Video conferencing platform that allows muting of non-board?

Apologies if this has already been asked. The search feature on this site still doesn't work for me, and I couldn't find the answer searching the site through Google.

As with most others, our HOA meetings transition to Zoom calls during the course of the pandemic. Now we are back to a hybrid model, with some participants attending in person in our clubhouse and others via Zoom. However, we still have issues with our Zoom participants unmuting themselves to talk over the board during meetings. What we want to do is to keep everyone but the board muted until open forum (if anyone knows a way to do this in Zoom, please let me know!).

There's an add-on for Zoom called 'Webinars' that allows this, but it's almost $700/year (compared to $150/year for a pro account). Before I pitch this to the other board members, are there any other platforms that have worked well for you in this regard?

Try Microsoft TEAMS. Believe can mute people or participants. Easy to use.

Zoom works fine. You need to setup co-hosts. Make the Board Host & Co Host of the meeting. Then set the security settings to disable allowing participants to unmute themselves. Then Board members are able to mute / unmute at will but non-Board members cannot unmute themselves.

Discord probably can, and it is new and innovative - and free. Zoom seems like 20 year old technology, on par with many of the free communication programs of the early 2000s.

Zoom has it's own security risks. It's not exactly the most "safe" thing to use if you want your privacy or risk of viruses.

Part of my paying job is being a Zoom producer. I put on large and small zoom events on a weekly basis. I'm not trying to push zoom, but I have used google meet and webex also and also the webinar add on to zoom. Do not use webex - it's great for giant meetings but hard to use. Google meet is ok (and I work on a strictly google platform for work so I'm really familiar with it) but zoom will do all you need it to do. You DO NOT have buy the zoom webinar add on and frankly it would be a waste for you, but you should upgrade to the paying version of zoom - not the free version which limits your meetings to 20 minutes. You can set it up in advance so everyone is on mute and only the host can unmute them. You can even disable chat if you only want the homeowners to see and not communicate. The hand raising is standard. You can do presentations (like presenting financial documents) and there are also whiteboards for collaboration. And security does not have to be an issue (by the way, I have NEVER had someone "zoom bomb" one of my meetings). I think security issues on zoom are really overblown, especially because in your HOA you probably know everyone anyway. If you want you can have registration so each person gets a unique sign-in. All of this is easy to do as you set up the meeting.

The nice part about zoom is that you don't have an account. For MS teams, they prefer that you have a MS account. I will betray my prejudice here, but I hate MS teams in general although I have never produced a meeting using their presentation platform.

No, you don't need Zoom Webinars. As I explained before, you can do what you need using the basic Zoom. I'm happy to set up a Zoom meeting with you to demonstrate how you can do what you need for $150/year. I'll post my e-mail here if you want to take me up on it.

Thanks for the additional info.

My experiences with MS Teams during the pandemic have been far from stellar. It is the only platform that will sometimes just randomly freeze for a few seconds (both audio and video), even though this is a high performance machine on a fast connection. I end up having to ask people to repeat themselves multiple times each call.

We do have the $150/Pro version of Zoom and if it offers the functionality that we need, then that would frankly be the best situation. It's odd to me that the Zoom sales rep insisted that we upgrade to Zoom Webinars in order to keep residents muted until the open forum.


That is so generous of you to offer. I don't know if you posted your email, but I'm not able to see it. I'll try to see if I can find a way to direct message you through this site.

So, MichaelT21 is not a current board president?