Best Alternative to Zoom Breakout Rooms

Has this ever happened to you? 

You’re about to be sent into one of many Zoom breakout rooms and the host is taking forever to sort everyone into a room? Been there! 

With Altar Live, we’ve made it easy, efficient, and effective so you can ditch your Zoom account and use Altar for all your video conferencing needs!

Meet Altar Live

Altar Live is an online church platform designed for faith communities to stream and host interactive and engaging events and services. Our simple, intuitive platform gathers your people together online where they can worship together in watch parties, freely socialize at virtual tables together, and find private places to pray with each other. 

Altar Live is based around 3 major components: Events, Meetings, and Rooms.

Meetings in Altar Live allow you to host video-conferencing sessions with UP to 50 participants. It's great for small groups, Bible studies, prayer meetings, councils, staff meetings, and even classroom study! 

However, you will also now see on your Community Dashboard an option to create a Personal Meeting Rooms, the best alternative to Zoom breakout rooms. 

Personal Meeting Rooms are an extremely useful tool in Altar Live. They are great for a virtual office, daily prayer meetings, and other meeting needs that are static each time. Each Personal Meeting Room has capacity for up to 50 people at a time and can be named so you will be able to direct people to the right room.

While Zoom breakout rooms may be the most familiar, we're here to show you how easy it is to create a Personal Meeting Room on Altar Live. 

Let's get started! 

Create Your Own Room

First, log in to your Community Dashboard and click Add New Room. You are now presented with the 3 steps you need to create your meeting First, enter a name. Then, a brief description. If you'd like, you can also select a thumbnail, which will be visible on the main screen of your meeting when your participants log in.

You can also make this event a recurring event on a daily, weekly, or custom schedule. Now choose the maximum number of people that can join your meeting. For convenience, you can also choose to have your participants start with their cameras and their microphones either on or off by default. Participants can still turn their own cameras and microphones on or off during the meeting, so choosing this option just makes entrance to a meeting less confusing.

Click next to assign Hosts. Hosts have the ability to end meetings, as well as remove participants from the meeting.

• Hosts also have controls over all participant mics & cameras
• and they can move all participants back and forth from Meetings to the Lobby for breakout groups

If you forget to assign someone as a host in this step, not to worry! You can do so once the meeting has started.

Clicking next will give you options to set permissions on who can join your event.

Selecting Anyone allows anyone with a link to join the service.

Selecting All Members makes your event private and only allows those who have created an account with your community in Altar Live.

Choosing Selected Members only allows those which you have selected beforehand to be in the meeting. This is useful for small group gatherings, Bible studies, and any general meetings.

Now that your event is ready to go, you can either save it as a draft to come back to later, or publish the event.

Your meeting room has been successfully created! On your community dashboard, you can now see your created meeting room. By clicking the three dots menu next to the name, you can now edit the room, copy the room URL to share with those that will be meeting in it, or delete the room.

Final Thoughts

With Altar Live, you won’t have to deal with the struggle of Zoom breakout rooms. With a church platform like Altar Live, anyone can easily create an engaging online church service that has the ability to bring people together regardless of location. The Altar Live team is honored to be able to provide video conferencing software, consulting & training for churches, and reach every person on the other side of the screen and create community online.