What's the best webinar software out there? This seemingly simple question can be frustratingly difficult to answer, as I found out in the course of this review project.
My goal was to field test every major platform in the webinar space to find out how they all stack up against each other and finally find something that serves my own needs for marketing and educational webinars.
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What's in This Review
This is my roundup comparison of all the webinar tools I've tested. In this post, I'll present a brief summary for each tool and my conclusion and recommendations at the end. Note that for each tool listed here, there's also a separate, in-depth review and video available. I won't repeat everything I stated in the separate reviews, but I'll link to them.
Price Comparison
Let's start by looking at a price comparison of the tools I tested. This will help us put things into perspecive, when we look at the different features as well as strengths & weaknesses of each platform.
Comparing the pricing of different webinar software solutions is not a straight-forward endeavor, because each one comes with different pricing tiers and configurations. To create the closest I can to an apples-to-apples comparison, here are 2 different pricing scenarios.
Scenario 1: Low Budget
In this scenario, we're assuming that we want to be able to host live webinars with up to 100 attendees and we want to pay monthly, to keep the up-front cost low.
Zoom is by far the cheapest option in the roundup, as long as you don't use the webinar add-on- Beyond that, several solutions cluster around about $50/month (Webinar Ninja, Crowdcast, Zoom Webinars), followed by some solutions around the $80/month mark (EasyWebinar, ClickMeeting, BigMarker). Demio comes in at $99/month, but with a limit of 150 rather than 100 attendees. A pricing plan for 100 attendees is not available. Finally, we have GoToWebinar which costs $109/month for a room with 100 seats.
WebinarJam and EverWebinar are not included because they aren't available at a monthly price.
Scenario 2: Large Crowd
For the second scenario, let's look at what it costs to be able to host webinars to large crowds of up to 500 attendees. In this case, we'll also assume that we're able to pay on an annual basis.
In this scenario, WebinarJam is by far the cheapest option. Even if you combine WebinarJam with the EverWebinar add-on, it's still towards the cheaper end of the scale.
In general, you can expect to pay between $1,000 and $1,500 per year for a room with 500 seats.
ClickMeeting, Crowdcast and Demio cluster closer to $2,000/year in this scenario and GoToWebinar is the only solution to cost significantly more than $2,000/year.
For comparison, I've also included Vimeo in this chart. Vimeo has a live streaming plan which comes in at $900, has no audience size limit and includes some basic webinar-like features. It's not a full webinar solution, but for anyone doing events with very large crowds, it's worth considering.
Now that we have a view of the pricing, let's look at the individual solutions. I'll summarize my findings for each platform, presented in alphabetical order:
BigMarker
BigMarker is the Jack-of-all-trades webinar platform. With this single solution you can do live webinars, webinar series, automated webinars, livestreams, meetings and further variations of live online events. Full review.
BigMarker Pros:
Despite having a huge array of options, BigMarker's user interface is well designed, intuitive and rarely overwhelming. It comes with a wide array of well designed, useful and fairly customizable landing page templates, it has a feature-packed webinar room with many interaction and engagement features and it has a powerful, intuitive "timeline builder" that gives you great flexibility for creating automated events.
BigMarker Cons:
For marketing/sales webinars, BigMarker has a serious flaw: you can present offers that pop up on screen for your attendees, but the way the offers are presented encourages them to close the offer pop up and focus back on your presentation. Once closed, the offer is gone from view, until you launch a new one or re-launch the same one. It's just not a good way to present offers in a webinar.
Apart from this, I have some smaller complaints about the platform, including the overwhelming amount of different communication channels in the webinar room and the lack of a one-click signup feature unless you use the built-in and poorly implemented emailing feature. It's also worth noting that BigMarker is one of the pricier options, so it's only worth considering if you really need an all-in-one solution.
BigMarker Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
BigMarker is a solid jack-of-all-trades tool. It's not the best tool for any one purpose, but it's the only one that covers pretty much every conceivable type of online event and does them all reasonably well.
ClickMeeting
ClickMeeting is a tool that supports different kinds of online events and meetings, ranging from a permanently available online meeting room, through webinar events to fully automated webinars. Full review.
ClickMeeting Pros
ClickMeeting covers a fairly wide range of use cases and presents its many options in a fairly intuitive user interface. Out of all the tools I reviewed, ClickMeeting has my favorite feature set in the meeting/webinar room itself. It provides the presenter with a wide range of useful marketing and engagement features that are easy to use.
ClickMeeting Cons
Unfortunately, my test webinar with ClickMeeting was a disaster, from a technical standpoint. The stream quality was poor, the screen sharing kept glitching out and a large portion of the audience gave up on the webinar because of technical issues.
ClickMeeting Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
ClickMeeting has many promising and even well-implemented features. Unfortunately, the technical issues are a deal breaker.
Note: a representative from ClickMeeting reached out to me after I published my full review. They ensured me that they are taking my criticism of the platform seriously and have been working on improvements.
CrowdCast
CrowdCast is a webinar platform that seems to be inspired by social networks in various aspects. Each presenter has a public profile, attendees can follow/subscribe to presenters they like and the whole experience is focused around ease and convenience more than around advanced features. Full review.
CrowdCast Pros
It's very quick and easy to schedule and start a live event using CrowdCast. It probably has the easiest user experience of all the tools I tested. Among the webinar room features, I liked how easy it is to create events with multiple hosts (e.g. a group discussion or an interview livestream). CrowdCast also encourages chat and Q&A during the events. Expect high engagement (although the chat can also be a distraction.
It's also worth mentioning that CrowdCast offers very convenient monetization features. You can easily sell access to your webinars, make webinars that are exclusive to your Patreon supporters and even allow for pay-what-you-want donations during an event.
CrowdCast Cons
There's a downside to the ease of use and convenience for CrowdCast: while everything is fast and easy to set up, customization options are minimal to non-existent. Similarly, the webinar features are all skewed towards being simple and familiar, rather than being advanced features for power users. CrowdCast shines when it comes to engagement features, but on the marketing side, all you can do is display a small call-to-action button.
CrowdCast Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
CrowdCast does what it does really well. If what you need is a platform for livestreaming and engaging your audience, it's great. If you're looking for advanced marketing and customization features, you won't like it.
Demio
Demio is a relatively new webinar platform which bills itself as being made with marketers in mind. Full review.
Demio Pros
The user interface in Demio is simple, well designed and easy to use. During the live event, the stream quality was good throughout and as a host, you can display attention-grabbing calls-to-action and polls during a webinar. Demio also features a well designed webinar automation builder.
Demio Cons
Demio lacks a good feature for managing comments and Q&A, which can become difficult especially when there are many attendees and lots of activity. While the live webinar in Demio is well designed from an engagement and marketing perspective, the auto-generated replay is lacking such elements. In a very strange move, Demio automatically sends your attendees to a page that advertises Demio, instead of giving you good options for creating your own, conversion optimized post-event page.
Demio Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
Demio is a decent webinar tool, but it ultimately doesn't do enough to justify its above-average price. Among the competitors, you can easily get more bang for your buck.
EasyWebinar
EasyWebinar is a platform that combines features for live webinars and automated/evergreen webinars. Full review.
EasyWebinar Pros
In the middle price tier, EasyWebinar offers large webinar rooms and a relatively extensive feature set at a favorable price. At that price point, it's also notable for including all the automation/evergreen features, which are often reserved for higher price tiers in other solutions.
EasyWebinar Cons
Both the user interface and the selection of webinar funnel templates look awfully outdated, in EasyWebinar. And regarding the UI, it's not just a problem of dated design: the poor design makes the software more complicated and harder to use than it needs to be.
I also found the marketing and engagement features in the webinar room to be lacking, compared to what competing platforms offer.
EasyWebinar Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
EasyWebinar is just not well implemented. On paper, the features and pricing look good, but in practice, I can't recommend it.
Note: a representative from EasyWebinar reached out to me after I published my full review. They announced that they wanted to improve the software based on my review and they have since already rolled out some improvements to the UI as well as new templates.
GoToWebinar
GoToWebinar was one of the first tools available to run live webinars. It's also the tool I've used for well over 100 webinars for my own businesses. Full review.
GoToWebinar Pros
There's really only one major advantage to GoToWebinar: solid stream quality. GoToWebinar is about as reliable as a webinar tool can be. Which is to say: there will still be occasional technical issues and about 1% of attendees will have audio issues or similar, but 99% of the time, for 99% of attendees, your webinars will work reliably.
GoToWebinar Cons
The major flaw with GoToWebinar is that it just utterly lacks conversion and marketing focused features. The registration page is awfully basic and can't really be customized, you can show offers or countdown timers during an event, the user interface is corporat-y and not very user friendly etc., etc.
Basically, there aren't many things that are good about GTW, apart from aforementioned reliability. In addition, it's also the most expensive solution in this roundup.
GoToWebinar Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
GoToWebinar would be worth a recommendation if it was especially cheap. Unfortunately, it's especially expensive.
WebinarJam & EverWebinar
WebinarJam is a platform that's mainly focused around doing live webinars for the purpose of sales & marketing. EverWebinar can be used as an add-on or as a standalone tool to create automated webinars that look and feel like a live webinar. Full review.
WebinarJam Pros
WebinarJam has hands down the best marketing and sales features of any of the tools I've tested. This starts with great options for displaying offers during your webinars. Not only can you show an unmissable, strong call to action during an event, you can even add scarcity factors like a countdown timer or a limited quantity of items available, with live updating whenever a new purchase is made.
Another strong marketing feature is the email integration in WebinarJam. You can integrate it with advanced email marketing tools such as ActiveCampaign and pass on tags based on whether someone left early in a webinar or watched all the way through, whether they purchased an offer or not etc. It's a dream for anyone who wants to do sophisticated segmentation and follow-up marketing.
In my testing, I also found the basics to be solid: stream quality was good throughout, the webinar room is user friendly and my attendees reported having a good experience on the call. On top of all that, the pricing for WebinarJam is the best of the bunch, so long as you don't mind paying a full year in advance. Even combined with EverWebinar (which costs extra), the pricing is still more than fair.
WebinarJam Cons
Setting up a webinar event in WebinarJam is a bit of a pain. The user interface guides you through a long series of steps in an interface that can feel overcrowded. I welcome the breadth of options available in the tool, but I can't help but think there must be a better way to present them.
A fairly serious drawback is that in my testing, I found that all of the notification emails sent through WebinarJam went into my spam folder. I had to integrate with a 3rd-party email delivery service such as PostMark in order to solve this issue.
WebinarJam Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
For marketing and sales webinars, this is clearly the best solution. It's not perfect, but considering the price and the fact that the marketing features are money-makers, it's easy to recommend WebinarJam.
Webinar Ninja
Webinar Ninja is a webinar tool that aims to provide a rich set of features along with a modern, intuitive user experience. Full review.
Webinar Ninja Pros
There's a lot to like about Webinar Ninja, starting with a refreshingly simple and intuitive user interface. It's easy to set up and schedule live webinars, automated webinars and so called "hybrid webinars" (automated webinar with a host attending to interact in chat).
Webinar Ninja also comes with webinar funnel page templates that are well designed and customizable enough that you won't necessarily need a 3rd party solution for your landing pages.
In the webinar room, I particularly liked how easy it is to switch between different views. You can switch from full screen live video to screen sharing to picture-in-picture video with ease.
Webinar Ninja Cons
The biggest issue I encountered was a really poor stream quality. Even though I was streaming from a very fast connection, the quality of the stream that attendees saw was deteriorated almost beyond recognition.
I was also disappointed by the polls and call to action features. It's nice to see that such features are present, but they're too poorly implemented to be truly useful.
Webinar Ninja Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
Webinar Ninja is a promising solution, but in several aspects, it's let down by poor implementation.
Note: a representative from Webinar Ninja got in touch with me after I published the full review. They were open to my criticism of the platform and have already implemented improvements that should improve stream quality. They are also working on further improvements to the platform.
Zoom Meetings & Zoom Webinars
Zoom is a platform for online meetings, which can also be used for webinars. Full review.
Zoom Pros
The basic plan for Zoom costs only about $15/month. With that, you can host and record group meetings with good stream quality and you can also record these meetings and download them as videos.
You can buy a "webinar" add-on which adds some features like polls and Q&A, but this add-on is not worth getting, for the price.
Zoom Cons
Zoom is not really a webinar solution and compared to other tools in the roundup, it shows. It's not very user friendly, it doesn't have any marketing or engagement features to speak of and the funnel pages it auto-generates are awful. Ultimately, it's only a contender because of the low entry price and its high reliability, which is only matched by GoToWebinar.
Zoom Review Summary
Usability:
Marketing Features:
Stream Quality:
Engagement Features:
Overall Score & Conclusion:
Zoom (without the webinar add-on) is a good enough solution for group meetings and webinar-like events if your main concern is to keep costs at a minimum.
Conclusion: What's the Best Webinar Software?
As you can probably tell from this roundup and especially from the individual reviews, there is no such thing as the perfect software for hosting webinars. To make your choice as easy as possible, let me categorize my conclusion as follows:
Not Recommended
The following tools are clearly not recommended, based on my testing:
- ClickMeeting because of the severe technical issues I experienced in the test webinar.
- Demio because it doesn't do enough to justify its above average price.
- EasyWebinar because of the outdated UI & templates and the lackluster marketing & engagement features.
- GoToWebinar because it just costs way too much for what it offers.
- Webinar Ninja because of poorly implemented features and poor stream quality.
Conditionally Recommended
The following tools I can recommend under specific circumstances, depending on your needs:
- BigMarker if your main priority is to have one platform for every kind of webinar, online meeting and livestream imaginable.
- Crowdcast if you want to sell webinars or you want to host Patreon-supporter-exclusive webinars.
- Zoom Meetings (without the webinar add-on) if you want to keep costs as low as possible and don't mind sacrificing features & functionality for it.
Top Recommendation
Finally, my top recommendation goes to WebinarJam, which offers the best marketing features and comes at the lowest price (especially if you only need live webinars OR automated webinars, but not both).
Quiz
To make it even easier for you, I've put together a quiz. Through a short series of questions, the quiz will determine exactly which webinar software is ideal for your needs:
This concludes my massive webinar roundup review. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, by leaving a comment below!
Great round up Shane!
Thank you, Matt!
Thank you for your review of webinar platforms. It was very helpful.
I’m assuming you did it in the last year and I realize platform development makes reviewing a moving target. Is your top recommendation the same? Does Zoom platform upgrades change your opinion of them?
Is there a different #1 today?
Cheers,
Tom Johnson
TJ@Andevon.com
Great review Shane. Thanks for your time and diligence!
Thank you, Randy! Glad to know you appreciate it!
Great overview. How would your rankings look when ordered by Streaming & Audio Quality?
That’s a good question!
I think Zoom takes the top spot for this one, followed by GTW, WebinarJam, Crowdcast and Demio. And the losers in this would obviously be ClickMeeting and Webinar Ninja.
Thanks Shane, that’s all so fantastically helpful and much appreciated.
Thank you! I’m glad you found this useful.
Thank you, Shane. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this.
Thanks a lot for this whole project. Very valuable!
Thanks Shane!
Thanks for all your work! So next up one to rule them all, Thrive Webinar? ;)
I’d really rather not…
I want someone else to make the perfect webinar solution, so we don’t have to.
Hello Shane, thank you for all the work you put into your reviews. I wonder if you know livewebinar which seems to me a very solid solution.
Thank you, Henning! I’ve signed up for Livewebinar and will give them a try soon.
Did you test it already?
Wow Shane, That’s a brilliant and comprehensive study that obviously took a huge effort. Many thanks! Can we look forward to WebinarJam integration with Thrive Architect now? :-)
Thank you for your comment, Kerry!
We already have an integration. :)
You can go to Thrive Dashboard -> API Connections and add a connection to WebinarJam there.
Your integration to WebinarJam leaves something to be desired. I have reported on it and requested a rework. You are unable to pick the webinar from a scheduled slate of webinars.
The API connection that you have always uses ‘0’ and doesn’t allow for the increasing number of webinars that pile up when you use the same webinar multiple times.
I’d be happy to provide additional information and volunteer to work with your team using my WJ account to get the issue sorted out.
The relevant required field is ‘schedule’ which is ‘0’ for the first webinar and increments by one for each additional webinar that gets scheduled.
Note from their API documentation: “{+} webinar_id and schedule must be obtained from a previous API call to retrieve the details from whatever specific webinar you want to register the person to. “
Hi Shane, your webinar tool comparison video is the most balanced, mature, educative video I’ve listened to in a long time.
You have a beautifully, concise way of explaining the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of each webinar tool showcased.
I respect the time, openminded / even handed, way you’ve approached this multiple webinar tool review.
This is why I usually watch your videos and read your Blog posts.
I’ve been a Zoom room enthusiast for several years now. For me it’s affordable, and delivers all the functionality I need.
I use a Zoom room for teaching people skills. The video and audio quality has been consistently good. My attendees have been happy so far.
I’ve used WebinarJam earlier on. It’s another really good Webinar tool. I shifted to Zoom purely because of it’s monthly pricing.
Thank you for this body of work. It’s really the best I’ve watched and listened to in a long time.
Warmly,
Ivan Bayross
Thank you very much! It’s really rewarding to get feedback like this after sinking so many hours of work into the project. And I’m glad to see that your own experience with Zoom and WebinarJam reflects my recommendations as well.
Hey Shane, thanks for the comprehensive reviews, helps validate our choice. Everwebinar is much cheaper than you have listed. You can buy it for $497. And if you buy WebinarJam first, it has a discount in the upsell funnel.
Thanks for your comment!
In my price comparison, I have one entry for WebinarJam and one for WebinarJam + EverWebinar. Perhaps I can clarify that further. My thinking was that getting EverWebinar as a standalone is probably rare. Can’t really think of many cases where you’d want a webinar automation tool, without being able to host live webinars.
I understand, but when I bought them together EW was only $397 as an upsell. Makes the yearly =~ $900.
Great work Shane. Very helpful review. I don’t get stuff like this anywhere else. Thanks
Thank you for your kind words!
Very useful and complete summary of what was a very interesting series of tests.
And the quiz at the end is very handy way of selecting according to preferred criteria.
Thanks Shane.
Thanks for your comment, Philip! I’m glad you found this useful.
I suggest to include https://livestorm.co in the next review round.
Great roundup. Thanks for the effort. I have zero affiliation to EasyWebinar other than being a user (primarily for the automated webinars) and wanted to add that they have indeed updated the UI and it’s much better. The standard landing page templates still aren’t great but we just embed the registration widget in our Thrive Landing Pages and it works just fine that way and looks way better :)
Hi Shane,
Thanks for sharing. I’ve been using Zoom for group calls but it’s good to know what else is out there and the main pros and cons of them.
Hi, Thanks for your review. I agree, Webinar is very good with marketing and I had been using it. The one major downside is that they don’t have screenshare for devices. My only option is to share my iPad screen using quicktime and then screenshare and the quality of the video came out really bad with distorted sound and screen skips. Do you have any other recommendations that supports screenshare of devices and also good marketing and funnels?
Wow! Amazing review. So helpful. Thanks so much for all your hard work in putting this review together. The best of the best. Thanks a million Shane.
Thank you, Geoff!
Congratulations for your work. Very pro, interesting, complete
Whahoo!! Thank you SO much. I’ve been stalling with doing webinars for years because it’s daunting to find the right platform. You made it so easy, I’m going to dive right in and get going with producing webinars instead of procrastinating.
This is fab Shane, always such good work.
I noticed Stealthwebinar and recently it looks like you used livewebinar.
Any update on those two?
I’ve given Livewebinar a try, yes. Will publish a review on that when I get around to it. Stealthwebinar I haven’t used yet.
Great review, thank you very much!
Shane, are you familiar with a webinar tool that will allow me to
split the audience to groups and a sign a diff presenter for each group?
We’re selling a mentoring program and my goal is to split the audience, let’s say 100 people to 7-10 small groups and a sign a mentor (presenter) to each group so they will be able to experience working with a mentor.
Is there a good tool on the market or is any of the above tools has this feature?
thanks
Thank you!! Very well done and super helpful. Good job!
Really appreciate you took the time to do this excellent review. It was most helpful!
Thank you for your comment, Anita!
Thank you Shane,
I am a volunteer in a non-profit org that supports and facilities sharing among security directors for faith based organizations. In these days of COVID-19 we are moving our monthly meetings online. I have been asked to find a platform to facilitate our meetings and presentations. I’m a technical guy, but had limited exposure to webinar platforms, this was very helpful. Thank you!
Hi Ron, I’m glad to know this was helpful for you!
Hi Shane, have you tried LiveWebinar? Would love to hear your insight about that
I’ve tested it once, but not reveiewed it yet.
Thank you for all your information. I was supposed to hold a in person conference May 30 and now am looking at different options. Its a lot to process. Ill have two main speakers and several different breakout sessions for a one day conference. I’m hoping you can point me in the right direction as best fit for an event like this I was looking at BigMaker
Hi Bonnie,
As far as I know, there is no system out there that comes with a built in feature for break out sessions. However, pretty much every decent webinar and meeting tool will allow you to have multiple presenters. So, I’d assume that the breakout sessions have to be run as separate meetings where participants have to manually join the ones they want to or need to take part in and choose the tool based on the other features and functionality.
Zoom Meetings has breakout sessions… it’s one of the ways they distinguish their Meeting tool from the Webinar tool. The limit for Zoom with a Large Meeting Addon is 1000 participants and up to 50 breakout rooms; Zoom Webinars allows up to 10,000 participants but does not have breakout rooms.
I enjoyed all your Webinar reviews. Very well done!
Have you reviewed “Livestorm” or are you planning to?
Hi Shane, your round up review was just what I was looking for and, after taking the quiz, Zoom is definitely my first step into the world of online coaching, workshop facilitation etc., although I am intrigued by the ‘jack of all trades’ Big Marker, as I aim to get into sales webinars in the hopefully not-too-distant future. I’m also forcing myself through the ‘technical pain barrier’ on the excellent Solopreneur SEO Sprint course you hosted with Viola. It’s all forcing me to embrace the technical stuff I’ve been avoiding for years! Thank you!
Thanks for all these tips; I live in Mexico and I’m an English teacher. I think this assessment helps me a lot to start an on line activity with my teenagers and adults. Thank you very much!
If you are stuck in a big corporate environment with just Microsoft Edge as your browser and with no admin rights on your computer (so you can´t install any webinar software), choosing a webinar is a challenge. The new Edge is based on the same platform as Chrome, so that might to make it easier. Any tool suggestions if stuck with old Edge?
Can’t say I’ve tested that specifically. There are 2 options that would be a safe bet:
1) Tools that are browser independent like GoToWebinar or Zoom.
2) Live streaming via OBS and Vimeo or YouTube, where the viewer can watch the resulting video on any browser and the host streams through a browser-independent app.
Hey Shane, very helpful! My concern: we want to do a worldwide webinar that might have as many as 2,000 people mostly USA but some in India & Europe. How can we be assured that the webinar software wont be overwhelmed by the load either overall or in a region? Also we want to have breakout sessions with smaller groups where folks can see and interact with each other. Any recommendations? Thanks
That’s a tricky set of requirements…
Of the tools that offer a “breakout session” feature, only Zoom and Digital Samba have plans that go up to and beyond 2,000 participants. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they’ll definitely manage an event of that size without issues. Plus, I wouldn’t be surprised if you found that specific features like breakout rooms might just not work at that scale.
A reliable way to do a webinar to such a large crowd is to use livestreaming. YouTube will definitely be capable of this, but it’s public. So if it’s more of an exclusive event, I’d look to Vimeo Pro. Vimeo Pro also offers some webinar-like features (no breakout rooms, though).
In any case, I would contact the provider and tell them about your event and the expected crowd size. If you use Zoom, you’ll be paying so much for a plan to accommodate this crowd size that you can expect some hands-on help, I’d imagine. The other options cost a lot less, but I’d still try to get someone from the company involved and not just start an event of that size and hope for the best.
Hello Shane,
Thank you so much for your great videos. Just got a new subscription ;)
I have a question for you. I need a recommendation for a software that can handle live group calls and evergreen webinars. What can you recommend for me for this scenario?
Best Regards
To cover both of those use cases, I’d look to an all-in-one platform like BigMarker or LiveWebinar.
Alternatively, run your evergreen webinars with EverWebinar and your group calls with a free platform like Google Hangouts or Skype Meetings. That would be the most cost effective solution.
Before everything thanks for this great review Shane. I’m looking for a Webinar that I can use with some colleagues for teaching (small classes), so we can keep the interest of our students now that we can’t go to the classroom because of the Covid19. I been reading the reviews and all and I saw that there is a quiz but is not charging, I can’t see it. Because we don’t know for how long we are going to be in this situation it’s hard for us to commit with an annual subscription. I know is a lot to ask after you made all this amazing work, but I really don’t want to make te wrong decision so that’s why I’m asking you and to the other subscribers: Which Webinar Software would you recommend for a small educational institution? Thank you very much and sorry if there are spelling mistakes but english is not my language.
Hi Shane
Would you consider doing a review of Meetvio
Dear Shane thank’s for your review. I want to ask you about adobe connect ¿what do you think for using as webinar platform?. Regads!
Love your work. So helpful.
This was an awesome post that I keep referring back to! Do you have a recommendation for a white label webinar platform?
I would like to create a series of Webinars from my Desktop-PC in conjunction with my Tablet to scribble on the Screen :D
Is there any webinar-tool that provides this functionality?
Dude, I would love that! I’ll have to do some research to see if that’s possible.
Hi Shane,
Love all your work, especially Thrive Theme Builder, but also your product reviews which are comprehensive without being overwhelmingly detailed and focus on the use case. I’ve always felt WebinarJEO deserved to do better in the marketplace for live and evergreen webinar software – did you leave it out of this review for a particular reason or just pressure of time ? It does seem to offer great value for both scenarios! BWs James
Hi Shane,
Thanks for the great reviews. I’m working with a non-profit and I am volunteering to teach some of our new members. So, I need to play videos during my webinars that I can start, stop, rewind, FF, and run in slow mo. We’ve tried several platforms, and most show the videos jerky or skipping several frames on the attendee side. Any recommendation as to which platform would be best for utilizing videos? Thanks!
Thank you for the info
Hello Shane,
Since my business is mostly based on webinars, I read your article with interest.
With that said, I disagree with your conclusion fully :
I’ve been a WebinarJam user for years, and even though the tool is indeed great on paper, it’s simply unreliable.
NEVER IN MY CAREER HAVE I LOST SO MUCH MONEY (AND CREDIBILITY) THAN WITH WEBINARJAM!
Almost everytime people had troubles with the stream (yes, everything was sat up properly, and no, it wasn’t huge ass webinars).
3 times the webinar was also permanently interrupted. I cannot count how much money I lost because of that, not to mention looking like an amateur to my audience!
Their customer support is garbage too : everytime my webinars were sabotaged, it was always “my fault” (despite following all instructions and good practices). Except for once when they finally admitted it was their fault.
They have an unreliable tool, and worst of all they don’t take responsability for it!
Oh and there is that outdated delay of 5-10 seconds between the presenter and the audience, which is a problem when attempting to be interactive (a very important part of webinar success, as you know).
Also note that I shared my frustrations about webinarjam with colleagues during events and masterminds, and almost everyone I talked with encountered the same problems.
Because of these reasons, I switched to Demio, and it was the best technical decision of my life (after using the Thrive tools of course!).
And I feel you’re a bit unfair to Demio in your review : yeah, it’s expensive, but you don’t pay for features, you pay for reliability first and foremost!
With Demio, there is no delay, the stream quality is top notch and NOT ONCE I encountered a problem. And their customer level is TOP NOTCH.
WebinarJam is an accident waiting to happen, and I strongly advise everyone to keep away from it… unless you hate money and enjoy looking like an idiot after your webinar was disconnected 5 minutes before your pitch! ;)
After year’s experience with WebinarJam I saw all its flawsand also that you had some additional criticism on it. Don’t remember where but you said at some point it USED TO BE your favorite. Do you have an update on your top choice? Thanks from a superfan ;)