If you want to start hosting webinars but have no idea where to start, you’ve come to the right place.
Sometimes selling through email sequences or social media posts alone isn’t enough to show your audience why they should buy what you’re selling.
Hosting a webinar and putting a face to a brand, and demonstrating the benefits of your product or service, can be that extra push they need to know, like, and trust your brand. Then you can turn your audience into happy customers.
However, webinars can be as complex or as simple as you want them to be. This is why you want to choose the software that’s able to deliver the exact customer experience you’re looking for. Read on to find the best webinar software on the market and what you should think about when choosing one.
The 5 Best Webinar Software of 2020
- Livestorm – Best for simple webinars
- WebinarJam – Best for highly interactive webinars
- WebinarGeek – Best for EU GDPR compliance
- LiveWebinar – Best for advanced cloud-based webinars
- EverWebinar – Best for pre-recorded webinars
Below, I’ve highlighted what each webinar delivers for each category, along with their prices and best features.
#1 – Livestorm — Best For Simple Webinars
- Very beginner-friendly
- Host unlimited webinars
- HD streaming
- Try their free plan
With Livestorm’s simplicity and ease of use, you can create your next webinar and have it up and ready to go in five minutes. This makes them the best webinar software for businesses that want to create simple webinars quickly.
Everything can be done from your browser without needing to download and install anything for Livestorm. You can host an unlimited amount of webinars with their HD streaming capabilities, so you never have to worry about needing more webinar streaming and hitting your limit.
For instance, if you want to show a live demo, you can easily share your computer screen with your audience with one click. Though their biggest strength is being a simple webinar software option, Livestorm also offers all of the standard webinar features like scheduling, pre-recording webinars to use later, audience insight and analytics, and landing page options to gather leads.
Livestorm’s simplicity goes beyond how they’re built. They let you try them out for free or request a live demo by filling in a few details. Better yet, you can attend their weekly live demo webinar and ask any questions you want during their Q and A session.
How much is software like Livestorm? They offer a free plan, but it only lets you host 20-minute webinars with up to 10 attendees. If you’re serious about using their webinar tools extensively, the next level plan is $89 monthly plan billed yearly, which lets you host up to 100 attendees. You can increase that to either 250 or 1,000 attendees for an additional fee. For the enterprise option and beyond, you’ll have to speak to them directly.
If you’re invested in choosing a straightforward and functional webinar software for your business, I recommend attending their free weekly webinars. It’s a great way to check out everything they offer without any of the commitment. Try Livestorm for free now.
#2 – WebinarJam — Best For Highly Interactive Webinars
- Polls and surveys for attendees
- Drawing board for better presentations
- Real-time participation
- $1.00 14-day trial
WebinarJam might have a fun name, but they mean business when it comes to creating webinars with highly interactive tools.
Webinars keep your audience highly engaged, with features like live chat and the ability to spotlight attendees and bring them onto the webinar with you.
WebinarJam has no shortage of interactive tools to make sure you capture your audience’s attention from beginning to end. For instance, with their polling option, you can quiz and survey your audience in real-time to encourage participation.
If you want your webinar registration page optimized for sales, you can use WebinarJam’s mobile-responsive page builder and split-test which page your audience interacts with most for higher conversion rates.
You can also fully customize your email automation, send interactive SMS texts, handwrite notes on your presentations as you go with their drawing board feature, and integrate clickable offers while your webinar is in session for instant sales.
WebinarJam offers a $1 14-day trial you can use as a test drive. If you decide to commit, they charge yearly, starting with their Basic tier at $499 for 500 attendees, or try the Professional level for 2,000 attendees at $699. Their Enterprise option starts at $999 yearly for up to 5,000 attendees.
If you start with WebinarJam, it’s doubtful you’ll ever have to migrate to another webinar software. They’re that well-rounded. Many marketers love it because the long list of things you can do with the software is designed to make your audience take action. But if you’re still on the fence, I recommend taking advantage of their trial.
#3 – WebinarGeek — Best For EU GDPR Compliance
- Great for EU audience
- Seamless interface
- $11/month for 25 viewers
- Try the free webinar challenge
You don’t have to worry about GDPR compliance with WebinarGeek if you cater to a large EU audience. Their software is fully GDPR ready, so you don’t have to worry about taking that extra step for every webinar.
Their user-friendly interface makes creating your webinar a seamless process, from the landing page to the opt-in forms and each page’s branding. If you happen to get stuck in the process, their live chat goes as far as offering support in multiple languages, as they’re built with the European audience in mind.
WebinarGeek hosts a free webinar challenge to help you launch your first webinar in seven days if you’re starting the process and want some hand-holding. Their prices start at $11 a month charged annually for up to 25 viewers, and $35 a month billed annually for up to 100 viewers with the option to add more for additional fees. Anything beyond that requires you to speak with them to get a quote.
If ensuring GDPR compliance is a particular headache with your webinars, WebinarGeek easily eliminates that problem and provides an excellent webinar experience.
#4 – LiveWebinar — Best For Advanced Cloud-Based Webinars
- Safely store/share files
- HD-quality webinars
- Tons of integrations
- Try it for free
Are you looking for advanced webinar software fully tailored to your business, highly customizable, and cloud-based? Enter LiveWebinar, the most advanced webinar software.
LiveWebinar lives up to its promise by delivering on advanced cloud-based webinar capabilities.
With their cloud-based software, you can easily and safely store any files to share with your audience without worrying about your webinar crashing or being interrupted. What’s more, you can also live stream your HD-quality webinar on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope for greater reach.
LiveWebinar equips you with the ability to invite your audience via video and text to watch from virtually anywhere. They’re easily accessible through your browser without the need for confusing downloads. Once you design your perfect webinar, you can embed it on your site for easy access and a touch of more personalized branding thanks to their cloud-based feature.
If you want to take it a step further, LiveWebinar lets you create quizzes and certificates to go right along with your webinars, turning them into courses. They integrate with Slack, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Aweber, HubSpot, Mailerlite, and a ton of others. If you don’t see your preferred integration as an option, you can always connect it with Zapier or use their API key function.
LiveWebinar’s free tier might not be the best for growing businesses since it only allows up to five attendees. But you can go pro for $11 a month charged annually for up to 100 attendees, or $95.20 a month billed yearly for up to 500 attendees. If you want the capacity for more than 1,000 attendees, you’ll have to contact them for a customized package.
If you want a webinar tool that ensures a highly customizable cloud-based webinar experience that delivers quality, give LiveWebinar’s free trial a try.
#5 – EverWebinar — Best For Pre-Recorded Webinars
- On-demand webinars
- Great for gated content
- Simulate live chat
- Starts at $499/year
EverWebinar is outstanding for creating pre-recorded, on-demand webinars that feel and look live. They’re the best option if you prefer to create pre-recorded webinars that virtually cut your webinar management time in half.
One of their best on-demand features is what they coined as their Replica Replay. With it, you can import past webinars from WebinarJam and convert them into evergreen webinars to play again and again. They also keep every live interaction that happened during the initial webinar to make it seem more live upon rewatching. This effectively saves you the hassle of possibly hosting hundreds of live webinars that repeat the same points and sales pitches.
If you’re hosting a live webinar and don’t want to have a live chat simultaneously, you can simulate one with their live chat simulator. This way, it seems like your audience is actively interacting with you. With their just-in-time option, you can make sure your audience doesn’t skip your webinar if they’re pressed for time, with the ability to watch your webinar within minutes of signing up.
To get access to all of EverWebinars pre-recorded webinar features, you can start with a yearly three-payment installment plan of $199. Otherwise, you can try the $499 annual plan or upgrade to a biennial plan for $799.
How to Find The Best Webinar Software For You
Most webinar software combines marketing automation with video conferencing functionalities. They overlap with the basics like polling features, several automation options, email sequences, and sign up features.
But to personalize things further, these are the points to consider when choosing the best webinar software for you.
Marketing Strategy
Think carefully about what marketing strategies you use or want to use to capture leads, record how your audience interacts with your webinar, and how you’ll segment them to maximize sales. These strategies will help you choose between software options, as some will support your needs better than others.
Some webinar software comes with tools that let you dive deep into the analytics of your attendees. Others are more straightforward and focus on delivering reliable, quality video streaming. It’s up to you to decide the level of complexity you need your webinar software to handle. This, in turn, will be a deciding factor in choosing the appropriate software, attendance limit, and price point.
Business Goals
This guide wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that webinars aren’t only for directly selling your audience a product or service. Webinar software can also be used for online training, video conferencing, and group meetings that don’t necessarily revolve around direct selling.
Maybe you are looking to create video conferencing or online training as well as direct sales webinars. In that case, you’ll want to find software that delivers more than one webinar function.
Reach
Webinar software generally has an attendance cap, which is largely what they use to set their prices. So, if you’re expecting to have hundreds of people at a time join your webinars, you’ll want a more robust software that allows for more attendees without abruptly capping your audience at the last minute or lagging.
However, more attendants almost always means paying more for more software bandwidth. Taking your budget into account when weighing different webinar options is essential. You don’t want to invest in webinar software that ends up costing you more than your expected sales revenue.
Quality and Reliability
HD streaming and connectivity are crucial webinar features if you care about your brand image. If you deliver a sub-par webinar that starts late, glitches, fails to connect with your microphone, or goes off the air halfway through the presentation, your results will reflect that.
Quality matters, especially because chances are you aren’t the only business in your niche offering webinars. Keep in mind it doesn’t take much for your audience to click away, especially if they can’t follow your pitch due to malfunctions. Additionally, while not all webinar software offers HD streaming, it can be an excellent addition if you have the budget for it.
Summary
The beauty of webinar software is that once you find the right one, you can save time and grow your sales quickly by creating a more personalized online video experience that reaches a massive audience.
In my experience, the best webinar software tools to have in your marketing toolbox are Livestorm and WebinarJam. They enable you to create time-saving evergreen webinar funnels you can use indefinitely with plenty of engaging features. You can also try using them in tandem, as they easily integrate with one another.
