Compare Webinar Software

Webinar software is essential for direct communication in the globalized world. They allow businesses to broadcast to potential customers and allow teams in multiple locations to talk and interact in real-time. Before choosing a webinar software for your business, it is critical to compare webinar software offerings to do your webinars the way you need them to be.

What Is Important for a Webinar Software Comparison

To determine what is essential for a webinar software comparison, it’s important to analyze numerous providers to understand their offerings. At Softailed, we do that by conducting in-depth research on the functionalities offered by each provider to determine what they propose. We then select which features are the most critical for analyzing webinar software using information gathered from expert opinions, user reviews, and our own research.

Our research concluded that the following eight criteria are critical for comparing excellent webinar software offerings.

1. Features

If you organize webinars for your customers or team having the right suite of features with your webinars is essential for creating a sleek experience, from streaming live webinars to optimized registration pages reducing the effort your attendees must put in before accessing your webinar. Here’s what to look out for when comparing the features of multiple software vendors:

Web conferencing

With web conferencing, multiple participants from any location in the world can interact in real-time. This feature seems basic but is not present with all offers. So, when comparing webinar software, be sure to check if it's possible when needed.

Live webinars

Live webinars are just that – live. With live webinars, you and your attendees can interact in a shared space at the same time, making it easier to get access to organic and instantaneous feedback. This is an essential feature when choosing or comparing webinar software with the idea of offering live events.

On-demand/automated webinars

On-demand events are a feature that offers added flexibility to your event planning and organization. The ability to prerecord and upload a webinar allows you to ensure that registered attendees can pick a time that fits them to view your webinar. This is also a bonus for event marketers, as they can repackage and repurpose content from live events or webinars to provide value to the business.

Breakout rooms

Large online events don’t provide much room for interaction, mainly due to time, issues with moderating, and bandwidth factors. That’s where breakout rooms come in. With breakout rooms, you can split your attendees into smaller groups where they can interact more effectively. It’s also a great feature for networking, which is a crucial reason why people attend events.

Virtual backgrounds

A virtual background adds to the customization of your event. Rather than having an ordinary background for your speakers or hosts, the virtual background feature allows you to create a unique environment that can be used to better display your business and sponsors.

Custom branding

For businesses using webinars as a marketing tool, being able to brand events is a critical feature. Branding also communicates the company’s culture to team members with an individual online presence. From a custom event website to branded streaming, there are multiple ways a webinar software can include your specific branding.

Record events

A great advantage of some webinar software is the option to relive the event. Being able to record webinars allows you to offer more flexibility to attendees living in different time zones or unable to attend your event live. Check for this feature if you’re a business dealing with content creation, attendees in multiple locations, or you plan to repurpose event content.

Replays

With many webinar platforms, replays are simply videos that can be automatically sent to users to rewatch the webinar. It’s also an excellent way for people who missed a part or the entire event to catch up. This feature is super valuable in combination with a recording feature and on-demand webinars.

Registration pages

Creating registration pages can take time and cause frustration when conversions are low. A webinar software with an in-built option to create registration pages is always a plus, allowing your attendees to get access to your webinars stress-free and highly optimized for virtual events and webinars.

Accept payments

For businesses that are conducting paid events, accepting payments is an important feature. There are multiple payment platforms worldwide, and webinar software that integrates with them is valuable because you won’t have to deal with anything yourself. Check for this crucial feature if you’ll be accepting payments for your webinars or virtual events.

2. Pricing

Whether your business is small or large, pricing is always an important consideration when comparing software. You want to keep costs low while getting the best value for your investment. Here are the important attributes to examine when comparing webinar software in terms of pricing.

Free plan

A free plan allows you to enjoy the basic features of a software product without ever having to pay for it. It’s a great way to determine if a webinar software solution is a good fit for you, especially if you’re still making up your mind. And if you’re only organizing small webinars for a few attendees, a free plan may be enough for you after all.

Pricing Plans

Most providers offer multiple plans with a range of different features. Ensure that you match the pricing with the features you need and what counts the most for you.

3. Usage

As a team lead or marketer, you want to get as much usage out of your webinar software as possible. That’s why checking out usage functionality when choosing webinar software is significant. The usage criterion determines to which extent you can use the software and what the limitations are.

Here’s what to look out for.

Number of webinars

This figure refers to the number of webinars a company can run with webinar software per month. Depending on your needs, your company may need to conduct tens of webinars in a month. When picking webinar software for your company, ensure to examine the number of webinars allowed. This specifically applies to people that think about mainly using automated webinars since they usually run around the clock where any limit is reached fast.

Number of attendees

When choosing webinar software, ensure that it supports as many attendees as you need to have in a session. Most solutions will allow you to host a different number of attendees depending on the plan you choose. If you’re hosting large events, this can become critical.

Maximum event duration

The maximum event duration is the maximum number of hours you can hold an event. Needs will vary between businesses, but this attribute is important since any interruption would put you in a bad light. Some solutions will allow up to 24 hours per session, with most offering at least 2 hours. If you need extra flexibility with long events, keep an eye on the options.

Simultaneous speakers

At online meetings or webinars, it’s expected that you are not always talking alone. Sometimes you may invite guest speakers or have a live discussion. For these circumstances, you want to be able to have multiple people speaking. Some webinar software will allow up to 10 simultaneous speakers, with others allowing much fewer. Understand your business needs when looking at this attribute. Go for more or less, depending on what kind of events/webinars you plan to host.

Browser-based

Most users want to set up their webinars without having to download any desktop application to get their webinars out as easily and fast as possible. This also reduces the chance of having any compatibility issues. Browser-based solutions allow you to control the whole software from your internet browser.

Desktop app

On the other hand, with many people working from their PCs, a desktop app is sometimes expected from companies to access the application from one place. If that’s the case watch out for this when comparing software.

Mobile app

The remaining option is a mobile app that allows you to manage the software on the go or even go live from your phone. This can be helpful for people that often travel while taking the community with them.

Language customization

With customers and teams expanding worldwide, multilanguage functionalities are becoming more essential for software tools such as webinar software. Great tools will include the most popular languages to personalize the experience to your target audience. Give your event or webinar attendees a first-class experience by choosing a webinar software that allows them to enjoy your webinar or registration process in the language they are familiar with.

4. Engagement

One of the major challenges with many virtual events and webinars is keeping attendees engaged. According to Bizzabo, on average, only 42% of attendees watch the entire event, from start to finish. To ensure that your event attendees get maximum value from your event, it is important to use effective engagement techniques.

You should choose a webinar software tool that supports multiple engagement options. Here are the ones we included in our comparison.

Chat

A chat helps to make networking and interactions easier. As everyone cannot speak simultaneously in a virtual meeting – likewise for a physical meeting – the chat functionality allows attendees to mention important things quickly and effectively. It’s also an effective tool for getting feedback from attendees about what’s being said at the webinar.

Whiteboards

Bringing up complex topics that need visualization? With whiteboards, you can start showing things while you talk. Draw on a whiteboard and even share it with other presenters to allow a smoother experience when explaining products to customers or when walking your team through a process.

Screen sharing

Screen sharing is another more or less compulsory feature on webinar platforms. With screen sharing, presenters can enhance the visual experience of event attendees with high-quality, intuitive graphics, charts, tables, and pictures. Team members can also use the screen sharing feature to collaborate on complex projects such as spreadsheets, documents, etc.

Emails

The email feature offers you to send attendees automatic messages to confirm their registration for your webinar, remind them right before the webinar starts, or follow up with them to send an offer or reply after the event.

Polls and Q&As

Polls and Q&As are among the most popular engagement tools used across webinars. They offer an opportunity for a large audience to contribute and participate actively in an event. Additionally, they provide indispensable feedback to the event organizer.

Calendar integration

With a calendar integration, you can ensure that your audience does not forget about your event. Your attendees can directly import all event details to their calendar application.

5. Reporting

For every business, constant improvement is a major goal. Getting reports is a great way to get information about your performance and find improvement opportunities. It helps you to create better webinars in the future. Additionally, reporting provides information about attendees, enabling you to make better business decisions.

Here’s what to look out for when comparing products in this category.

Analytics

Analytics is the engine of improvement in the digital age. Strong analytics mean a lot if you’re planning to do more with your webinar data, such as attendee engagement tracking, real-time analytics, and observing key metrics. With precise analytics, you can quickly identify where you need to make changes.

Data export

Doing more with your data also involves using other tools to derive more insights. Therefore, data export functionality may be essential for your reporting. Whether it’s for an Excel spreadsheet or you’d like to have your team visualize your data on Tableau.

Source tracking

For marketers and businesses hosting virtual events, this feature is an excellent addition to help you improve your marketing. By tracking the source of registrations for your webinars, you can better see where your attendees (and potential customers) come from and where they spend their time to tailor your marketing for future events.

Contacts

With this feature in your webinar software, you can view all registered contacts in one place and export them if needed. It’s even more powerful if you use a CRM system that can be integrated with the webinar software you choose.

6. Integrations

Integrations can make using webinar software more seamless. With the right integrations, you can limit the back-and-forth movements between different apps and enjoy a smooth experience planning and executing events. The following points are the most important for a webinar software comparison in terms of integrations.

Number of integrations

With hundreds of software solutions in every niche available on the market, there’s just a chance there’s a webinar software with the integrations you’ll need. That’s why the number of integrations supported on a webinar software platform is a critical factor we consider. Of course, if you’d like to have particular integrations, you’d have to check a software solution individually. The total number is used to give you an idea of how engaged a webinar provider is in offering integration options.

YouTube Live

The YouTube Live integration is a great way to have more people present at your event. You can broadcast your event on your main event page and simultaneously stream it on YouTube. And for events where the number of attendees exceeds the supported limit by the software solution, you can use this feature to broadcast your event to more people without paying extra.

Facebook Live

Similar to YouTube Live, you can do the same with Facebook and stream your events there at the same time if this feature is available.

Hubspot

Hubspot is mainly a CRM software that makes marketing, sales, customer service, and customer relations a seamless, integrated process. Hubspot helps event marketers optimize webinars' outcomes by integrating lead data into your CRM, allowing you to create more customers out of your attendees.

Salesforce

Another popular CRM is Salesforce which makes customer conversion, retention, and relations easier. Knowing who joined your webinars or came in as a new potential client can help you improve your sales pipeline through direct integration with your webinar software.

Zapier

With thousands of app integrations supported on Zapier, this integration with your webinar software makes your work easier and enables great functionality across platforms. Zapier allows you to integrate multiple apps for your team and automate tasks between apps, allowing you to save time and improve your efficiency.

7. Support

Planning webinars and virtual events is stressful enough. You don’t want to run into an issue when planning your event with no options to receive help. That’s why it’s important to compare the level and quality of support when choosing webinar software for your company.

Email

While email may not be the fastest and most responsive support option, it offers a great way to get detailed feedback on personalized issues. Response times will vary between software offerings, with most of the best solutions responding in less than 12 hours. You can check solutions for additional support options if you prefer a faster response to your personalized requests.

Chat

Chat comes in two main options – live chat and chatbot. Chatbots provide automated responses, which can save time and help you get solutions quicker. You’d want to check if a webinar platform offers live chat with human agents for more personalized responses. Live chat is a relatively cheap way to access personalized support, allowing you to enjoy support from anywhere in the world.

Phone

Phone support allows you to get instant feedback on personalized problems. You can check for this feature if you’re in a fast-paced industry and need very little turnaround time on requests. With phone support, you can talk directly with an agent from the software company and get excellent solutions.

24/7 availability

The availability becomes critical when instant support is needed. While not many webinar software providers offer it, it becomes even more of an advantage for those who do. If there is a lot of responsibility behind your events it can be a blessing to save your webinar from being a disastrous event.

Ease of use

When choosing new webinar software, it’s important to consider this criterion carefully. The goal is to strike a balance between features, functionalities, and usability. Good webinar software is easy to learn and has a mild learning curve. We conduct tests to see how seamlessly the tools work. We also gather customer reviews, data from online sources, and expert opinions. Comparing the ease of use score will give you a good indication of whether a webinar software is more suited for beginners or not.

How to Compare Webinar Software

Comparing webinar software should be easy. Here are a few steps for comparing providers with our tool in the most effective way:

1. Scroll to the top of the page for the comparison tool.
2. Click the plus symbol and search for webinar software solutions that you’d like to compare.
3. Each webinar software you’ve selected will be displayed side by side.
4. Be clear about your needs and compare providers in detail.
5. If you’d like to see only the differences between providers, use our filter in the top corner of our tool to see the differences between webinar providers exclusively.
6. To see other webinar software that users find interesting, you can explore the frequently compared section at the bottom of the comparison tool.
7. Exclude providers that are not offering what you need until you are left with one provider.
8. If you’d like a more in-depth look at a solution, click the “Visit Website” button to go directly to the webinar software provider’s website.

When picking webinar software, you’re looking for the best balance of functionalities and pricing. Before picking solutions, it’s best to do as much in-depth research as possible by looking at your business type and size, the tools you already use, and the features that would be indispensable for your business. Depending on these factors, your priorities will vary.

For example, a B2B company will find more use for integrations like Zapier and Salesforce. At the same time, a smaller business may be more concerned about pricing. You can then make a checklist detailing your priorities so that when comparing software, it’s easier to make your choice.

Of course, choosing a new software for your business is a big decision, so it’s okay not to have all the answers with your first comparison. Our platform saves your selection of tools instantly so that you can always go back to your selection later. Feel free to explore tools in-depth, work with our other tools, and then make a final choice.

Get a detailed step-by-step guide on how to use our tools to choose the best software for you in How to Compare Software.

Your Result of Comparing Webinar Software

We’ve examined the main criteria you should check when comparing webinar software. Use the tips shared as a wireframe guide when comparing two or more tools. However, note that the most important criteria to you should pull the most weight when making your choice. Our tool helps you to see how well your chosen solutions compare, but you’ll still need to make that final decision.

If you feel that you are struggling to make a choice, we recommend using our finder tool, which provides you with a webinar software recommendation based on your specific needs. You can also check our best picks to see the overall best webinar software on the market.