Review Summary – Meeting Burner is a lightweight online meeting application. It’s still in “beta”, but it shows some promise as an online meeting service.
Pros – Easy to use. Beautiful user interface. Minimal time and effort required to setup and run. You can’t beat the price (free – during beta).
Cons – Not ready for primetime – still in active beta. Choppy audio. No mobile applications. Meeting attendees get spammed to join after the meeting ends.
Meeting Burner Ratings
| Category | Score | Why |
| Overall Rating: |  |
Above average in most categories, but it’s missing key features, and is still in active beta. |
| Usability: |  |
A beautiful user interface that doesn’t require an instruction manual. |
| Audio quality: |  |
The audio was a bit choppy in our tests. |
| Video quality: |  |
You can view the video feed of the presenter, but not other meeting attendees. |
| Collaboration features: | |
You can share your desktop with ease, but you can’t take control of meeting attendees desktops. |
| Presentation features: |  |
Meeting Burner makes it easy to share your desktop or a specific application. |
| Mobile features: |  |
There’s currently no native mobile applications available for Meeting Burner. |
What We Like About Meeting Burner
The user interface – The uncluttered and simple user interface is easy to figure out. In fact, their website claims that “grandma can figure it out”. Considering there’s nothing to download and install for meeting attendees, they’re probably right.
The price – During the beta launch, Meeting Burner is free. I’m sure this will change when they figure out their business model. What’s interesting is that there’s a place to put credit card and billing information, but it’s not clear what you would be billed for. Will they support a free and paid version in the future? Is this for additional bandwidth or capacity? We looked all over the site, but couldn’t find the answer.
Meeting recordings – We really like Meeting Burner’s recording features. All of the recordings are stored in the cloud. This saves precious hard drive space, and makes it easy for everybody to download the meeting at a later time. There’s also tools to export the recording to other formats (e.g. YouTube).
Meeting configuration – The meeting setup screen gives you control over the layout and functionality of your meetings. You can choose to enable or disable features for your account, or for a particular meeting profile.
What We Don’t Like About Meeting Burner
They can see you, but you can’t see them – You can see the meeting organizer’s webcam, but there’s no way to view other attendees. If video conferencing is important to you, we recommend GoToMeeting’s HD Faces.
No mobile applications – They’ve focused all of their efforts on their web application. This is a nice start, but to be a viable online meeting platform they’ll need to launch native apps on iOS and Android.
No control granting – Meeting organizers can share their screen, but attendees cannot. This is limiting, especially when you’re doing a product demo. For example, GoToMeeting has remote support and control granting, so you can easily view or control a meeting attendees screen.
Beta – If you’re on a shoestring budget, Meeting Burner is a nice alternative to some of the paid online meeting services. But if you’re meetings are mission critical, you need the reliability and scalability of an established vendor like GoToMeeting or WebEx.
Meeting Burner Features
| Pricing: | Free (while in beta) |
| Mobile Clients: | No |
| Free Trial: | Yes |
| Meeting Capacity: | Up to 50 |
| Desktop Sharing: | Yes – but only for the meeting organizer |
| Desktop Recording: | Yes – hosted in the cloud |
| VOIP: | Yes, but we weren’t impressed with the quality. |
| Control Granting: | No |
| Video Conferencing: | Organizer only, no video for attendees |
| Chat: | Yes – only group chat, no private chat |
| Annotation Tools: | No |
Our Conclusion About Meeting Burner
Our initial impressions with Meeting Burner were mostly positive. In some regards, it’s clear that it’s a beta product, but other aspects of the service are as good (if not better) than some of the established online meeting services.
Additional Resources
Before committing to an online meeting service, make sure you read the reviews for our top picks. You can also compare our top picks side by side. It’s worth noting, that most of the vendors we review on this site offer free trials.
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Meeting Burner Review Details
Reviewed by: 
Jeremy Palmer
Reviewed on: November 2011