Mumble vs TS3

[aefvindicator]

My clan currently employs Ventrilo as our primary VoIP solution, however, TF2 teams have been employing Mumble as it is the accepted community standard, and is using it to great effect. Alternatively, TeamSpeak3 is used by our Armed Assault teams, likewise for community connectivity. We are currently engaged in quite vigourous discussion on which out of Mumble and TS3 is going to become the new primary solution for us, as our Ventrilo contract is coming up for renewal and we are weighing up the pros and cons of continuing with Ventrilo or moving to a free alternative in TS3 or Mumble. I see that latency is a focus for the devs of Mumble. However the enhanced user interface features and the administrative functions of TS3 have our attention also. Does anyone have a link to an unbiased comparision between the two we can use as a basis for discussion? Also, what sort of clear benefits have people found TS3 posesses over Mumble? Note that we have been looking at Ventrilo as the 'normal' in comparing TS3 and Mumble. At minimum we want our new solution to be able to do what ventrilo has for us, but better.

[hacst]

I hope you get the unbiased comparisons/opinions you are searching in here (this being a Mumble forum which mostly attracts people using Mumble :D ).

Here you have my stance on this question, obviously you should take it with a grain of salt. I rarely have used TS3 and Vent and also I am a Mumble developer. Anyway, here it comes:

While with TS2 and Vent it's pretty clear that Mumble offers the superior solution, especially in latency the difference was mind boggling already in 1.1.X times. With TS3 it's a much closer call. As far as we can tell our latency is still lower, we aren't talking about differences of half a second any more though and you'll have to see for yourself if it makes a difference for your gameplay.

We largely employ the same codecs for high quality transmissions, being Speex and CELT (ts3 offers more but they aren't really higher quality. Also ts3 iirc offers stereo transmission support but for a VoIP tool that's not really useful imho, no one has a stereo microphone), so differences in audio quality mainly come from audio pre-/postprocessing the tools do. Mumble offers noise suppression, automatic gain control and real multi channel echo cancellation as provided by the SpeexDSP library. I'm not sure as to what's in TS3 but in the end it comes down to: Setup both tools and see for yourself.

On the management side the 1.1.X branch of Mumble wasn't that great. Not that it didn't offer the functionality but we relied on 3rd parties to provide administration interfaces for our server. If I'm not mistaken TS3 ships an interface with their server and you can do a lot of stuff from the client. With 1.2.X we started integrating basic admin functionality in our client, no, it doesn't allow your to configure every aspect of a server but it is enough to manage it (for virtual server management etc. you still want to use a 3rd party interface, they improved a lot^^). From what I've seen their rights management is more granular than ours, some in our community say it's a monster :roll: , but I don't know enough about it to do a real comparison. Again: Try for yourself ;-)

In terms of features TS3 has some things we don't: Multi server support, profiles, plugins and file transfer come to mind. Mumble on the other hand has some stuff TS3 does not have (afaik): Native (with 1.2.3 interactive) overlay support, encrypted voice transmission (afaik ts3 only encrypts their control channel) and positional audio plugins for a lot of games come to mind. But repeating myself once again: You'll have to try for yourself to find out which features actually mean something to you and your clan.

Then there's licensing. That one is pretty simple for Mumble: Run or rent as many servers with as many slots as you want. We don't care. Take & Change our code, just stick to the BSD licensing (which basically means do what you want but don't remove our names and the license from it). For TS3 I refer you to their FAQ on licensing (keep in mind that non-profit also generally means no ads, more info can again be found in their faq).

Last but not least there's support and community: I like to think we have a great community. Obviously it is smaller than the one of TS3 but if you visit us on IRC you'll pretty much get help instantly at all times. A lot of times one of us developers is around to help out too (dunno if the TS3 devs are that responsive). We also have open ears for feature suggestion so if you have a great Idea we like and we find the time to implement it we will :D Oh, and of course we are open source: We get a lot of contributions by people not (yet) in our core team and you (or one of your clanmates) can also contribute if you see an issue anywhere you want to resolved asap.

In the end you'll have to decide on your own. Comparisons will always have some bias or focus on points that in the end aren't all that important to your special use case. Since both tools can be evaluated for free I'd recommend you to do so and make your choice afterwards.

Hope this helps ;-)

[aefvindicator]

Very helpful, thank you :)

[kissaki]

TS3 does not, in contrary to TS2, have a web administration interface, only some kind of protocol you can log in with and administrate via console.

Also, the licenses for TS3 suck imho; constant checking of validity and duplicate use.

When I moved the server for another community after 2 hours the new server went down, as I kept an empty server on the old IP to tell ppl to move to the new one, with the same license ofc.

No such hassle with Mumble.

My clan moved to Mumble a long time ago, long before TS3 was out.

We did a 2 weeks test-phase before we decided on switching to Mumble entirely. And those who were not really for it are now. I think everyone in my clan enjoys mumble.

So I can really suggest a test phase, so every member can test it out to their willing. Ofc there’ll be some fanboys not really trying or some annoying ppl not even trying to set it up correctly, but well, the members will better understand what it's about.

I'm not really a heavy TS3 user… Only using it if I have to. :)

[princemichi]

^^agree. sorry for this "spam" but i have to say this :D :

Mumble rules the VoIP World!

Gogogo Mumble!!!

[jesepi]

I would say Teamspeak 3 is close to mumble in voice quality, but falls short in the voice delay department. Here is an example: http://gcguild.net/movie/ventrilo-vs-teamspeak-vs-mumble You seriously can't beat mumble right now.

The Teamspeak 3 client starts up MUCH quicker than mumble, which is odd since I believe they both use QT.

I think mumble's user/channel permission system and how you configure it is superior in both simplicity and scalability.

Integrating mumble with existing login systems seems to be easier than teamspeak 3.

I really enjoy TS3's user interface. I think out of the three (mumble, ventrilo, teamspeak) it is the best if you were judging ease of use and most visually pleasing.

Managing a virtual server from within the teamspeak client is nice. Having to SSH in and edit mumble's .ini file and restarting can be hassle. Reading logs from the TS3 client is great, and having a filter system to show what information you want displayed is a plus.

Mumble sets sound quality on a user basis, vs teamspeak defining the quality on a channel by channel basis. I think having it be a user-specific configuration is the best option as people's connection quality vary greatly.

Mumble has an amazing 3d positional audio plugin system. TS3 lets you drag usernames around but it isn't nearly as awesome as it being in real time based on position in a game environment.

[kissaki]

Oh, and here’s a comparison of CPU usage:

http://wiki.natenom.name/mumble:mumble_ts3_cpu