Zoom has been at the center of the new work from home era, rising to become the de facto video conferencing service for many. However, there are several reasons to dig deeper and go with a different conference calling service.

The first is price. Zoom offers a lot of functionality, but it’s piecemeal. Meetings with up to 1,000 participants carry an extra charge, as does webinar functionality, virtual audio conferences and call cloud storage.

A dedicated conference calling service like GoToMeeting or RingCentral offer all of these features under your subscription. There are free options that offer these features, too, such as FreeConferenceCall.

In addition, Zoom imposes time limits on group meetings, even on some of its paid plans. The top conference calling services don’t have these limits, and many allow you to store your meetings in the cloud regardless of how long it is.

Zoom is a great, free option for one-on-one meetings. However, a dedicated conference calling service is a must for businesses hosting large and frequent meetings.

Forbes Advisor closely analyzed a list of the top conference calling services on the market to bring you the top five options. Using a data-driven approach, we gathered information on each service and distilled it into a simple five-star system, giving more weight to more important features.

Price is what we looked at first, especially with an influx of free, highly capable conferencing services. We put more weight on the cheaper plans to avoid costly enterprise-focused plans from bringing down the score too much.

Outside of price, we closely considered the features that make a conference call service tick. These include dial-in conferencing, software integrations and video conferencing. We scored each service based on the most important features but also considered unique features from each provider.

Finally, we looked at information that we can’t neatly fit into data. That included ease of use, the overall value and stand-out features like call transcription.

Using this system, we chose the top five services and ordered them based on the star score. The score encapsulates not just the opinion of one person, but also data gathered from the service itself and the community.