Best Webinar Software: Massive Roundup Review!

what is the best webinar software that is what I've been trying to find out and to do so I tested nine different webinar platforms and this is my roundup review comparing all of them here I'll tell you which ones are the best for which purpose which ones you absolutely have to avoid and why we'll do an actual price comparison between these platforms which can be quite tricky and I'll give you my overall top recommendation and as you'll see this review is a bit different from what you usually find in a review like this hello I'm Shane Miller from active growth home and I've been using webinars for marketing in my business for a very long time and so I went on a quest to find out what is actually the best webinar solution to use in this video we're comparing the following platforms big marker click meeting crowdcast Demio easy webinar GoToWebinar webinar jam webinar ninja and zoom now I'll put timestamps below this video so you can jump to whichever section is most relevant to you and let me first give you a quick overview over what we're going to be doing in this review and how this is different so my review process was first of all - do you know what you usually do like try all the features kind of kick the tires and so on but importantly what I also did is for each of these webinar solutions I did one full real live webinar usually to a crowd of between a hundred and three hundred people so a real live event with a real crowd and this is very important because you can look at feature comparisons and kind of poke around in the settings of a tool all day long until you run a real webinar under real-life circumstances you can't tell which ones are really good and which ones are really bad and as you'll see in the elimination round that's coming up this was a very important factor another thing I need to mention is that I signed up for each of these software's as a customer I paid for the plan and I did my testing of my webinar so that there is no sponsorship here there's no free review copies or anything like that and I also didn't ask for review access in part to make sure that I wouldn't get special treatment right I don't want to have any kind of conflict of interest or any expectation where they say oh we gave you a free account so we want a good review or anything like that so I signed up as a customer the people running these services had no idea I was doing these reviews until I actually published them [Music] going through all the pros and cons looking at all the features and comparing everything in nine different webinar platforms would take forever as you can see the video that you're watching is not infinity minutes long so what I did here is instead of just kind of exhaustively going through everything I want to compress everything down to what's most useful for you we will take a look at a price comparison of these tools we will do an elimination round where I talk through the ones that you definitely shouldn't be using and why and then I'll give you my recommendations kind of conditional recommendations if this then use that and I'll give you a final top recommendation at the end if you want more details I have a separate review of each of these platforms I have a separate video and written review and I'll link to those as well so if you want to dive in you can check out the full roundup review with more comparisons and things like that and you can watch each of the individual reviews to get more details so just just because I'm moving fast through the content here doesn't mean that I haven't taken a very detailed look at all this stuff I just want to basically keep this as short and useful as possible so if that said let's get into it [Music] to get the right answer we must first ask the right question and what is the best webinar tool is really too vague of a question so here are the criteria that I looked at that I tested and compared these tools against the actual criteria that I believe matter for webinar software our number one I'm looking for marketing features I want a way to display something like a special offer during a webinar and if there's a way to add a countdown or some other scarcity factor that's going to make a huge difference to how profitable a sales webinar is going to be and especially if we're going to be paying a lot of money for one of these tools it should have good marketing features second and just as important or engagement features attending a webinar should not be the same as just watching a long video and that's an important factor it's supposed to be live and it's supposed to be interactive and engaging both of these tools have is just a simple live chat but I really want something more for my money for webinar software so I'm looking for a good way to display things like polls or quizzes or other interactive things during the webinar I want to be able to have some way to manage questions and answers so that even in a big crowd I can I can engage with the most important questions that people are asking and just anything else that helps you make this an engaging kind of two-way communication so it's not just a bunch of people watching a long video next up I also looked at the webinar funnel pages so ideally I want a tool that builds all the pages needed you know registration page confirmation page replay page and so on ideally all of that is built-in and it looks good and it's conversion focused and it's customizable alternatively I want to make it as easy as possible to integrate a webinar with my own landing pages of my own funnel the worst is when there's just like a really basic almost uneditable registration page for example low conversions I can put all this work into my webinar but then very few people will register for it because the landing page is so lame that is not a good deal next up we have automation or evergreen webinar features so ideally a platform will let you create an evergreen or automated webinar that looks and feels just like an gauging live interactive webinar to the attendees but it actually runs on automation this can be a powerful tool in a marketing funnel now full disclosure here personally I don't do automated or evergreen webinars this is not something that I have a lot of experience with I did look at all these features but if you want to know that this is not the main emphasis of what I tested and looked up next up of course we have pricing I want to make sure that I'm getting a fair deal on my webinar software and then finally there's one elimination feature which is reliability and stream quality because if I'm doing a webinar I have to be able to rely on this platform if hundreds of people are going to sign up I have to be able to rely on the fact that they'll easily be able to join my webinar that they'll be able to hear me that they'll get good quality video or screen sharing or whatever I'm sharing and that people will be able to attend my webinar and not be struggling with having to download and install things having to refresh their browser because it's not working and so on and so forth this is the absolute killer feature you can have a webinar tool with great features but poor reliability and it's just not worth it let's look at a as fair as possible price comparison between these tools if you just look at the different pricing pages you'll see that's a bit difficult to compare because all of them have different kinds of pricing plans for different kinds of room sizes and so on what's usually the case is that it scales with room size so let's say you can pay a certain amount to do webinars for up to a hundred people attending live and if you want more than a hundred people on a live webinar you have to pay more to do an apples-to-apples comparison of the pricing I decided to focus on two scenarios a low budget and a higher budget scenario the low budget scenario is that you want to be able to do a webinar to one hundred people and you want to pay monthly so you want to keep the upfront expense relatively low the second scenario is doing a webinar to 500 people and paying annually and with these two scenarios we can compare all of these tools so with one hundred paid monthly not all of the tools have this plan available have a monthly payment plan available but here's what we see with the ones that do you can see that there's one outlier right on the side here which is zoom meetings for $15 a month that is by far the cheapest option I know that zoom is in the list twice also as zoom webinars for $55 a month you can get a webinar ad on resume but I think it's not worth getting because the features it adds just don't add that much and if you want to keep your budget low it's better to go for the cheapest option and more on that later okay next up we see around 50 dollars we can get webinar ninja crowdcast and zoom webinars then around 80 dollars we have easy webinar in click meeting and then going up big marker demo and go to webinars finally the most expensive solution of this priced here now note that in Demio for $99 a month you actually get a room of 150 people there is no 100 room option that's why I added a little note there in the pricing table next if we look at the higher budget option for webinars for a room of 500 people paid annually here we can compare all the options and this is what we see we see again we have one clear lowest price solution but this time its webinar jam with webinar jam I've also separated this you can get webinar jam by itself or you can get the add-on every webinar which adds all of the automation features that are not part of the basic webinar jam offer webinar jam plus every webinar is still towards the cheaper end of the scale but that's why it's in here twice another exception in this list is I've added video because you can get Vimeo for live-streaming with a few additional webinar like features like chat that you can moderate and you can show offers and you can get that for nine hundred dollars per year with unlimited seats so if you mainly do live streams and you do webinars to very large audiences that is definitely worth looking at it's not a fully featured webinar solution but it's something to keep an eye on simply because of the good pricing here so as we can see here a lot of these solutions cluster around something like $1,500 per year and then we have on the higher end outcasts Demio for about $2,000 and finally again GoToWebinar the most expensive solution so that's what the pricing looks like if we do and as straight as possible comparison then we'll refer back to this a couple of times so we can see how you know features and quality compared to pricing with that let's get to the next part [Music] let's go through the elimination round here I'll tell you which tools we can just not recommend at all and I'll give a brief reason why and I'll start with GoToWebinar even though go to everyone has been the tool that I've used the most for webinars in the past the thing is it has reliability going for it but not much else and as we've seen it is basically the most expensive solution zoom plus webinars does get more expensive eventually if you keep increasing the room size but for most use cases GoToWebinar is the most expensive option and while it is reliable it's basically devoid of marketing features and it just doesn't do much to justify its high price so I can't recommend it next up click meeting click meeting has probably the best feature set of all the tools I've tested but the actual reliability the actual stream quality was just bad basically I couldn't use the replay of that webinar at all I had to re-record and it was just not an enjoyable webinar for anyone there most of the chat was people saying that they couldn't see me or couldn't hear me or they tried to refresh or whatever and people just giving up so good features but just not good enough in practice and this is one of the reasons why it's so important to test with a real webinar with actual with an actual audience because in a dry run none of these issues appeared I had a similar issue with webinar ninja now webinar ninja also has the problem that some of its marketing and engagement features are not very well implemented but the reason I'm eliminating it right here is because I had technical issues the stream quality the video quality was just super low even though I was in a fast connection and the stream probably was so bad that first of all the replay was basically unusable and secondly it was just not an enjoyable event for people to see this thing which made them wonder a hold on is my connection bad is the host connection bad what's going on so it was distracting from the actual content our next elimination is easy webinar easy webinar looks promising when you look at the price comparison especially for larger rooms but unfortunately it's just not interesting enough even at a lower price to be worth a recommendation it doesn't have major issues in the webinar itself but it does have a major issue with very outdated looking landing pages and also very outdated UI which is just difficult to use it's just very user unfriendly plus I found that the marketing features and engagement features are pretty lacking compared to the competition the next elimination is for Demio now Demio doesn't really do anything tragically wrong the thing is it's one of the more expensive options it has some good features it has some things that I don't like or that I thought weren't implemented very well but at the end of the day it just doesn't do anything to justify its relatively high price so it's eliminated not because it's awful but just because it's not good enough so after all these eliminations that leaves us with four more tools and three of them I can recommend under specific conditions let's start with zoom zoom I can recommend as the budget solution so as we saw if you get just zoom without the webinar add-on which isn't really worth it you can get it for basically 15 dollars per month and you can do almost the same as you can do if you get the webinar add-on the difference is just not really very noticeable so for 15 dollars a month you can do meetings one-on-one meetings group meetings and webinar like events and it's by far the cheapest option to do so now to be clear this is a situation of you get what you pay for because it basically has no marketing features it doesn't have any engagement features to speak of it doesn't have any funnel pages and so on it is however highly reliable and in this case the price is so low that if that's the priority if the priority is to pay as little as possible and still do this type of event then it is worth using if you get the webinar add-on it does add a few engagement features but in my opinion they're not worth the price because they're not very well done and in general zoom is a bit like GoToWebinar in that it's quite outdated it has kind of a user unfriendly user interface it has this very corporate and business focus and not a marketing and user focus and that is noticeable but again because it's the price the price is basically the saving grace of zoom and it is worth using if you want to keep your budget as low as possible my next conditional recommendation is for crowdcast crowdcast is a webinar platform which kind of leans towards being a social network as well a little bit and it's mostly about like social engagement and things like that which also means it's not big on marketing features crowdcast is recommended if you are a patreon creator and you want an easy way to do patreon exclusive webinars and meetings so with only people who support you on patreon easiest way to do that is using crowdcast also if you want to do webinars where the webinar content itself is just teaching or coaching but you want to sell the webinar so you want people to pay in order to attend crowdcast is one of the easiest ways to do that too and also I would only recommend it for relatively small crowds if you do webinars to 500 or a thousand people or something like that then I would not go with crowdcast conditional recommendation number three is big marker and big marker is the best jack-of-all-trades tool so if you want to do sales webinars and you want to do educational webinars and you want to do one-on-one meetings or group coaching or things like that and you want automation and evergreen features all in one big marker is the best solution big marker is not the best at any one of these things but it's the best solution that covers all of these use cases and even though it's not the cheapest solution it is cheaper than buying one solution for your marketing webinars and another solution for your group coaching for example [Music] that leaves us with my final and top recommendation which is for webinarjam webinarjam has several things that go strongly in its favor and make it my favorite out of this bunch first of all webinarjam is specialized and focused on marketing it has by far the strongest marketing and conversion features during a webinar jam event you can show one or multiple offers at specific times of the event and you can have scarcity factors such as a limited quantity that takes down and even combined with a countdown timer and having this kind of strong front and center offer during your webinar plus scarcity factors it's just going to make a huge difference to your bottom line if you do sales webinars webinar jam also comes with a decent set of built-in funnel pages so that you can have decently high converting branded registration pages and so on and it's also fairly easy to integrate with your own landing page solution if that's what you use and another thing about webinar Jam is that it is the cheapest solution the only downside to the pricing of webinar Jam is that you can't pay monthly so you'll have to pay roughly $500 per year starting with a payment of $500 and that can be a bit of a tough pill to swallow but if you compare it to how much you pay for other solutions on a monthly plan by the end of the year it's actually much much cheaper and that is true whether you get webinar jam by itself for live events only or whether you combine it with the ever webinar add-on to get all the automation features because even combined the two are still one of the more affordable options now if you take that together with the powerful marketing features it also means that with webinar jam it is easiest to get a return on investment webinars can be a super powerful engagement and marketing tool and you know with webinar jam if you just do one sales webinar per year even if you don't have a huge audience even if the thing you're selling isn't very expensive you easily be able to make back the cost of this platform webinarjam specializes on marketing stuff but that's not the only thing it does well it's not the perfect solution don't get me wrong it's not like everything about webinarjam is great but all the things that matter are there you can do great sales webinars with it but you can also do coaching webinars and onboarding webinars and so on it's not just for sales webinars that's just what the main purpose is but you can also use it for other live events and like I said it does everything it needs to do it does nothing extremely poorly and overall it's just the best solution out of the bunch so with that what is the conclusion of this entire roundup review well if all you want is just a simple recommendation you're just like okay I don't want to have to deal with all this complicated stuff and look at a hundred comparison tables or anything like that what is the best one my answer would be for almost everyone the best choice is webinarjam like I mentioned before for some specific use cases there might be another tool that serves that use case better if you're not sure what exactly applies to you and what your use case is here's what I recommend if you're watching this on youtube check out the link in the description which goes to the full written review first of all that has more details on more comparisons but also it has a quiz you can just answer a couple of questions and it will tell you for your specific case what is the best tool to use so check out the description below for the links to that quiz the full review all the other individual reviews and so on and if you enjoyed this review I'd appreciate it if you could leave a comment and like this video because it really helps more people find it as well I'd also love to hear from you if you have any other questions or any comments about this do you have other questions about how to do webinars or what webinar tools are the best any other tools that you think beat my favorites or that I should add in future reviews or just any other comments about this go ahead and leave a comment below welcome to the post scriptum part of this video there are a few more notes I want to add here because quite a lot of time passed between the initial testing of all these tools and the publishing of this final review first of all I have been informed of possible tech issues in both webinarjam and big marker so I just wanted to point that out after I published my individual reviews for these platforms some people said they've been using them and had experienced some problems now this is worth mentioning but I also want to mention that no platform is 100% bulletproof and of course in my testing I can find persistent issues by doing a real webinar but I can't find the kind of issue where you and maybe one in ten webinars is gonna have a problem and even with GoToWebinar and zoom the two platforms that have the best infrastructure you will still experience some tech issues some of the time basically in my experience there is no platform out there we're out of a hundred webinars you will have 100 webinars that are completely free of tech issues I've never seen that and that's just kind of part of the game that's something that we have to deal with so keep that in mind no platforms of hunters and pull of proof and all I can say is that in my test webinars I reported the issues that I found in those webinars or didn't find in those webinars and that has inherent limitations the other update is that I have been contacted by either founders or representatives of click meeting Demio webinar ninja easy webinar and crowdcast after I published my individual reviews and basically all of them saying ok we see the stuff that you've criticized and we're working on updates and improvements and for most of these I know that since my original review was published they have actually started rolling out you know UI updates new features updated infrastructure and so on and I think that's great to see isn't it's great to see that these people contacted me saying ok this is a fair review even though it's negative and we're gonna work on it rather than them just kind of defending a platform that is flawed I think that's great to see but I also want to say that an updated verdict requires many more hours of testing / clap form so from my perspective as a reviewer I can't just go and say oh you made a change let me just update my review and update my video and update the verdict commit in this video that is many dozens of hours of work per platform - - but also from a consumer perspective I would not recommend using a webinar platform that had he choose a couple of weeks ago even if they promised changes even if they make updates let that sit for six to twelve months and see what the situation is then I would much rather use a platform that is good now and has been good for at least last year then use a platform that has just been brought up to date because of severe issues and that is why I'm not updating the verdicts for the time being alright thank you for sitting all the way through this I hope you find this useful its enormous ly time-intensive to do a review like this I might do an update next year like can't promise anything so I hope you find this useful in the form that it has right now

Channel: ActiveGrowth

Views: 125,484

Keywords: webinar, live stream, evergreen, webinar marketing, marketing, online business, sales, review, comparison, Shane Melaugh, GoToWebinar, Webinar Ninja, WebinarJam, Zoom

Id: deat3cK0ZTk

Length: 24min 33sec (1473 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019