is part of the project
A client call is rarely the whole job — it's one event inside a project that also has tasks, documents, decisions, and follow-ups. In Progress, meetings live in that project. Guests join by link with no account, exactly like Whereby, but the room sits next to the kanban board, the docs, and the chat where the follow-up actually happens. When the call ends, Progress transcribes it, writes an AI summary with action items, and emails the notes to attendees — no separate notetaker subscription, no metered transcription add-on. Whereby's AI transcription lives in its developer API product, not in the meetings app most people use; its own roadmap energy goes to that API. And where Whereby's free plan is now one room with short sessions, Progress is completely free during open beta — meetings, notes, and the entire workspace around them. The honest caveat: Progress is a project workspace with excellent meetings, not a dedicated video platform. If all you want is a standalone room URL with custom branding, Whereby Pro does that well.
And it comes with the rest of the project
These are live — click around. Every Progress project ships with all of it.
Chat
# launch · 4 members
Bookings
progress.app/book/sam · 3 event types
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Available times
Looking for a Whereby alternative?
If you love how easily clients join a Whereby call but keep pasting the takeaways into a separate task tool, doc tool, and chat tool afterward, Progress is the consolidation move. You get the same join-by-link, no-download meetings — with a lobby, and AI notes emailed after every call — inside a workspace that already holds the project's board, documents, chat, files, e-signatures, and a booking page to schedule the call in the first place. Since Whereby trimmed its free plan in January 2025, "free browser meetings" mostly means short sessions in one room; Progress is fully free during open beta. Stick with Whereby if you need a branded standalone room or Europe-hosted video is a hard requirement. If the meeting is part of a client project, try running it where the project lives.