04 Screen Share and Whiteboard
Share one window, not your whole desktop.
Screen sharing with a whiteboard, for teams who show work on a call instead of describing it. Pick a single window and nothing else leaves your machine. Draw over what is on screen. Hand the mouse to a colleague under rules your admin sets. The board stays after everyone hangs up.
What it costs
Part of Meetings.
Screen sharing and the whiteboard are included with Meetings. Meetings is priced per host, per month. No separate whiteboard seat, no per-board fee, no cap on how many boards a workspace keeps.
The only thing that adds a line to your bill is recording the share. A recorded screen share is stored and billed per GB of retained storage, the same as any other recording. One hour of 1080p screen share is roughly 600 MB, and it is usually less because a slide that does not move compresses hard.
- Price basis
- Included with Meetings (per host, per month)
- Share modes
- One window, one screen, one browser tab, or the whiteboard canvas
- Upload cost
- 0.5–1.5 Mbps on the sharer, depending on how much changes
- Annotation
- Pen, highlighter, arrow, text box. Any participant the host allows.
- Remote control
- Off until the sharer grants it. Scoped to the shared window.
- Board export
- PNG or PDF, or post the live board into a chat channel
How sharing behaves
What leaves your machine, and what does not.
Window-level sharing
The default is a single window. Your inbox notification, the half-written message to a colleague, the second monitor with payroll open: none of it is in the stream. When you share a window and then drag another window on top of it, the covering window is not transmitted. The participants see the window you chose, nothing in front of it.
Whole-screen sharing exists for the times you need to show an installer or a system dialog. An admin can turn whole-screen sharing off for the workspace and leave only window and tab sharing, which is what we recommend for teams that handle client data.
Annotation over the share
Anyone the host permits can draw on top of the shared window. Pen, highlighter, straight arrow, a text box when a scribble will not do. Marks carry the drawer's name in a small label so three people on the same drawing do not turn into one argument about whose red line that is.
Annotations clear when the share stops unless somebody saves the frame. Saving takes a flat image of the window plus the marks and drops it into the meeting chat.
The whiteboard canvas
The board is not a share. It is a surface in the workspace that a meeting can open. Freehand, shapes, sticky notes, straight connectors, an image dragged in from the desktop. Pan and zoom are per person, so one participant can work in a corner while another reads the whole board.
A board opened in a call stays when the call ends. It keeps its name and its members, it can be reopened in the next meeting, and it can be posted into a channel so the people who missed the call can scroll it. Version history keeps the last 30 days of edits so an accidental erase is recoverable.
Stylus and touch
On a tablet the board takes pressure from a stylus and treats a finger as pan, not pen, so resting a palm on the glass does not leave a mark. On a laptop trackpad the pen is deliberately smoothed; drawing a straight line with a trackpad is a bad time for everyone and the smoothing makes it survivable.
Remote control
Four rules before anyone touches your mouse.
Handing control of a machine over a video call is the feature most likely to be misused, so it is the one with the tightest rules. We would rather a support call take two extra minutes than have a contractor land on a desktop nobody meant to open.
An admin can disable remote control for the whole workspace from the admin console, or allow it only between members of the same workspace and never for guests. Every grant is written to the audit log with the two names, the meeting and the timestamp.
The bandwidth question
A share costs upload.
Most calls fail on the upload side. Your attendees can hear you fine; you cannot hear them. Add a screen share and the person doing the sharing pays for it.
A screen share takes between 0.5 and 1.5 Mbps on the sharer's upload. A static slide or a code editor with occasional typing sits near 0.5. A spreadsheet being scrolled, a map being dragged, a video played through the share: 1.5 and sometimes beyond, at which point we throttle the frame rate rather than let your voice break up.
That sits on top of the video you are already sending. A 720p tile needs about 1.2 Mbps each way. Ask for 1080p and that becomes 3. Plan for the person on hotel wifi. A presenter on 1080p video who also shares a scrolling spreadsheet is asking roughly 4.5 Mbps of a home connection that may have 5 Mbps up on a good day with nobody else at home.
The practical answer is dull and it works: the person sharing turns their camera to 720p or off. Nobody is looking at the presenter's face while a drawing is on screen. The configurator works the worst case out for your actual numbers.
When upload runs short during a share, Vebex drops the sharer's own camera first, then the share frame rate, then the share resolution. Audio is the last thing to go. The person on the weak link still hears the room and still sees the drawing, just at eight frames a second instead of fifteen.
Someone shares a full 4K monitor from a dock while on a 2 Mbps upload, then blames the platform when text goes soft. Share the window, not the 4K desktop. If the whole screen genuinely must be shared, set the monitor to 1080p for the duration.
Before you ask
Questions we get about sharing.
How much bandwidth does screen sharing use?
Between 0.5 and 1.5 Mbps on the sharer's upload, depending on how much of the screen changes. A static slide sits near the bottom of that range; a scrolling spreadsheet or a video sits at the top.
Can someone take control of my machine without me noticing?
No. Control is requested, granted by the sharer, scoped to the shared window only, and ended by any keypress on the sharer's own keyboard. Admins can disable remote control for the whole workspace.
Does the whiteboard survive the meeting?
Yes. A board belongs to the workspace, not to the call. It stays editable afterwards and can be posted into a chat channel or exported as PNG or PDF. Version history covers the last 30 days.
Is screen sharing charged separately?
No. Screen sharing and the whiteboard are included with Meetings, which is priced per host per month. Only a recording of the share adds a storage line.
Who is this not for?
Design teams who want a board as their permanent working surface, with components, libraries and a plugin ecosystem. Ours is a meeting whiteboard. It is good for a floor plan, a flow and a rough layout drawn while people watch, and it is not trying to replace a dedicated design tool.
Ask for a proposal
Tell us what you show.
What gets shared on a typical call, whether remote control is allowed at all, and how many people host. A person replies within one working day.