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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 Skeptic

Weighted verdict

Has read many pages claiming end-to-end encryption and wants the sentence that says which meetings, on which plan, with what turned off. Also reads for the participant cap, the dial-in minutes, and where recording storage stops being free.

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

Scored by The Skeptic

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 Skeptic

Screen sharing, chat, whiteboard and a low-bandwidth claim exist, but not a single participant number is published, and breakout rooms and host moderation controls appear nowhere in the evidence. The only modes documented are the 'Group call' default and a 'Small meeting' E2E mode, which tells me small meetings are the design target; scale and behaviour under load are asserted, not documented. 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 Skeptic

The sentence I look for exists: 'Small meeting' mode gives end-to-end encryption via DTLS-SRTP with client-generated keys, with the trade-off named — quality and stability. But the default is Group call mode, the evidence never states what encryption that mode has or whether the vendor can technically access media there, and no lobby, per-meeting passcode or SSO-gated joining is documented. Optional E2E with named crypto earns above 5; silence on the default mode and on access controls keeps it well short of 8. 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 Skeptic

Mobile and low-bandwidth support is a homepage claim and transcription exists, but the evidence has no dial-in, no accessibility statement, no confirmation that guests join by link without an account, and no keyboard or screen-reader testing. Registration requires an email or phone number, and nothing evidences that the browser path is full-feature rather than degraded. 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 Skeptic

Recording is plan-gated, but consent is outsourced: customers 'are then responsible for collecting consents from all participants' — no product-enforced notification or consent prompt is evidenced. Storage region for recordings, retention, and organisation-wide admin policy are all unstated, and the policy's claim of no meeting storage sits unresolved against an advertised Recording feature. 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 Skeptic

The Embedded product is a genuine documented API with SDK tooling, programmatic room creation and transcription — more than a checkbox API. But no calendar integration, no SSO/SCIM, no room-system support and no self-hosted or private-cloud option appears anywhere; the in-room integrations are Google Drive, YouTube, Trello and Miro, not identity or scheduling. Cloud-only with a good SDK sits between rubric level 3 and 5. 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 Skeptic

Account data sits in Ireland, but Usage information is hosted in Ireland and the United States, the contracting entity is Norwegian — EEA, not EU — and group companies sit in the US and UK. Subprocessors appear only as categories with no named entities, and the evidence says nothing about where media is relayed; SCCs and 'built in Europe' are a safeguard and a slogan, not a processing map. I weigh this heavily, and the core question — where the media goes — goes unanswered. 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 Skeptic

The pricing page links exist and the models are stated — Meetings 'charged per user license', Embedded 'charged by usage' — but the evidence contains not one figure: no per-host price, no billing period, no participant caps, no storage allowance, no minimum term. A buyer cannot compute even a rough annual invoice from this evidence, which puts it below the per-host-headline anchor. 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 →