Zoom Review: Best Budget Webinar Solution?

What Zoom Is Not...

To talk about Zoom in comparison to other webinar tools, we need to first define what it is and what it is not.

Zoom is primarily a tool for online calls and meetings. In fact, it's more similar to Skype than it is to a dedicated webinar solution like GoToWebinar or Webinar Ninja.

You can use zoom for one-on-one online calls or group calls/meetings. In these calls, you can share audio, webcam and your screen, just like you can in Skype, Google Hangouts and, indeed, a typical webinar solution.

Zoom is commonly used by coaches to work with their clients and by companies for internal meetings. It can also be used to host webinars, but as you'll see, Zoom is rather limited as a webinar solution.

Using Zoom

With that said, let's have a look at what the user experience is like. My main interest here is, of course, using Zoom as a webinar tool.

Right away, you can see the corporaty flair of this tool. The dashboard is definitely more functional than aesthetic. But that, by itself, doesn't have to be a bad thing.

From here, you can schedule meetings and, if you purchase the Webinar add-on, also webinars.

When you schedule a webinar event, the options available are limited, compared to other webinar solutions:

Notably weird is that by default, no reminder emails are sent to your registrants. You have to activate those manually - something I highly recommend you do, as it will increase your attendance rate.

Live Meetings & the UI Mess

An event is started via the desktop app, which you need to download and install to use Zoom. Zoom reminds me of GoToWebinar in this regard. Not only do you need a desktop app for both, they also have an outdated and messy looking user interface in common.

The Zoom app looks simple enough to start with. The basis of the UI is this ribbon of options:

The ribbon appears at the bottom of the Zoom application window, initially. It docks to the top of your screen once you start screen sharing.

Once you start sharing your webcam, your screen and perhaps interacting with polls and questions, the UI turns into chaotic jumble of windows:

For your attendees, it's a similar situation. They will see the main video feed in the main Zoom window and additional things like Polls or Q&A appear in additional windows.

What I dislike most about the Zoom experience is that as the webinar host, I have no representation of what my audience sees.

Conspicuously Absent

I don't consider Zoom a "real" webinar solution. This is in large part because many features that are standard for webinar tools are absent in Zoom.

For example...

No (Usable) Funnel Pages

Here's what the registration page for a Zoom event looks like:

If you entered this in a competition for the least conversion optimized page of all times, I think it would stand a good chance of winning.

The image at the top and the logo on the side are optional. You can change the webinar title and you can add a text description. Beyond this, there are no customization options for this page.

Needless to say, if you want to convert as many visitors into registrants as possible, use a custom landing page solution.

No Timed Polls or Offers

In Zoom, you can't create an offer or call to action that you display when you pitch a product.

There is a polling feature, but you can't time the polls to make them appear for your audience at a specific point in time. In fact, you can't make polls appear for your audience at all. Audience members have to know to click on the "polls" icon in their interface and select a poll to answer themselves.

The same is true for the Q&A feature. It exists in Zoom but in my test webinar, it became clear that these features weren't obvious or easy to discover for my audience members.

No Useful Webinar Replays

You can record your Zoom calls and use the video as a webinar replay video. However, there isn't a useful or marketing focused webinar replay feature built into the tool. You can't have a nice looking landing page with your replay, there's no "like live" replay feature with timed polls and offers etc.

No Automation/Evergreen Features

Zoom doesn't include any kind of webinar automation or evergreen webinar features. If you want to create an evergreen webinar as part of your marketing funnel, Zoom is not the solution for you.

The Crux of the Matter: Zoom Pricing

As mentioned above, Zoom isn't primarily a webinar tool. If we simply compare it to other webinar solutions, it looks awfully lacking in many ways. But there are 2 things we need to know about Zoom, to put it into context:

1. It is a calling/meeting tool first, as mentioned above.
2. There's a free plan and a very affordably priced entry-level plan, which makes it a far cheaper option than any webinar solution.

Zoom enjoys popularity with coaches and entrepreneurs because it's so affordable. However, when looking at Zoom as a webinar tool, this affordability comes with a caveat.

The Zoom Webinar Plan

Of the available pricing plans for Zoom, the "Pro" plan is the relevant one for anyone not using it at an enterprise-level scale. 

With the free plan, you can already run meetings with up to 100 participants, but it's limited to sessions of no longer than 40 minutes. The $14.99 plan adds a few features, but most importantly, it removes that 40 minute time limit.

This plan is the one that's situated very competitively, compared to other webinar tools... BUT, it doesn't come with webinar features. Those are unlocked by purchasing a separate add-on which starts at $40/month for 100 seats:

Since this is an add-on to the base plan, this brings the total price to $54.99/month.

Here are the main things the webinar plan adds to Zoom:

• Webinar events, for which the registration process is a bit different than for group meetings and in which all attendees are muted by default (in group meetings, everyone's mic is shared by default and everyone is an equal participant in the call).
• A Q&A feature, separate from the live chat.
• A feature for adding interactive polls to your calls.
• Analytics to show you audience engagement and other metrics for your webinars.
  
  

Is it Worth Getting?

As you saw in the review above, none of these webinar features are particularly well implemented or useful. In my opinion, they are not worth the extra $40/month that they cost.

Using just the Pro plan for $14.99/month, you can create meetings for up to 100 people and you can set your meeting up to automatically mute all participants . This changes the dynamic from an "everyone is talking" group call to a "presenter with an audience" setup, like you have in a webinar.

To be clear: this doesn't give you a particularly good webinar solution, but at least it's very affordable.

That concludes my (perhaps unusual) take on Zoom. Since originally publishing this review, I've completed my epic roundup/comparison of 9 different webinar platforms. Check it out here.