Talespire does look promising.  I wish I had known about it in time to get a key.  

I know, i hope they develop premade dungeons and campaigns. 

Great thought.  All the 5e campaigns thus far.  :)

I use Fantasy Grounds because of some classroom management options they have (especially the recent updates where players can only control their tokens). I am a BIG fan of DNDBeyond but would love to learn more about possible connections between them at this point. I enjoy Roll20 too, nice and system agnostic; however, it's just not as flashy/fun/cool. Maybe it's the graphic designer in me, but I love the modifications we can make and the extra spikey bits.

I play in older campaigns using Roll20 with DNDBeyond extensions, but I think it's already outdated and needs a ton of work. I purchased a DM key for Foundry VTT and then subscribed to a patreon for all adventure modules to be preloaded with walls/lighting/etc. to save time.

I drool over the thought of DND Beyond creating a competitive, quality VTT so I can keep everything in one source. That is my dream scenario, and I'm hopeful the development team is working hard towards this goal. To let the quarantine and (re)newed interest in tabletop RPG's with remote sessions pass by without capitalizing on the demand would be a huge miss.

C'mon, DNDB team! Make me a happy camper! My wallet is here for it.

I havent played D&D on a virtual table top, but as a kid, I have played a turnbased computer game, such as Ultima. My brother and I even skipped school to play together on his computer. These are memories of great joy. I have also played various D&D MMOs.

I can easily imagine playing D&D online as joyful. But I feel playing with at least one human alongside you is necessary for the joy, even when engaging other friends remotely online.

I am with you.  This is the dream.  All my source material is here and ready to go.

my preferred platforms are DnD beyond and Map Tools

Foundry VTT FTW! DnD Beyond isn't really a VTT, but I wouldn't play D&D without it. It makes creating characters a breeze. It's useful for tabletop and pretty much required with either Roll20 or Foundry VTT. I originally chose Roll20 to run our campaign last March, because Foundry VTT was still in beta. After a couple months, I switched to Foundry VTT  because, 1) it is so much easier to mod and make thinks work the way you'd expect; 2) it looks so much better; and 3) and it's arguably less expensive, although I've found I've contributed to many of the programmer's/creator's Patreon pages which sort of balances it out. There've been a couple bumps as new releases have changed the way things worked, but overall, they're improvements.

Question - have you tried Roll20? How would you rate it compared to Astral?

I have tried Roll20, but not Astral. Roll20 is really good if you can play it for free. If you need to pay for whatever reason, I do not think it is worth the ongoing cost to use it. I prefer the pay once model. I used the free version of Roll20 until the pandemic. Now I am using FGU because I was DMing a WoTC module in DDB and wanted to continue running it. Since FGU is a pay once and it has WoTC modules I chose that one. 

I have heard that Foundry VTT is really good but they do not support WoTC modules nor source books, for me that is a must. Which is why I chose DDB in the first place, but since they do not have a VTT I needed to pick another platform.  Good luck it seems that each VTT has its own pros & cons. 

I tried Astral last year. I found the mapping and token features great, but despised how they did character sheets. Things may be very different now -- it's been about 11 months.

So far I've tried Fantasy Grounds Unity and Roll20. FGU looked and felt like a program designed for Windows 98 so I dropped that one pretty quick. Roll20 is ok for our group. The few bugs we've come across have usually been solved by a refresh and it works well enough for now. Some of their organization for campaigns like Storm King's Thunder is pretty nice, but then I get annoyed when I can't collapse/expand all folders at once instead of manually closing every folder that's not currently needed. I don't think I'll be spending more money on the service when it seems like better options are on the horizon. Still, needing only a web browser to run Roll20 is a huge plus for my group. And Beyond20 is fantastic of course (I would hate to have to use Roll20's clunky character sheets).

As for Foundry, I'm a little suspect. They don't sell official D&D content, but they use the cover art from the PHB on their demo page which I feel is misleading. I have to wonder how people are playing official modules on Foundry because I sure as heck wouldn't want to go and hand draw all the boundaries for maps so that the lighting system works properly. My limited prep time would be better spent elsewhere. I do like that they give control to the players for opening doors and the weather effects are cool. The map scaling when zooming in and out seems to work properly whereas on Roll20 it makes everything blurry. So yes, it does look nicer than Roll20 but I don't know... It seems like so much work to get official modules up and running. If you do homebrew campaigns, maybe not so much?

I'd love for D&D Beyond to develop a map system and finish the combat tracker and shared dice logs so I could ditch Roll20. But what I'd really like is to move to TaleSpire. That makes everything else look primitive. I just hope the community content is robust, cuz I don't want to build everything myself.

Foundry VTT FTW.

Well that is some good news... especially since I just started using The Forge rather than self hosting. I must say it was a smooth transition, far smoother than I would have thought, even including being able to upload easily all my world content and things like player die choices of color/material in the Dice So Nice mod stuck between my personal hosted game and the Forge. I thought my players and I were going to have to spend half an hour getting oriented. Instead it was 5 minutes and we started playing.

We use Discord + D&DBeyond + Owlbear Rodeo - it works like a charm ...

If D&DBeyond would partner up with the two guys from Owlbear Rodeo and include the easy to use Mapfeatures with the Beyond stuff, that would be my dream come true..

As someone who has seen the sneak peak, it looks VERY promising. 

I have moved to Foundry as my VTT of choice, if we are going to use one, but recently for my latest campaign I have gone back to just using Discord for chat, using theatre of the mind and showing a map as a screenshare if it is needed to describe a complicated space or combat. The players roll dice physically at their own desks, and have all printed off and are maintaining physical player sheets. My last game with a VTT the DM was a developer who had written all sorts of macros and programmes to replicate everything so you simply clicked a button and the computer worked everything out for you, including applying any special bonuses etc. It felt too much like playing a computer game online and I absolutely hated it as a player. 

Yup, every group and every player is different.

One of my players loves using DDB to roll and has the extension that lets it show up in Foundry. The others prefer just doing all/everything in Foundry, other than leveling up their PC here and picking spells just because some things are not available in Foundry (yet, apparently). I love Foundry, but I still roll dice on my desk because that is one of the most fun parts about playing a table-top game to me -- die rolling. I spent all this money on metal dice -- I'm going to effing use them! But I leave that decision up to each player. And we do enjoy seeing each other's dice rolled on the virtual TT and groan sympathetically at the 1s and cheer at the 20s etc. There is something different about seeing it on a 3d-looking die vs. just a line of text. Or just hearing them call it out if they roll it on their own desk.

For maps, I've learned to be careful with it. Dungeons yes. But sometimes the maps can also distract from the RP so I have tried not to get too immersed in mapping everything (which I had done early on). I agree that if you do too much of this it feels like a video game.