Sonacove Meets vs Whereby for Online Teaching (2026)
Whereby and Sonacove Meets answer the first question a teacher asks in almost the same way. A permanent room URL, a browser, nothing to install and no account for the student on the other end. That makes this an unusual comparison, because the thing most video tools argue about is already settled, and the decision moves to what you can actually do once the class is in the room.
Sonacove Meets vs Whereby: which is better for online teaching?
Sonacove Meets is the better fit when the lesson itself needs tooling: a poll to check whether a concept landed, a whiteboard you can draw on without sending everyone to a second product, and breakout rooms for pair work. Whereby is the better fit when you need up to 100 attendees on one cheap licence, when you want a free tier for one-to-one tutoring, or when you want to put video inside your own booking site. Join friction does not separate them, so ignore it and compare the middle of the lesson instead.
The two products were built for adjacent but different buyers. Whereby sells to consultants, coaches, small teams and developers, and its feature set reads that way: excellent room mechanics, strong recording, chat with reactions, and a lock-and-knock model that handles a client arriving early. Sonacove Meets is built for the tutor and the small academy, where the person choosing the tool is the person who has to notice, at minute eighteen, that half the class has stopped following.
That difference shows up in exactly two places, and both are worth more than they sound: polls and the whiteboard.
How do students join each one?
Both are one link and a browser. Whereby states plainly that there is “no app or software download required” and that all calls happen in the browser using WebRTC (Whereby features), and Sonacove guests open the room link, type a display name and join with no account. Nothing in this row favours either product.
There is a small structural difference in how the roles work. Whereby gives the host a separate host room URL that carries elevated privileges, while guests open the plain room URL and get only the features the host has enabled for them, knocking to get into a locked room (Whereby user roles and privileges). Sonacove uses a waiting room the moderator admits people from, and moderator rights are granted to a person in the meeting rather than carried by a second link.
In Sonacove the room name is the URL, which has one practical consequence worth acting on. Name rooms after the class rather than the date, because “algebra-year-9” survives a whole year and “algebra-jan-14” is dead by the second lesson. The same habit applies to a Whereby room URL, and it matters more there, because the Pro plan gives you three room URLs in total.
Can you run a comprehension check mid-lesson in Whereby?
Not with a built-in poll. Whereby’s published feature list covers chat, reactions, raise hand, breakout rooms, recording, screen share and backgrounds, and it does not list polls at all (Whereby features). Sonacove Meets includes polls on both plans, which is the single biggest functional gap between these two products for a teacher.
This is not a checkbox argument. A poll is the only tool an online teacher has that answers the question a physical classroom answers for free, which is whether the thing you just explained actually landed. Faces in a grid of small tiles do not tell you that, and asking “does everyone understand?” reliably returns silence from the students who do not.
The pattern that earns its keep is the same question twice: ask it before you teach the concept, teach, then ask it again. The gap between the two result sets is the only honest measurement of the last fifteen minutes you are going to get. There is more on the mechanics in our guide to using polls in online teaching.
A constraint we would rather you heard from us: Sonacove poll votes are attributed, not anonymous. Voter avatars appear under each option and the post-meeting record lists who voted for what. That is useful for spotting the one student who needs a follow-up, and it is a problem if you ask “did you understand this?”, because nobody wants their name under “no”. Word poll questions about the material rather than about the student, and the attribution stops working against you.
Without polls, the Whereby equivalent is a chat question and a manual count, or a reaction. Both work. Neither gives you a distribution you can look at in three seconds while still talking.
What is the difference between the two whiteboards?
Whereby’s whiteboard is an embedded Miro board rather than a native drawing surface: the feature list describes it as “use embedded Miro boards for visual collaboration” (Whereby features). Sonacove has a whiteboard built into the meeting, opened from the toolbar with nothing else to sign up for. The trade is real in both directions, and the direction that favours Whereby is persistence.
An embedded Miro board is a Miro board. It keeps whatever you drew on it, so a maths tutor can build up a worked example across four lessons and it will still be there in week five. It also means a second product in the loop, potentially a second subscription, and a student who may hit a Miro account prompt at the worst possible moment.
Sonacove’s board goes the other way. It opens instantly with no third party involved, it is there for the whole meeting, and it lives for the meeting only. Board content does not persist across sessions, which is a genuine limitation rather than a design flourish, and it means one habit is not optional: export the board before you end the call, every time, if the drawing is worth keeping. We would rather write that down than let a teacher discover it in week three.
- Export the whiteboard before ending the lesson, not after
- Name the room after the class, because the name is the URL
- Decide before the lesson which single poll question you will ask twice
- Check the attendee cap against your largest group, not your average one
For when a board beats a shared screen at all, see choosing an online whiteboard for teaching.
How do Sonacove Meets and Whereby compare feature by feature?
The overlap is wide and the gaps are narrow but sharp. Whereby leads on attendee numbers, recording generosity and the option to embed video in your own product, and Sonacove leads on in-lesson teaching tools. Every Whereby row below comes from Whereby’s own pages, linked underneath.
| Sonacove Meets | Whereby Meetings | |
|---|---|---|
| Guest account required to join | No | No |
| Guest install required | No, browser only | No, browser only |
| Free tier | None | Yes: 1 host, 4 attendees, 30 minutes, 1 room URL, no recording |
| Attendees per meeting | Up to 20 guests | 100 on Pro, 200 on Business |
| Price | Individual €8.99 / user / month, Organization €15.99 / user / month | Pro $10.99 / month, Business $13.99 / host / month with a 3 host minimum |
| Rooms | Room name is the URL | 1 on Free, 3 on Pro, unlimited on Business |
| Polls | Yes, votes attributed to the voter | Not listed on the features page |
| Whiteboard | Yes, built in | Yes, via an embedded Miro board |
| Breakout rooms | Yes | Yes |
| Chat, including private messages | Yes | Yes, with reactions, message deletion and transcript download |
| Raise hand | Yes | Yes |
| Recording | Yes | Not on Free, unlimited on Pro, included on Business |
| Waiting room or lock | Waiting room with per-person admit | Lockable room with knocking |
| Per-participant moderation | Yes, including granting moderator rights | Yes: remove, mute and spotlight participants, delete their chat and files |
| Background blur | Yes | Yes |
| Recurring class scheduling | Yes, by day of week with an explicit timezone | Not listed on the features page |
| Phone dial-in | No | Not listed on the features page |
| LMS integration | No | No, though Embedded can put video inside your own product |
| Host apps | Browser, with optional desktop and mobile apps | Browser |
As of September 2026. Whereby rows are sourced from the Whereby Meetings pricing page, the Whereby features page, the Whereby user roles documentation and the Whereby Embedded pricing page. Vendor limits move, so check any row you are about to spend money on.
Two rows deserve a second look before you decide. “Not listed on the features page” is exactly what it says: Whereby publishes a long feature list and these items are absent from it, which is not the same as a vendor confirming the feature does not exist. And the Business price is per host with a minimum, which the next section unpacks.
What does each one cost for a tutor or a small school?
Sonacove Meets is €8.99 per user per month on the Individual plan and €15.99 per user per month on the Organization plan, with no free tier. Whereby Meetings is free for 1 host with 4 attendees and a 30 minute cap, $10.99 a month for Pro and $13.99 per host a month for Business, all excluding VAT (Whereby Meetings pricing). Our prices are in euro and Whereby’s are in US dollars, so read the headline figures as close rather than directly comparable.
The Business number is the one that misleads. Business carries a three host minimum, so the real entry price is 3 × $13.99, which is $41.97 a month before anyone uses a second seat. A solo tutor who wants the Business ceiling of 200 attendees and unlimited room URLs is buying two licences they will never log into. Pro, at $10.99 for 100 attendees and unlimited recording, is the plan that actually competes.
There is a second Whereby product that no comparison should skip. Whereby Embedded is a video API billed by usage rather than seats, starting at $0 for up to 2,000 participant minutes a month and $9.99 a month on Build with $0.004 per participant minute after the included allowance (Whereby Embedded pricing). A participant minute is one person for one minute, so a 60 minute lesson with 10 students is 600 of them, and the free allowance is roughly three such lessons a month. If your school runs its own booking portal and wants lessons to happen inside it, Sonacove has no answer to that at all.
Where is Whereby the better choice?
Whereby wins on the free tier, the attendee ceiling per pound spent, board persistence and the embedding path. If you recognise your situation here, buy Whereby, and a comparison page that cannot say so is an advert.
You teach one-to-one and you want to pay nothing. Whereby’s free plan gives you a permanent room URL, 4 attendees and 30 minutes. For a half hour conversation lesson with a single student that is a working product at zero cost, and Sonacove has no free tier of any kind. The cap bites when a lesson runs long or a parent joins, but plenty of tutoring genuinely fits inside it.
Your groups run over 20 people. Sonacove allows up to 20 guests per meeting, full stop. Whereby Pro carries 100 attendees for $10.99 a month and Business carries 200. A class of 28, a revision session open to a whole year group, or a parents evening is not a Sonacove use case today, and no amount of teaching features compensates for people who cannot get in.
You want the board to still be there next week. An embedded Miro board keeps its content between sessions. Ours does not. For a tutor building one long worked diagram across a term, that difference outweighs the convenience of a board that opens in one click.
You need video inside your own product. Whereby Embedded is an iframe or web component with per-participant-minute billing, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a company this size to offer, and it is priced so a small operation can afford it. If your students already log into your platform and you do not want to send them elsewhere, that is a decisive advantage.
You record everything. Whereby describes recording as unlimited on Pro at $10.99, with cloud and local recording plus recording transcriptions. That is a lot of recording for the money.
Which one should you choose?
Choose Sonacove Meets if you teach groups of 20 or fewer and you want polls and a built-in whiteboard in the lesson rather than alongside it, and if a paid tool with the teaching features included at both price points is what you are after. Choose Whereby if your groups are larger than 20, if a free tier for one-to-one work matters, if you want a persistent shared board, or if you are embedding video in software you already run. Choose Whereby Pro over Business unless you genuinely have three hosts, because the minimum makes the cheaper-looking tier the expensive one.
If you are undecided, run one real lesson in each with your actual students and count how many times you wanted to ask the room a question and could not. That number decides it faster than any feature table, including this one.