Gather Town vs SoWork: The Best Virtual Meeting App

In this article we compare SoWork and Gather Town. We’ll cover everything you need to know to pick the perfect virtual workplace for your remote team.

🔑 Key Takeaways

What Other Teams Say

Feature Overview

Spontaneous Connections

A life-like digital work environment that turns the endless notifications and faceless video tile reputation of remote work into a human experience.

This is at the center of both Gather Town and SoWork. Both apps give your remote team a shared place. Where you feel like you're one team, working beside each other, no matter where in the world you actually are.

You’ll see who’s in the office. Be able to walk up to available teammates for a video chat. Grab someone after a meeting to make progress on a project, or join in on a conversation you’d never have known about if it had happened in Slack or on Zoom.

The presence and 'water cooler' moments that a virtual office gives your remote team is transformative.

You’ll unlock engagement, collaboration, and productivity in a way that traditional chat apps and video conferencing tools just can’t.

So where do SoWork and Gather Town differ?

The Gather team originally created Gather Town during the pandemic for events and social gatherings (get it, ‘gather’?!). When socials and events returned to in-person but remote work persisted, they pivoted the product to focus on work.

If you look at the product through this lens, you’ll see the social-first focus. From the items available to customize your office, to the types of between-meeting connections they encourage. The focus to-date has largely been around socializing at work. And for remote teams, this is an important part of the virtual workplace experience.

SoWork is different.

SoWork was originally created for remote work. Socialization is a core part of the SoWork virtual office experience, but it’s woven into the experience from a work-first perspective. Think: deep work zones where teammates can work beside each other. Interview zones so existing employees can wave ‘hello’ to a new hire. Collaborative work zones with pomodoro timers where teammates can crush work together and play between sprints. Analytics that encourage team connections to increase team performance.

So basically, socialization in SoWork has a purpose: to engage employees, bond teams, and ultimately drive high performing work.

AI and Data-Powered Tools

Remote teams using a virtual workplace have a major advantage. Their office is digital. It can use technology to level-up the team in ways the physical office never can. Gather data, generate insights, automate workflows...the digital office is the future of work.

But not every virtual office takes advantage of technology to supercharge your remote team.

Where do SoWork and Gather Town stand?

To-date, Gather Town hasn't focused here. They've been prioritizing socialization and customizations. We'll see where they go next!

SoWork was the first ‘smart’ virtual office on the market.

They’ve been using innovative AI and advanced work features for a while and they continue to develop this area.

With SoWork, you’ll get:

• Actionable insights that save your remote team a lot of time.
• Automated meeting transcripts and summaries with action items. Integrated with your other tools and housed in a single location so the entire team can access meeting documents easily.
• Meeting zones with ‘smart’ functionality, so when you walk in you have everything you need to accomplish a task.
• An AI-powered office assistant that retrieves information and gives employees personalized insights (in beta).
• And more. The team adds new features every week.
  
  

Additional Meeting Tools

Gather Town offers basic meeting functionalities. SoWork provides advanced tools to enhance your remote team's productivity.

Actionable Insights

Both apps offer analytics to Premium customers. They give your team insights into office engagement, meeting attendance, and team cohesion.

Analytics help you answer questions like:

• Is our virtual office being used as expected?
• Are any employees too disconnected from the rest of the team?
• Is anyone over or underworking?
• Which teams are collaborating and which aren't?
• And more!

Mobile App

Whatever virtual workplace you choose, make sure they have a mobile app!

If your team can’t take certain calls in the office because someone’s on-the-go, everyone will have to switch to whatever video conferencing tool you used before. Then you’ll have more than one meeting tool. And this will impact the team truly adopting your office as the place to work from.

The good news? Both SoWork and Gather Town have mobile apps.

SoWork and Gather Town’s mobile apps allow you to:

• Log into your office
• See who’s online and available
• Start a meeting with someone
• See what meetings are taking place and join in

SoWork’s mobile app is more integrated with the office. It also has:

• The latest office activity (e.g. Jesse gave Vinay an award for completing a big project). This helps mobile teammates feel connected to office happenings
• AI meeting summaries, so teammates can easily catch up on-the-go
• Chat

Integrations

Your virtual office needs to fit into your existing workflows. And both Gather Town and SoWork have integrations to do that.

Calendar

• Gather Town has an in-app calendar that is separate from your Google Calendar. You need to add events to it in order for them to show up in your office and receive alerts. What’s on your Google Calendar is not reflected in your Gather Town Office.
  
• SoWork integrates directly with your calendar (Google or Outlook) and pulls your events into the office experience. It uses your calendar information to help you work during the day. Like showing you only your next 2 calendar events so you can focus. Or giving you an alert 10 minutes before a new meeting is starting so you can wind down what you’re doing.

Both apps allow you to:

• Change the location of existing calendar events to your new office. This helps your team switch over from your old meeting tool to your new one.
• Create new meetings from inside the office. These meetings can have links where attendees arrive at specific zones, or at your desk.

Whiteboards

Both apps have in-office whiteboards that are integrated to a whiteboarding app.

• SoWork has Miro and Eraser whiteboards
• Gather Town only has Eraser

Slack

SoWork and Gather Town have Slack integrations. They both:

• Alert Slack channels of meetings taking place in your office

But SoWork also has the ability to:

• Send AI meeting summaries to Slack channels after a meeting
• Transfer Slack history to SoWork chat to replace chat tools

Google Drive

SoWork integrates with Google Drive, allowing you to add an item in the office that teammates can walk up to and access files.

Gather Town does not currently integrate with Google Drive.

All your other tools

SoWork has Zapier integrations, so you can connect events in SoWork to any tool you want.

These are the events you can currently integrate to other tools:

• AI meeting summaries (send to Notion, Slack, etc)
• AI-generated meeting action items (send to Asana, Jiro, etc)
• Meeting recordings (send to Google Drive, email, etc)

You can dig into SoWork's Zapier integrations here. They’re actively working on adding more - send them a live chat with your requests!

Gather Town does not offer Zapier integrations.

Customization Overview

If your remote team lives in video conferencing apps (like Zoom) or chat tools (like Slack), employees are just dots or tiles on a screen. And culture is reduced to gifs, emojis, and virtual backgrounds. Yikes.

A virtual office is completely different.

SoWork and Gather Town offer a skeuomorphic experience.

Team members exist as avatars navigating a customizable digital space. And that space isn’t just for meetings. It’s for all the in-between moments, too. Just like the physical office.

The realism, natural interactions, visibility and spontaneity all come together to create a way more engaging remote work experience.

The big customization difference between SoWork and Gather Town is in the style of the art.

Why do we care about art in a remote workplace? Art affects realism. And realism in remote work has a surprisingly big impact on engagement.

Gather Town is more of a pixelated, old-school video game.

SoWork is immersive and life-like.

With more realistic art, SoWork is able to display items of cultural significance - team pictures, images of company milestones - in a way that Gather Town can't.

Teammates in SoWork can leave gifts, celebrate, and express their company pride in ways that just aren't possible in other products, SoWork makes virtual experiences feel like in-person human moments.

Office Customization

Gather Town and SoWork offices are fully customizable. Both apps have:

• Themed map templates that your remote team can move into and adapt as desired
• Blank maps if you prefer to start from scratch
• The ability to knock down walls and restructure the office
• Tons of furniture options
• Themed items, so you can create an office vibe that represents your culture
• Signs, labels, meeting zones. To organize the office around a purpose.
• Interactive objects, like whiteboards, notice boards, integrations
• And so much more

Where do SoWork and Gather Town differ?

Gather Town focuses on having a wide variety of mapmaking functionality.

• They have a lot of event options because of their prior event focus
• They have an API that can be used to create your own office objects, like an item that looks like your pet.

SoWork also offers a lot of variety and pets, but focuses more on what remote teams need to build a strong, high-performing culture. Things like:

• Meeting zones with thoughtful coworking functionality, like pomodoro zones.
• Extensive desk customization, so employees really get engaged.
• Realistic art paired with items like team photos, logos, and awards to really make the digital office feel real.

Customizing Desks

In remote work, a designated, personalized work spot is really powerful.

• Employees have a place to go every day.
• Employees have a personal slice of the office where they can express themselves and be a part of the culture
• You know where to find someone in-between scheduled meetings.
• You get a place to engage with each other outside of meetings. Somewhere to decorate for birthdays or leave a congratulation gesture after a big goal is accomplished.

In Gather Town, desks are like cubicles.

• They're pre-made and organized in groups beside each other.
• Each desk is the same size, and has the same built-in functionality. Customization is very limited.
• You can adjust the desk, chair, rug, and items on the desk.
• Once you claim a desk, you can easily return to it when you're elsewhere in the office.
• You can allocate desks for other teammates

SoWork is the opposite.

• Each teammate gets a workspot pin. The pin has all the functionality (leave a note, ring, teleport to, assign to someone, etc).
• Employees then create a customized work area around their pin. There are no limitations.
• Desks are optional, and many teammates opt for beach chairs, bean bags, or swings instead.
• Pre-made templates available for easy customizing.
• New teammates get to decorate their office on their first day, and clear it out on their last.

Character Customization

In the virtual office, your character represents... you! So both Gather Town and SoWork allow you to customize how you look.

Gather Town and SoWork officer fun, diverse options.

Maybe you want to be a pirate? Or batman with a skateboard?

SoWork's art style makes everything look more real.

This impacts how connected someone feels to their character. Does it really represent them? This level of self-expression is hard to do remotely and critical for employee engagement and team performance.

SoWork's realistic art means you can make company-branded clothing.

There's a reason we give teammates swag. We know how company-branded clothing drives a feeling of pride and connectedness to the team.

Engagement & Bonding

Both Gather Town and SoWork focus on team engagement and bonding.

Again, we see their origins influencing how they do this.

Gather Town's history of focusing on socials and events comes through - team engagement and bonding centers around games, play, and space customization.

They do have a few office-specific capabilities, like the ability to leave a note on a teammate's desk for their birthday.

SoWork approaches engagement and bonding through the lens of team performance.

• Teammates can engage in real-time by chatting above their head, without breaking deep work.
• Meetings can be celebrated using emojis, without interrupting the flow.
• Teammates can give each other gifts to recognize their work achievements or cultural impact.

So both products encourage team engagement and bonding.

But Gather Town focuses on fun and social for the sake of... fun and social.

While SoWork integrates play and bonding into work to drive team performance.

Support

SoWork prioritizes fast, high touch customer support.

They are available on all common channels, usually respond in minutes, most days of the week. They take customer feedback seriously, and dedicate solid roadmap space to what their customers ask for.

SoWork is available in unconventional ways, too.

Like you can walk straight into their full-time office and talk to the founders.

Gather Town customer support channels are slower and more traditional.

You need to fill out a form or sign up for a meeting with sales to speak to someone on the team.

Both products have extensive help center sites, where how-to guides cover almost every feature in their digital offices.

Onboarding

A big question on leadership's mind when adding 'virtual office' to the tech stack is: how do I move my team in?

SoWork and Gather Town have in-app tutorials.

SoWork also has themed checklists so you can discover the features you need most.

After completing the in-app tutorial, you'll have access to a culture checklist and a productivity checklist. Each checklist helps you find the latest and greatest features for those categories.

SoWork can come to your office, often on very short notice.

Need help finding a feature? Want your team to have a live demo? After ideas for setting up your new office? Reach out to the SoWork team using their in-app live chat and you can get someone (often a founder) to swing by your office.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, Gather Town vs SoWork comes down to the product priorities.

The best product for you depends on your remote team's unique needs. Make sure you check out our SoWork vs Kumospace article if you'd like to see another comparison!