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Video Conferencing

Whereby

UK / wider Europe Report an error

Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: 2 of 4 dimensions proven

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Whereby AS · whereby.com

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Educator

Weighted verdict

Teaches thirty people who join from whatever they have, half of them on a phone in a dead spot. Cares that the browser works without an install, that guests need no account, that breakout rooms are usable, and that nobody is excluded by bandwidth or by a missing caption.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Educator

The meeting itself

How this is scored

Whether the call works: participant capacity, video and audio quality under load, screen sharing, breakout rooms, moderation, and what happens on a bad connection.

0 — Small meetings only, no screen sharing worth the name, no moderation controls, and the call degrades without telling anyone.

3 — Standard meetings with screen sharing and mute-all, but low participant limits, no breakout rooms and no bandwidth adaptation stated.

5 — Meetings at the scale most teams need with screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation, and documented behaviour on constrained connections.

8 — Large meetings and webinars with published capacity limits, per-participant moderation and waiting rooms, layout control, simulcast or adaptive bitrate stated, and reliable behaviour on mobile networks.

10 — Scale and control are engineering claims the vendor stands behind: capacity published per plan and per region, selective forwarding with adaptive quality documented, live streaming, hardware-room support, and diagnostics an admin can read after a bad call.

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The Educator

Screen sharing, chat, whiteboard and transcription are listed, and the vendor claims quality holds up 'in low bandwidth scenarios and on mobile devices' — that claim matters to my dead-spot students. But there is no published participant capacity, no host moderation controls in evidence, and not one word about breakout rooms, which is how I actually run a class of thirty. 1 2

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Encryption & meeting access

How this is scored

What is actually encrypted and against whom, plus who can get into a meeting. Judged on documented mechanism rather than on the word "encrypted".

0 — Transport encryption only, undocumented; meetings joinable by anyone with a link and no lobby.

3 — TLS in transit and encryption at rest, with the vendor holding all keys; access control is a passcode.

5 — The above plus a lobby or waiting room, host-controlled admission, per-meeting passcodes, and a clear statement that the vendor can technically access media.

8 — Optional end-to-end encryption for meetings with the trade-offs named (which features stop working), documented key handling, SSO-gated joining, and per-meeting access policies.

10 — End-to-end encryption available without surrendering the product — its cryptography documented or open source, key management explained, identity verification for participants, and the vendor stating plainly what it can and cannot see.

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The Educator

There is a real mechanism behind the E2EE claim — 'Small meeting' mode with DTLS-SRTP and client-generated keys, and the trade-off named (quality and stability) — plus a statement that meeting media is never stored. But Group call is the default and I find no lobby, waiting room, passcode or host-admission control documented, so who can walk into my room is a blank. 3

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Reach & accessibility

How this is scored

Whether everyone who needs to join can: browser without an install, dial-in, low bandwidth, guests without accounts, captions and keyboard operation.

0 — A desktop client is the only way in; guests must create an account.

3 — Browser joining exists but is degraded, guests can join by link, and there is no dial-in and no accessibility statement.

5 — Full-feature browser joining without an install, guest access by link, mobile apps, and a stated accessibility posture.

8 — Telephone dial-in with numbers listed, live captions, keyboard-navigable and screen-reader-tested interface, and documented low-bandwidth behaviour.

10 — Reach is designed for: browser parity with the client, dial-in across the regions the customer operates in, live captions and translation, a published accessibility conformance report, and a usable experience on a poor mobile connection.

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The Educator

Mobile and low-bandwidth support is stated, transcriptions exist, and registration is framed as optional so guests plausibly join without an account. But there is no telephone dial-in for my dead-spot learners, no accessibility statement or screen-reader evidence anywhere, and the hard 16-and-over floor simply excludes younger students — an accessibility fail by policy, not by bandwidth. 1 3

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Recordings, retention & admin control

How this is scored

A recording is personal data about everyone in the room. Who may record, who is told, where it is stored, how long it lives, and what the works council can switch off.

0 — Anyone can record, storage location unstated, no retention rule, no admin policy.

3 — Host-only recording with a notification, but storage region unstated, retention manual, and no organisation-wide policy control.

5 — Admin policy over who may record, participant notification and consent prompt, stated storage region, and manual deletion that works.

8 — Automatic retention and deletion per policy, recordings encrypted at rest with access logged, transcription handled with its own retention rule, and attendance or analytics features that can be switched off for co-determination.

10 — Built for a works agreement: every recording, transcript and analytics feature independently switchable and documented, retention executed and evidenced, an audit trail of who accessed which recording, and no participant-level behavioural scoring at all.

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The Educator

Recording is plan-gated, but consent is contractually shifted onto the customer rather than a built-in prompt or notification, and nothing says where recordings live, how long they survive, or what an organisation can switch off. The vendor's own pledge not to store meeting media is honest, but it leaves the governance a works council needs entirely unevidenced. 3

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Integrations & deployment

How this is scored

Calendar, identity and the wider stack — plus, in this category, whether the product can be run on the customer's own infrastructure at all.

0 — No calendar integration, no SSO, no API; cloud-only with no alternative.

3 — One calendar integration and basic SSO, no API worth building on, cloud-only.

5 — Calendar integration for the major suites, SAML or OIDC SSO, a documented API for scheduling, and room-system support.

8 — The above plus SCIM provisioning, embedding via SDK, webhooks for meeting events, and either a self-hosted option or a documented private-cloud deployment.

10 — Deployment is the customer's choice: a genuine on-premises or private-cloud option with the same features, open protocols or open source, embeddable SDKs, and identity integration that does not require the vendor's directory.

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The Educator

The Embedded product is the strong card: API and SDK tooling with programmatic room creation, which is genuinely embeddable. But there is no calendar integration for the major suites, no SSO, no SCIM, no webhooks and no self-hosted option in evidence — the FAQ even has to ask whether the API works on a Meetings plan at all — and the in-room apps (Drive, YouTube, Trello, Miro) are not the stack integration I mean. 1 2 3

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where media and metadata are processed, who the contracting entity is, which subprocessors carry the traffic. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as this buyer weighs it — which in this category is heavily.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, media routed through unstated regions, subprocessors unnamed.

3 — EU data residency for storage while media relays or metadata remain non-EU, or the contracting entity sits outside the EU.

5 — EU hosting and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — relays, analytics, support tooling, transcription — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — Media and metadata processed in the EU on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, complete subprocessor list published, any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: media never leaves the EU, every subprocessor European, certification published, and an on-premises option that removes the question entirely.

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The Educator

Account data sits in Ireland, but usage information is explicitly hosted in Ireland AND the United States, with SCCs as the named safeguard; the contracting entity is Norwegian — EEA, not EU — and subprocessors appear only as categories, never named providers. The homepage's 'GDPR compliant, ISO 27001' posture is welcome, but media routing is unstated, so this stays at the residency-with-gaps tier. 1 3

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Pricing transparency

How this is scored

Whether a buyer can compute the annual invoice for their host count — including the capacity, dial-in and recording storage they actually need — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A per-host headline exists, but participant caps, dial-in minutes or recording storage are unpriced or unmentioned.

5 — Per-host prices public with billing period stated and capacity limits given, but at least one commonly needed piece (webinar capacity, dial-in, storage) sits in an unpriced add-on.

8 — Every tier and add-on priced publicly with per-host maths, capacity limits, dial-in rates, storage allowances, minimum term and VAT treatment stated.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator producing the annual invoice for a given host count, meeting size and recording volume, including overage and per-region dial-in.

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The Educator

A public pricing page exists and names the two products with their billing models — per-user licence for Meetings, usage-based for Embedded. But the evidence captures not a single figure: no per-host price, no capacity limits, no storage allowance, no term or VAT — so no teacher or buyer can compute an annual invoice from this evidence. 2

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European sovereignty — proven facts

2 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency EU only ⚠ unverified 3/3 pts 4 Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (14)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor homepage whereby.com Checked 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Pricing whereby.com Checked 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Privacy policy whereby.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Security / trust page whereby.com Checked 30 Sep 2026 Details →
  5. 5 The meeting itself — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 The meeting itself — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Encryption & meeting access — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Encryption & meeting access — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Reach & accessibility — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Reach & accessibility — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Recordings, retention & admin control — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  12. 12 Recordings, retention & admin control — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  13. 13 Integrations & deployment — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  14. 14 Integrations & deployment — found from sitemap docs.whereby.com Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →