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HCL Sametime vs Office 365 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

HCL Sametime
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Virtual Meetings (25th)
Office 365
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
152
Ranking in other categories
Content Collaboration Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Messaging and Collaboration solutions, they serve different purposes. HCL Sametime is designed for Virtual Meetings and holds a mindshare of 1.6%, up 0.5% compared to last year.
Office 365, on the other hand, focuses on Content Collaboration Platforms, holds 8.4% mindshare, up 6.9% since last year.
Virtual Meetings Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HCL Sametime1.6%
Zoom Workplace Business7.5%
Webex5.2%
Other85.7%
Virtual Meetings
Content Collaboration Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Office 3658.4%
Dropbox Business - Enterprise7.9%
Google Workspace7.6%
Other76.1%
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Bogdan Chechlowski - PeerSpot reviewer
Kierownik Biura Informatyki at EIB SA
Stable product, communicate very fast and allows to see who's online in the office or work environment
It was used for communication through text messages, primarily Being able to see who was online and communicate very fast was a good feature.  The security was quite good. However, when we tried to implement it for email at a high level, we had to use another solution, FortiMail Gateway. I view…
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Collaboration has transformed how our teams work and Copilot now drives faster daily decisions
The interface for the security and compliance center could be simplified. It changes frequently, which can make it somewhat difficult for admins to stay up-to-date on where specific settings are located. The compliance center modification or improvement of Office 365 needs to be introduced. The rest of the features feel acceptable to me. The reason it is not a ten is because of the complexity of managing the vast array of admin settings, which requires a specialized IT team. Even though it meets industry standards for decent security compliance such as SOC and HIPAA, the complexity of managing the admin settings needs to improve.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"A very good communication and real-time collaboration software, it is simple, fast, reliable, keeps history and the best feature of all is its intelligence."
"I can view the status and availability of colleagues or team members, which makes it easy to approach them when they are available."
"The security was quite good."
"Audio and video calls provide faster communication than chat."
"This solution saves time and cost in communicating with team members, streamlines tasks in my organization by encouraging us to chat directly with the relevant person, and strengthens professional relationships through increased communication among peers."
"The good thing is they auto-recover and auto-save, so when corruption happens, we can retrieve the latest version templates from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint."
"The integration capabilities of Office 365 are well integrated; everything is linked, and you're able to flow from your processes, making my work easy because it does the tracking for me."
"Yammer and SharePoint’s social collaboration features have transformed our work style and the way we collaborate with the clients."
"The valuable features of Office 365 include easy integration with different platforms, and it's the standard solution because almost all people use this Microsoft Office solution."
"Reduces the manageability from physical server to cloud, with less chance of issues."
"Everything about the solution is useful."
"I like all of the features."
"What I appreciate in the Office 365 world is having Copilot as an assistant that can help automate many things."
 

Cons

"The interface is too colorful and looks like Windows XP."
"Sametime hangs sometimes and therefore needs to get restarted."
"It seems that the software might in the future, support the software telephony exchange but at the current time, it is not doing that and because of that one key feature of real-time communication is missing from it."
"It lacks some features compared to modern solutions. For example, it doesn't allow sending screenshots or other files."
"The webinar should be integrated into Sametime for a larger number of participants."
"I started working a lot on Microsoft Teams and I find it a bit vast. It should be divided out a bit so that someone can use it for basic functionality, like audio, video, and calls. Then, if someone wants more advanced functionality for file sharing and team creation, and so on, they could use a separate app."
"I rate the support of Office 365 a four out of five."
"I have had limited experience contacting Microsoft support, but when I encountered an issue connecting to SharePoint, it took more than a day to resolve."
"Data protection and email security are almost the same for all the organizations, irrespective of their segment (SMB or enterprises), with standard subscription at least basic Data loss prevention and Advance threat protection can be enabled for SMB segments, it is available in enterprise version / Premium versions."
"Regarding their message board support, I think it's extremely poor."
"I haven't tried working with Copilot within Office 365; it's good, but native ChatGPT and Google Gemini are better."
"Sometimes the configurations of the error troubleshooting are pretty problematic and there are a lot of issues that happen even if you follow the step-by-step guides. They can work on fixing this issue. If there are a lot of issues in your Windows or your Office or anything, you restart your PC and it works. They need to get rid of this need."
"The online applications have limited functionality compared to the local applications."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The price of Office 365 is very expensive."
"The pricing is not really high, but one can get the software with the license key for free."
"I would rate the solution 3 out of 5 for the price. I think Microsoft presents a good solution concerning the price."
"The pricing is good for all the features that we receive, e.g., Skype for Business."
"Most of the time, we purchase Microsoft Exchange licenses, which are less expensive and provide only an email platform and 50 gigabytes of email storage for free."
"I think that we pay $9.99 USD per user, monthly."
"The pricing is high and has actually caused us to limit the number of licenses we purchase due to budgeting."
"Good reporting and good value subscriptions for international calls."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business62
Midsize Enterprise31
Large Enterprise70
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Office 365?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Office 365 is that it is moderate.
What needs improvement with Office 365?
Office 365 could be improved or enhanced in some ways. It would be better if it were more simple to find the points, or sometimes there are so many possible configurations that it makes you confuse...
What is your primary use case for Office 365?
Teams and Outlook are important for us, and Teams is central to our operations. I utilize Power Automate for streamlining repetitive tasks in our organization, but not for large tasks. For tasks su...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus Sametime
Microsoft Office 365, Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 F1
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Connect2Cloud, Superior Group, Daifuku Co. Ltd., Seaward, The City of Fort Worth, Christian Brothers Services, Berlitz, Deutsche Notes User Group, Danske Fysioterapeuter, Slumberland, La Vacanza, Rheinmetall AG
Me & the Bees Lemonade
Find out what your peers are saying about Zoom Video Communications, TeamViewer, Microsoft and others in Virtual Meetings. Updated: July 2026.
907,664 professionals have used our research since 2012.