EasyWebinar Review: A Better Solution for Webinar Marketing?

EasyWebinar is a webinar platform that promises a solid set of features for both live online events and automated or evergreen webinars.

Let's see how it holds up against competing products like Webinar Ninja and Demio. Plus, I'll be comparing it to the thing I've used to host over 100 webinars myself: GoToWebinar.

What You'll Discover in This Review

In this EasyWebinar review, we'll have a look at what it's like to set up webinar events, what marketing and engagement features are included, what the webinar experience is like both from the host's and the attendee's perspective and how the pricing compares to the competition. Let's get right into it!

Creating Webinar Events

Sign into your EasyWebinar account and you're greeted with a pretty comprehensive dashboard, featuring links to every part of the software:

Unfortunately, the good impression the UI makes doesn't last beyond this home screen. Setting up a webinar sends you into a clunky looking tabs-within-tabs interface.

I'm not one to judge a user interface based on its looks, though. I'll happily use an ugly UI if it lets me efficiently do what I need to do. In this regard, EasyWebinar is a mixed bag.

When you create a new webinar, you've got a good range of options for creating one-off events, events on a recurring schedule or automated events.

For your event replay, you also have several options: you can make a replay available indefinitely, make it expire on a certain date or even put it on an evergreen time limit:

Webinar Funnel Pages

EasyWebinar comes with all the marketing funnel pages you need to run live webinars or automated webinars. With that, it already sets itself apart from the likes of Zoom and GoToWebinar.

Unfortunately, there are only 4 styles available for these landing pages and 3 of them look very outdated indeed. Here's an example from each of the template sets:

Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to design, but I find the first 3 among these sets unusable. However, judge for yourself. The important thing here is that you know what's on offer, before you make a buying decision

The bad news regarding landing pages doesn't end here, though. There are 2 more issues that make EasyWebinar funnels a bit of a pain:

Blind Editing

EasyWebinar comes with registration pages, thank you pages, event pages, replay pages and "event ended" pages. You can edit the pages to a limited extent and the editing is done via a crude back-end interface.

That means you are filling fields like these, to change what appears on your landing page:

There's no obvious "preview" button anywhere to be found and while looking at this editing interface, it's unclear how exactly your inputs will be represented on the page. Plus the various editing fields needed to create all the elements of a page and all the pages in a funnel are strewn across many segments in the dashboard.

Like the overall UI design in EasyWebinar, this felt like a throwback to many years ago, before visual, front-end editors became the norm.

Glitchy Embed Options

Seeing the state of the built-in pages, you will be tempted to use your own landing page templates instead.

EasyWebinar gives you the option to embed a button or a form on your own website, through which visitors can register for a webinar. This is a welcome option, but I found it a bit difficult to work with. It took me several attempts to change the button to a custom color of my choice and I couldn't center align the button without writing some CSS.

Form & Function

Earlier, I said that I wouldn't judge a UI for being ugly, as long as it's functional. With EasyWebinar, I found both aspects lacking. The real complaint I have about the UI is that it makes things difficult for me. Blind editing of landing pages is cumbersome and slows me down. And even the embed options didn't feel smooth or accessible.

Also, this UI is not intuitive. If you aren't used to crawling through unfamiliar interfaces, I think you'd find aspects of working in EasyWebinar downright frustrating.

The Webinar Room

Let's take a look at what we find in the webinar room and wha the experiences of hosting and attending an EasyWebinar event are like.

As a host, you'll see a screen on which you can select and test your audio and video inputs. After this, you enter the webinar room.

The view is fairly simple and intuitive. It also reflects almost exactly what your attendees will see during the webinar. Here's the attendee view:

The Offer Feature

In EasyWebinar, you can set up one or more offers to display during your webinar. You can choose when to start displaying the offer during your live event and it appears at the top of the chat area. Here's an example of what an offer looks like:

An offer consists of a title, a button and optionally a countdown timer. The placement of the offer is well chosen: it's an attention-grabbing position on the screen, without obstructing the view to your webinar content. The offer will be visible to every participant and can't be dismissed or hidden by them.

The weird thing about offers in EasyWebinar is that you can choose from a gallery of buttons, but you can't customize the buttons. The buttons appear to be image based. As with other aspects of EasyWebinar, it just feels oddly outdated.

Conspicuously Missing

The main thing I noticed when testing the EasyWebinar webinar room was that it felt a bit bare-bones compared to the many other webinar solutions I've tested. Here are a few things that many competitors offer, that are missing in EasyWebinar:

• No Questions & Answers: there's a live chat area, but no separate or explicit way to manage questions and answers. This is a problem especially for webinars to large crowds. Important questions will get drowned out in the general chatter. What's extra frustrating is that the chat interface jumps down to the latest message whenever a new one appears. This makes managing questions almost impossible.
• No Whiteboard: unlike many competing solutions, EasyWebinar doesn't offer a whiteboard feature that lets you draw or write on the screen or on top of the screen you're currently sharing. A whiteboard isn't a must-have feature, but it can be a valuable and engaging teaching tool.
• No Polls or Surveys: there's no way to prepare and display polls or surveys during your webinar.

That's No Poll!

What's especially grievous is that 2 of these missing things are explicitly advertised on the EasyWebinar features page:

Technically, what's shown here is defensible because the small print mentions that both "polling" and "questions and answers" are to be dine via the live chat feature. It's still highly misleading, though. Putting these two things in the list with their own icon and title makes the customer expect features that aren't present in the software.

Especially the "poll your audience" feature is a ridiculous claim. Asking a question and then reading through chat responses is not how polling works and the creators of EasyWebinar are surely aware of this.

EasyWebinar Pricing

Let's take a look at the pricing and take a look at how it compares to other webinar tools.

The pricing starts at $78/month for 100 seats, which is a decent price.

The most interesting option is the $129/month tier, which comes with all the features unlocked and up to 500 live attendees for your events. This is a really good price for a 500 seat webinar room. To name just 2 comparisons, the same capacity costs $249/month with GoToWebinar and $195 with CrowdCast.

That's my take on EasyWebinar. I have since completed my roundup review and comparison of all the webinar platforms I tested. You can find it, and my final conclusions, here.