Tools for hosting webinars have become vital for businesses, solopreneurs, and educators to connect with their audiences like never before.
But let’s face it, some apps are better than others.
To make sure you’re on a reliable system, with solid connectivity and security, we’ve made a list of the top 10 webinar tools on the market today.
Each platform for hosting webinars will allow you to run a video call for a large audience, but here’s a list of the more specific features that you may want to prioritize:
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Ease of use. It’s great to put on an impressive show, but if every conference gives you and your attendees a headache, it isn’t the right webinar software for you.
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High-quality video and audio. Sound and visual quality have come on leaps and bounds, so it’s hard to go wrong.
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Interactive elements. Live chat, polls, Q&A sessions, and breakout rooms are all possible with the best webinar software.
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Supporting functionalities. A lot goes on behind the scenes of a successful webinar. How easily can your audience sign up, log in, and access documents?
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AI tech. Live captions, transcriptions, summaries, and automated follow-up tasks — artificial intelligence is now included with many tools for hosting webinars.
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Screen sharing and recording. Run high-quality presentations and save them for non-attendees to catch up.
1. Bitrix24 — The all-in-one webinar solution
One of the best free tools for hosting webinars, Bitrix24’s free version allows you to gather internal and external participants, including organizers, panelists, and your audience. All attendees can keep themselves safe and their surroundings private with encrypted data transfer, private entry links, and custom or blurred backgrounds.
Bitrix24’s HD video and audio quality, real-time chat, document transfer, and screen sharing set the stage for productive collaboration, and you can record both audio and video so people who couldn’t make it or are in other time zones can catch up later.
However, perhaps the most impressive feature is CoPilot, Bitrix24’s AI assistant that can transcribe your entire conversation. Ideal for no-effort note-taking, it will detect topic changes and create instant summaries, talking points, and translations to send out to attendees via the Bitrix24 CRM.
Bitrix24 competes with the most well-known tools for hosting webinars despite offering far more than just video conferencing. Seamless integrations with native calendars, email invites and customizable reminders, CRM, and task management tools make this the best webinar software for scheduling events, gathering leads, and creating follow-up roadmaps.
HD video and audio, screen sharing, and recording - Bitrix24’s tools for webinars are a true breakthrough.
Rapid, smart content creation and collaboration allows you to launch webinars quickly and efficiently.
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2. GoTo Webinar — Professional quality for large audiences
GoTo Webinar has been a leading platform for hosting webinars for some time now and is known for its crisp video and audio quality. Whether you’re running a classic webinar, a recorded session, or live streaming to 3,000 people, GoTo Webinar can take care of it.
The GoTo team knows that attendance isn’t enough, you need attention. That’s why it detects the attentiveness of your participants and alerts you when levels drop. To remedy the situation, launch a poll or a slide-in question to get that engagement back.
Outside of the video call setting, GoTo Webinar has supplementary functions such as customizable invites and reminders to ensure a good turnout. After the webinar, you can send follow-ups with a call-to-action to leave a lasting impression.
These features come at quite a cost, so GoTo Webinar isn’t ideal for small businesses on a budget. However, if your business model revolves around serious tools for hosting webinars, it’s a safe bet.
3. BigMarker — Mass webinars with marketing integrations
BigMarker’s claim to fame is that it’s the first end-to-end webinar solution, from landing pages advertising your webinars all the way through to CRM follow-ups. It may not be the only end-to-end service on the market today, but the holistic approach including automations, audience engagement, and detailed analytics makes it a solid contender.
Part of their end-to-end workflow manifests itself in a close connection between webinars and marketing. Built-in services like customizable email invitations, automated reminders, and even social media promotion. The result is a bigger audience that is more likely to attend.
BigMarker’s best feature is surely its scalability. From small meetings to online events for up to 50,000 attendees, the sky's the limit. All of this is possible through your web browser, meaning neither you nor your participants need to download anything.
4. Webex — Custom branding for 100,000 attendees
Webex is one of the leading tools for hosting webinars with extensive customizable branding options and interactivity. By incorporating logos, brand colors, and personalized backgrounds, you create a professional environment that familiarizes your audience with your product.
Once your webinar is underway, you can keep attendees engaged with live polling, Q&A sessions, and a chat function. Split your audience into breakout rooms, each with a whiteboard, before returning to the main webinar with fresh ideas.
Where Webex really excels is in its accessibility. If the capacity of 100,000 attendees isn’t enough, you can also display automated captions, translate them into over 100 languages, and even include live interpreters. However, you will need to integrate Webex with a dedicated CRM to retrieve contact details and go to the next step of your sales journey.
5. Demio — The “hassle-free” webinar software
From the complex end to one of the simplest tools for hosting webinars, Demio describes itself as “hassle-free” software for mobile and your browser. Even so, you get some impressive features such as engagement analytics, registration tracking, on-demand and automated webinars, and room for up to 3000 guests. On the admin side, 10 people on stage and 50 admins can save the day if anything goes wrong.
The interface is clean and easy to use, making it a pure-breed marketing system that teams with little technical expertise can master without any training. In live webinars, you can run polls, an interactive chat, and Q&A sessions to make the session more dynamic.
Unsurprisingly, this no-frills approach means you won’t get many customization or branding options. You may also find difficulties scaling up to exceptionally large audiences, and more expensive tools do offer more depth and capabilities.
6. Zoom — Familiarity and stability for online conferences
Zoom is probably the most used webinar software on the internet, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the best. It’s a clean interface, known for its reliability, and almost everyone you invite will be familiar with the app. However, some webinar-specific tools like marketing automation, custom branding, and engagement analytics are lacking.
On the plus side, Zoom has an excellent suite of interactive features including live chat, polls, Q&A sessions, and breakout rooms for more focused collaboration. The platform offers free tools for hosting webinars, but limits you to 40 minutes, pushing you to upgrade if you want a full hour.
Ultimately, Zoom is designed for meetings, so it’s a bit cumbersome when running webinars. Getting 1,000 is an add-on to enterprise and comes with an eye-watering cost, and with no native CRM integrations, you need to download participant data to a CSV file and hope it translates to your database with no errors.
7. Sessions — An affordable, interactive webinar platform
Sessions provides free tools for hosting webinars to get you started, albeit rather limited in attendees. Even so, you can spice up your events with chat, whiteboards, and polls, as well as send takeaway content without paying a penny.
However, Sessions really comes into its own on the paid tiers, which bring in custom landing pages, breakout rooms, branding, and cloud recording. Integrations are still in their early stage, allowing you to sync and share your calendar, but it’s not as easy to channel all your attendee data into a CRM for marketing purposes.
Like Bitrix24, Sessions boasts AI capabilities that streamline your experience. It will write up meeting agendas in seconds, launch intelligent polls, create full transcripts with time codes and names, and summarize your entire webinar, highlighting the main talking points. All in all, Sessions provides a solid webinar solution at a price that undercuts its more expensive competitors by some margin.
8. WebinarJam — Automation and AI-powered webinars
WebinarJam is another of our tools for hosting webinars that incorporate artificial intelligence into the planning process, giving you more time to focus on the session itself. Your job is to enter the duration, topic, and audience, and the AI agenda planner will write up a structure that you can later jump in and edit.
For marketers, the ability to record a session and then run it again live automates a powerful source of lead generation. The same feature allows you to target markets outside of your time zone without spending all night presenting in person.
WebinarJam gives you custom branding options throughout your sales workflow, from customizable registration pages, to email notifications and webinar room designs. This helps to create a level of trust between you and your brand-new leads with the aim of pushing them further down the funnel.
The main drawback is the learning curve, which many users say can be overwhelming, despite WebinarJam’s insistence that it isn't.
9. Facebook Live — Broadcasting backed by social media marketing
Facebook Live has the unique advantage of being part of a social media ecosystem, meaning you can create event pages and schedule reminders from the same platform. Beyond advertising to your list of followers, curated ads that draw on its vast amounts of customer data will attract key demographics to your webinar.
Of all the tools for hosting webinars on this list, it is probably both the easiest to use and the most limited in terms of capabilities. Designed for any individual to go live at a moment’s notice, it is super simple to launch your chat but doesn’t really cater to business needs such as detailed analytics, email reminders, or custom branding.
The engagement capabilities include real-time comments and reactions, but some of the webinar-specific features like polls, surveys, and Q&As are missing. With Facebook Live, you also run a risk when launching public webinars, as you can’t control who enters, making it an easy target for hijackers.
10. Adobe Connect — Creativity and customization in webinars
As one of the biggest names in software, you’d expect Adobe Connect to appear among the top 10 webinar tools. As a design-first company, it gives you a huge amount of customizations to tell your story against the backdrop of your branding. It boasts interactive storyboards with custom layouts and moveable “pods” to hold your audience’s attention.
The technical side is just as impressive, with real-time engagement metrics and solid reporting giving you insights into how effective your session was. You’ll have all the classic interactivity tools as well as staged learning content, native quizzes with leaderboards, and backstage collaboration between moderators.
On the downside, Adobe Connect’s size makes it pretty complex for new users to get their heads around, and it takes a while to master all of its functionalities. People have also commented that it drains their system resources too, so you need powerful hardware to run it.
Bitrix24: AI webinars on an all-in-one business platform
Bitrix24’s tools for webinars are a true breakthrough in how we see online sessions today.
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Rapid, smart content creation allows you to launch webinars quickly and efficiently
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HD video and audio, screen sharing, and recording offers a vast range of broadcasting options
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AI transcription, meeting summaries, and translation make content accessible and digestible
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Automated lead generation and email marketing take participants to the next stage with no manual effort
If you’re looking to energize your marketing efforts, sign up for Bitrix24 and tap into new customer bases today.
HD video and audio, screen sharing, and recording - Bitrix24’s tools for webinars are a true breakthrough.
Rapid, smart content creation and collaboration allows you to launch webinars quickly and efficiently.
Register Today
FAQs
What are the key features to look for when choosing tools for hosting webinars?
The key features to look for when choosing tools for hosting webinars are
How can tools enhance participant engagement in webinars?
Tools can enhance participant engagement in webinars by offering interactive features such as live chat, polls, Q&A sessions, and virtual hand-raising. These elements get attendees to offer their opinions and stay active and involved. Another way is to use video sharing, whiteboards, and breakout rooms to create a more immersive experience.
What advantages do specialized webinar tools offer over general video conferencing solutions?
The advantages that specialized webinar tools offer over general video conferencing solutions are:
