Hosting webinars is an increasingly popular marketing and sales strategy. It’s especially proven to be effective for B2B sales, high-ticket SaaS products and online courses.
The reason webinars are effective is because of the relative scarcity (have to register and attend at a specific time), the personal relationships the host builds with the audience and the educational value of the event.
Choosing the best webinar software is an important step to make sure you’ll maximize the attendance rate, truly engage with your audience, have the tools for a proper follow-up and learn the most important insights using the analytics dashboard.
What Aspects to Consider When Choosing a Webinar Software?
Choosing the best webinar software depends a lot on your goals. In this review, we’re focusing on the marketing and sales aspects of a webinar software.
We’ll evaluate each software based on its features that help you convert visitors to webinar attendees. And then converting the attendees to sales.
The 10 most important factors to consider when choosing a webinar software are:
- What types of webinars can you host? Can you host automated webinars? How easy is the setup?
- How much can you customize the webinar landing page? Can you customize the registration form? Is there registration page A/B testing included?
- Can you customize the emails using the email editor? How well can you schedule the webinar reminder emails to maximize the attendance rate?
- How well are the audience interaction tools (polls, offers, Q&A) features designed? Do they actually help you increase sales during the webinar?
- Does the video engine broadcast the best possible webcam quality without being laggy? Is there an on-demand customer support available?
- Do the presentation tools actually make the presentation easier for you? Does it have slideshow and video injections?
- Can attendees join with their mobile devices? Does the platform support different types of browsers?
- Can you automatically send the webinar replay to your attendees? Can they ask questions during the replay?
- Can you get analytics & insights about the webinar? What can you learn about your attendees and attendance? Can you export data?
- How fairly is the webinar software priced? Is there a trial available?
I’ve actually used every single webinar software in this review and evaluated its features based on these 10 criteria.
What is the Best Webinar Software?
1. BigMarker
Total Rating:
BigMarker is the best webinar software if you’re looking for diversity, flexibility and rich marketing features. It’s probably the most diverse webinar software on the market. You can literally host any type of webinar on it, for example:
- Live webinars
- Automated webinars
- Evergreen webinars
- On-demand webinars
- Live streams
- There’s even a 24/7 always-on webinar room
You can customize the landing page to your liking and add custom questions to it. The email reminders are diverse and flexible.
BigMarker Pros:
- Live + Automated + Evergreen webinars
- Automated webinar timeline builder
- Webinar funnel pages with very different layouts
- Flexible email reminders
- Webinar feedback survey e-mail
- Change live webinar room colors to match your brand
- Whiteboard tool for illustrating the presentation
- Pin chat messages
- Attendees can ask & upvote questions
- Rich audience interaction tools (polls, offers)
- Urgency timer for live webinar offers
- Webcam video filters & backgrounds
- Webinar replay can be trimmed
- Webinar replay editing & customization
- Robust analytics (even for the replay)
- Social Media acquisition tracking
BigMarker Cons:
- No online customer support chat (only chatbot)
- On mobile, the webcam view slightly overlaps with the slideshow
- Trial is limited to only 10 attendees
- Bit expensive
When to use BigMarker?
BigMarker is for you if you’re an experienced webinar marketer. You want to run live webinars, automated webinars, evergreen webinars and live streams.
Webinars are a centerpiece of your marketing strategy and you want a reliable software with rich marketing features and excellent presentation tools.
What’s the price?
The cheapest package will get you up to 100 attendees with live and automated webinars for $ 99 per month.
2. WebinarJam
Total Rating:
WebinarJam is probably the most popular webinar software currently on the market. They’re greatly focused on marketing features and the live room is specifically designed for sales webinars. The customizability on the webinar registration pages is remarkable and the analytics dashboard is very insightful.
WebinarJam Pros:
- The step-by-step setup is easy to follow
- Many registration page templates with different layouts and elements (image, video, …)
- Custom questions on the registration page
- A/B testing for registration page – simultaneously test different variants to see which one converts registrations better
- Emails can be sent from your custom domain
- Diverse email segmentation options – Different emails to attendees based on attendance time and behavior
- Can schedule SMS text messages as webinar reminders
- Choose the live webinar room color theme to match your brand
- Urgency timer and product item counter for interactive live offers
- Separate “Control Room” for the moderator
- Slideshow controls are helpful for presenting
- Whiteboard tool for illustrating the presentation
- The “Panic!” button to eliminate any technical difficulty in 10 seconds
- Large and helpful Facebook community
- The “Replica Replay” mimics the live webinar during the replay (polls, questions & offers)
- Analytics dashboard has insightful conversion statistics (incl. A/B testing results)
- Replay analytics show interactions and attendance during the replay
WebinarJam Cons:
- No automated webinars
- Marking chat messages as questions could be better
- Need a 3rd party tool to download the webinar replay file
- Only annual pricing
When to use WebinarJam?
WebinarJam is a very reliable webinar software and perfect if you’re committed to a long-term webinar strategy. WebinarJam is only for live webinars and focuses very much on the audience interactions during the webinar.
What's the Price?
Even the cheapest plan gets you all the way up to 500 attendees, but it’s still very reasonably priced.
3. GetResponse
Total Rating:
GetResponse is a fully-loaded all-in-one marketing platform. It’s originally an email marketing software, but their webinar features are a remarkable extension.
When marketers build marketing tools, you’ll end up with an extremely useful and conversion-optimized software.
GetResponse Pros:
- Fully featured email marketing software
- Can host Live and On-demand webinars
- YouTube & Facebook live features
- The main webinar dashboard gives a very clear webinar funnel conversion overview
- Huge variety for registration page templates
- A/B testing for the registration pages (and other pages too)
- Exit intent pop-ups (with A/B testing)
- Post-webinar thank-you page
- Abundant customization options for webinar emails (it’s an email marketing platform after all)
- All webinar reminders have a clear “Add to calendar” option that increases the webinar attendance rate
- Very visual and clear Q&A answering during the live webinar
- Chat window automatically recognizes questions and categorizes them accordingly
- Interactive offers have an urgency timer
- Can run survey tests and assign points (great for educational webinars)
- Polls and surveys can have images next to each answer
- Extremely fast customer support chat (under 2-minute reply every time)
- Option for collaborative whiteboard drawing with attendees
- Webinar replay records polls, Q&A and offers
- Detailed webinar funnel conversion analytics
- Email open rates and click-through rates
- Analytics include attendee geolocation and device data
GetResponse Cons:
- Navigating to the webinar reminder emails is not clear at first
- There’s no webinar follow-up email by default. Have to create a newsletter email as a workaround.
- SD/HD webcam quality doesn’t change anything in the live room
- When joining with mobile, the video blocks part of the poll when launched
- They will not host your webinar replay video file. You can only download it.
- Price depending on the size of the contact list
When to use GetResponse?
You’ll get the most benefit out of GetResponse if you’re also using it as an email marketing software. When you’re running webinars and your email marketing campaigns on it, it’s a marketing powerhouse. For combining these two, it’s the best webinar software.
What's the Price?
To host webinars on GetResponse, you’d have to get at least the Plus package, which is only $ 49 / month. It also gets you the automation builder and up to 100 attendees. Not to mention all the email marketing features.
4. WebinarNinja
Total Rating:
WebinarNinja is a super easy-to-use webinar software with a clean-looking user interface. The webinar setup takes literally 30 seconds. It’s a webinar software with a growing popularity and a reliable platform for many successful companies.
WebinarNinja Pros:
- Live and automated webinars even with the cheapest plan
- Beautiful registration page templates and clean user interface
- Customer questions on the registration page
- Thank-you page has a very prominent “Add to calendar” button, which increases attendance rate
- Emails can be sent from a custom domain
- Can customize the email contents and add shortcodes
- Q&A has timestamps
- Connectivity troubleshooter in the live webinar room
- Custom support is very fast and friendly
- Frequent Members Only webinars hosted by the founder
- Different screen layouts for presenting
- Automatic webinar recording
- Detailed webinar attendance & interaction analytics
- Webinar video & email list exports
- Monthly & annual pricing
WebinarNinja Cons:
- Little variety on the registration page templates
- By default, too many email reminders set up
- As a host, you can’t preview the next slide during presenting
- No engagement options during the webinar replay
When to use WebinarNinja?
WebinarNinja is the best webinar software if you want to host live + automated webinars at a cheap price. If you care about a clean user interface and rich audience engagement tools, then definitely go with WebinarNinja.
What's the Price?
The pricing on WebinarNinja is super affordable. The cheapest package is only $ 49 / month and will get you live and automated webinars with up to 100 attendees.
5. Demio
Total Rating:
Demio is the best webinar software if your audience size is under 50 attendees. Demio is the preferred webinar platform for most start-ups and starting webinar marketers.
One of my favorite features about Demio is the focus tracking, so you can analyze when you gained or lost your audience’s attention.
Demio Pros:
- Live & Automated webinars
- Extremely easy to set up
- Minimalistic design on registration page keeps the focus on the registration form
- Thank-you Page has an “Add to calendar” button to increase the attendance rate
- Custom questions on the registration page
- Well-picked webinar reminder email schedule times
- Webinar reminder emails have a clean & beautiful design
- Very convenient to launch polls & offers
- Mark chat messages as questions for better sorting
- Has the option to add a moderator
- Extremely fast & helpful customer support
- Rich knowledge base – Demio University
- Video injections have very good controls
- Automatic webinar recording
- Continuous registration tracking
- Continuous attendance & focus tracking
- Statistics about the attendee interactions (polls, chats, offers)
- The cheapest plan is very affordable
Demio Cons:
- Limited scheduling options for recurring webinars
- Few customization options on the registration page
- Can’t change the “Register” button text on the registration page
- Only 1 presentation layout
- Can’t ask questions during the webinar replay
- No registration page conversion analytics
- No automated webinars with the cheapest plan
When to use Demio?
Demio is the best webinar software for marketers who are just starting out with webinars. It’s also a popular choice among start-ups and coaching sessions.
What's the Price?
The “Starter” package will cost you $ 49 / month and will get you live webinars. The sessions are limited to 50 attendees and 3 hours, but that’s all your need when you’re just starting out.