The best webinar software for marketers

Your expertise is valuable—sharing it could help you find new customers or better connect with existing ones. That’s what webinars are for.

But no matter how great your presentation is, or how watertight your webinar promotions are, you need to find the best webinar software for the job. If you don’t provide your audience with the right experience, it’s all for nothing.

We rounded up the best webinar software to help you quickly and easily set up a webinar based on your budget, webinar features, and what you want to get out of your webinars. Whether you’re running a paid online class, doing a demo for potential new users, or offering tips in your area of expertise as lead gen, one of these platforms will work for you.

The best webinar software

What makes great webinar software?

People look for different things in a webinar platform. Some only need a simple tool that will allow them to make a webinar, an online live-streamed presentation. Some marketers want various tools and features that allow them to interact with their audience. Some presenters want to be able to record their webinar once, then release the recording as a separate event.

The wish list for webinar apps varies quite a bit. What doesn’t vary is the need for simple and quick webinar registration, a dependable broadcasting experience, intuitive controls for presenter and audience alike, and the ability to track key webinar metrics (such as attendance and attentiveness).

We tested over 20 apps for this roundup of webinar software choices, looking for ones that ace these core requirements, while also adding their own flavor to the webinar experience—be that with live engagement tools, enhanced marketing and branding features, or versatile webinar formats.

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The best webinar software for anyone new to webinars

AnyMeeting (Web, iOS, Android)

If you want to spend more time focusing on your audience and content than learning how to run webinars on platforms with a lot of complex features, Intermedia AnyMeeting’s no-nonsense interface will be your friend as you get started with webinars.

AnyMeeting lets you create and customize your registration form and confirmation and reminder emails, then even invite attendees directly from the app. While AnyMeeting doesn’t have a native way to embed this registration form in your own site, it does give you the option to import registrants via a CSV, so you could register attendees via a separate form app. Through the AnyMeeting Zapier integration, you can also have registrants directly added from the tool of your choice.

When presenting, you won’t have to worry about screen sharing—AnyMeeting lets you upload your presentation file directly to the app and run your slides from the web. You can even stream your webcam at the same time. Need to run the same presentation multiple times? AnyMeeting lets you simply upload a recording of a past webinar to replay and save you time and effort. Speaking of recordings, AnyMeeting can record your webinar for you automatically, so you never have to panic about that mid-webinar.

One of the biggest challenges in marketing webinars is keeping attendees engaged during the presentation. AnyMeeting offers presenters several options for interacting with attendees—all easy to reach from your on-air presenter view. With just one click, you can share PDFs and PPT files—a useful way to offer audiences extra perks, like a copy of the slides, for sticking around to the end of your presentation. View, address, and dismiss audience questions from a dedicated pop-up. Create, run, and display polls to engage and survey your audience. After you end the webinar, you can automatically direct attendees to the URL of your choice, as well as generate a custom survey.

You can do more with AnyMeeting when you connect it to your favorite apps through Zapier’s automated workflows. Automatically add event attendees, put registrants into your marketing campaign, and more with one of these pre-made workflows:

See more ways to automate AnyMeeting with AnyMeeting’s Zapier integrations.

AnyMeeting Webinar Pricing: From $48/month for the Webinar Lite plan, which supports up to 50 webinar attendees.

The best webinar software for integrated marketing campaigns

BigMarker (Web, iOS, Android)

Since every marketer will have different preferences and goals for their webinars, and every company has different budgets to work with, it’s hard to declare one webinar app a definitive winner. But powerful marketing features and integrations combined with an intuitive, flexible interface makes BigMarker a compelling top choice for most business needs. This app is designed to make marketing your webinar frictionless and includes a suite of built-in marketing tools to help you do just that.

Start by customizing the look of your webinar landing page, registration form, and webinar “room.” These can all be completely customized with templates and basic design tools (such as image upload and color/font settings) to suit your brand and webinar topics.

If you want to reach a broader audience with your webinar, take advantage of BigMarker’s “marketplace” of webinars, where you can publicly list your webinar and create a YouTube-like channel of all your past public webinars. These can be discovered in both Google and BigMarker searches—make sure you fill out the SEO metadata fields for your webinar to help its discoverability.

Import lists of email contacts into BigMarker via CSV or through a sync with Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, or any one of the other integrated CRMs. Use these lists within BigMarker to send customized webinar invitations to your subscribers. You can even manage separate contact lists within BigMarker, to send better-targeted email invitations directly from the app.

The webinar presenting process is just as smooth. Upload your presentation before the event, so it’s available to all presenters and easy to access without sharing your screen. Queue polls and document handouts to deliver to your audience at any point in the webinar. For marketers, the best part is its ability to connect webinar chat with Twitter, so that audience members can interact with you via Twitter hashtag, naturally boosting social visibility for your webinar and brand.

BigMarker Pricing: From $79/month for the Starter plan, which includes unlimited webinars of up to 100 attendees. Seven-day free trial.

The best webinar software for custom-branding your webinar

ClickMeeting (Web, iOS, Android)

With one of the easiest-to-use webinar interfaces on the market married to flexible customization options, ClickMeeting is a clear choice if you’re inexperienced with webinars but want more design control over your webinar registration, webinar “room,” and reminder emails.

Run standard one-time webinar events or set up a permanent webinar—which will give you a static room link that you can use again and again. While unfortunately you can’t use this feature to auto-run evergreen webinars, since a presenter or moderator is required to start the event, this does give you a lot of flexibility with sales webinars and running pre-recorded video.

ClickMeeting makes it easy to customize the messaging and branding around your webinar, without being overwhelming. Create landing pages, waiting rooms, and registration forms, all branded with your company logo, presenter image, and even the planned agenda for the webinar. Shift the layout of the webinar room to fit your content needs and presentation style, whether you rely primarily on audio, video, or your slide deck. ClickMeeting also lets you customize key settings, such as auto-record and thank you emails.

Another great feature is ClickMeeting’s WordPress plugin, which lets you embed webinar rooms directly into your website. If you don’t use WordPress, ClickMeeting includes embed codes for registration buttons, forms, and even the whole webinar room on your site.

By connecting ClickMeeting to the other apps you use through Zapier, you can automatically add your webinar registrants to your CRM, promote your webinar on social media, and more with these pre-made workflows:

See more ways to automate ClickMeeting with ClickMeeting’s Zapier integrations.

ClickMeeting Pricing: From $25/month for the Live plan with 25 attendees per webinar. Seven-day free trial.

The best webinar software for streaming to multiple services simultaneously

Crowdcast (Web, iOS)

Crowdcast isn’t necessarily built with webinars in mind. The branding talks more about creators than business owners, for example, and there’s not a lot of emphasis on features like email marketing. But there’s one feature Crowdcast has that other services don’t offer, and that’s the ability to simultaneously broadcast on multiple platforms. There’s built-in support for streaming to Facebook Live, YouTube, and Periscope. You can also stream to any service that supports RTMP, including Twitch and LinkedIn Live. This is ideal if you have followers on all of those platforms—you can meet everyone where they are, instead of trying to pull them to another service.

The actual webinar features are somewhat sparse. There’s chat, and support for polls, like most apps offer. You can also add clickable buttons for links, which is perfect if you have a call-to-action like a product to sell or an event you want viewers to register for. You can set up any of these features before the webinar or on the fly during the webinar itself.

Sparse as the webinar features are, in one way Crowdcast is more powerful than other tools—if you’re willing to put the work in. Users who want a truly custom setup can use third-party software like OBS, Wirecast, or Ecamm Live to set up their stream, instead of the included webinar features. These advanced tools, while not easy to set up, allow for all kinds of advanced configurations: custom on-screen graphics, support for quickly cycling through multiple cameras, and more. It’s about as close to a professional broadcast as you can get.

You can automate Crowdcast with one of these pre-made workflows, which will let you do things like automatically add event attendees to your mailing lists and more.

See more ways to automate Crowdcast with Crowdcast’s Zapier integrations.

Crowdcast pricing: From $20/month for the Starter plan with support for up to 50 attendees (you can pay 15 cents per attendee above that, without upgrading).

The best webinar software for automated, custom follow-up emails

Demio (Web, iOS)

Demio offers webinar creators a straightforward way to set up your webinar in seconds, with enough power to let you really leverage webinars for your marketing. Presenter controls are elegantly effective and simple to learn. But much of Demio’s real power comes after the webinar is over.

Make the most of the work you put into this webinar by re-releasing your webinar as an on-demand replay. Or better yet, capitalize on the scarcity effect and re-run your webinar with Demio’s “Like Live Replay” feature, which gives second-run attendees the same experience as your original audience, right down to interactions like polls and document shares.

While many webinar apps only offer a blanket webinar follow-up email, Demio’s automated rules feature lets you customize follow-up with contacts based on their interaction with your webinar. Did someone join late? Automatically send a replay link in a couple hours.

You can do more with Demio when you connect it to your favorite apps through Zapier’s automated workflows. Automatically register customers for your webinar, put registrants into your marketing campaign, and more with one of these pre-made workflows:

See more ways to automate Demio with Demio’s Zapier integrations.

Demio Pricing: From $34/month for the Starter plan with 50 attendees per webinar

The best webinar software with a built-in email marketing suite and CRM

GetResponse (Web, iOS, Android)

GetResponse is part email marketing software, part marketing automation tool—and it’s great at webinars too.

The webinar part of the software is fairly basic, letting you set up a standard registration form, edit basic settings, and launch your webinar. The presenter view is one of the simplest to use that I’ve come across, while still offering several handy features to engage your audience. In addition to adding and displaying your presentation, you can display a whiteboard, share your screen, live-share YouTube videos, and run audience polls. Adjust the room layout to best fit your presentation style and the webinar itself.

As you’d expect, GetResponse webinars are based heavily on email marketing. You’ll create your webinar by going through a setup wizard that includes building and sending emails to your chosen subscribers. You can even set up webinar invitations as a part of a regular autoresponder.

GetResponse makes it simple to market your webinar to your email lists via customizable templates. Control who gets your emails by selecting only certain lists, as well as adding exclusions, suppressions, and custom filters to any list you want. With GetReponse’s “Perfect Timing” feature, you can even choose to delay the delivery of your webinar invite until each individual subscriber is most likely to open it (based on data from previous emails to those subscribers). If you’re marketing internationally, the “Time Travel” feature is also handy, allowing subscribers to receive your email at your set scheduled time—in their time zone (instead of getting an 8 a.m. Eastern email at 1 p.m. their time).

GetResponse connects to thousands of apps with Zapier, so you can do things like automatically add leads to GetResponse as contacts. Get started with one of these pre-made workflows:

See more ways to automate GetResponse with GetResponse’s Zapier integrations.

GetResponse Pricing: From $49/month for the Plus plan for core features and up to 100 webinar attendees. 30-day free trial.

The best webinar software for a familiar user experience

GoToWebinar (Web)

As one of the first widely-used webinar tools, GoToWebinar is familiar to almost anyone who has ever attended a webinar. While GoToWebinar may not have all the features available from other apps, it offers a dependable, familiar user experience to both audiences and presenters alike.

Running a webinar in GoToWebinar is every bit as easy as running a meeting in its sister app, GoToMeeting. This meeting-first mentality makes it very easy to add multiple presenters and share screen controls between them. This is ideal especially when the presenters aren’t in the same office.

Scheduling new webinars is a quick process, especially when you can copy-paste webinars as a template. Simply add your title and date information, set up any custom fields you want on your registration form, and you’re ready to go. You cannot rebrand GoToWebinar confirmation and reminder emails, but you can add custom text. And GoToWebinar makes up for this lack of customization by automatically offering all confirmed registrants a calendar invitation, so they’re less likely to forget your event.

When you do run your live event, you can add a team member to your webinar as an organizer if you want a second person recording your webinar or want someone to moderate chat and answer attendee questions. Recordings and reports are stored in the cloud and are easily available to download from your dashboard. Follow-up emails offering the replay recording to attendees, non-attendees, or both can be automatically sent by GoToWebinar, so you never have to worry about forgetting to send people your replay.

You can do more with GoToWebinar when you connect it to your favorite apps through Zapier’s automated workflows. Automatically add registrants to your marketing campaigns, add registrants to your webinar list, and more with these pre-made workflows:

See more ways to automate GoToWebinar with GoToWebinar’s Zapier integrations.

GoToWebinar Pricing: From $49/month for the Lite plan for basic features and up to 100 webinar attendees. Seven-day free trial.

The best webinar software for audience engagement

Livestorm (Web)

Scrambling between multiple software programs and settings pages right before a webinar, making sure all the reminders are sent and webinar settings are correct is beyond stressful. Livestorm alleviates all that last-minute stress with a step-by-step approach to building your webinar that makes sure all details are accounted for before registration even goes live.

Starting with the basics—title and description—Livestorm walks you through all the setup for your webinar while your webinar is still in “draft” mode. Add contributors to your webinar, from guest speakers to moderators, to give varying webinar access to more than just the webinar host.

You can embed your webinar registration form on your own site, but for those who need more simplicity, Livestorm’s registration landing page template lays out key webinar details alongside eye-catching Register and Share calls-to-action.

The automated emails Livestorm sends are worth special mention. These emails highlight key information about your webinar and prompt key actions, such as Add to Calendar and Share This Webinar, with buttons, versus the simple link text that other webinar software uses for these prompts. You can customize the branding and messaging in these emails and also decide which emails you want Livestorm to send—such as one-hour reminders, start-time reminders, thank-you emails to attendees, and follow-up emails to no-shows.

During the webinar, Livestorm also offers a small but important twist on standard audience interaction by allowing your attendees to view and upvote questions from fellow audience members. Not only does this encourage your attendees to interact with your content (and each other), but it also gives you, the presenter, the ability to manage your limited Q&A time by focusing on questions that are important to your audience.

To automate Livestorm and automatically track your webinar attendees on a Google Sheet, connect your webinar software to your CRM, and more, start with these pre-made workflows from Zapier:

See more ways to automate Livestorm with Livestorm’s Zapier integrations.

Livestorm Pricing: Free Webinar & Meet Basic plan for unlimited webinars with up to 10 attendees; from $99/month for the Webinar Premium plan for all features and up to 100 webinar attendees

The best webinar software for customizing every little thing

WebinarJam (Web)

You’ve put a lot of thought into your webinar. Shouldn’t it look exactly the way you imagine? WebinarJam is among the most customizable tools on the market. This starts early: you can customize every aspect of the registration form, and even embed it on your own website. You can customize not only how email reminders look, but also how they’re sent—via WebinarJam or through your own SMTP gateway. You can create a custom landing page, complete with a countdown timer. You can even charge attendees for admission, if you want, or password protect your webinar.

You can also customize the webinar itself—you can change the color scheme of the interface, for example, something we haven’t seen in other tools. You can create polls, product offers, and handouts ahead of time. You can share your screen for your presentation, or you can upload your files ahead of time (there’s support for PowerPoint, Keynote, and PDF files). There’s also a video sharing feature: you link to YouTube, Vimeo, or MP4 videos and stream them to your audience. Your webinars can be hosted on WebinarJam, with all of the interactive elements, or you can stream to YouTube Live.

All of the must-have interactive webinar features are here: chat, polls, calls to action, and file sharing—and it’s easy to access them, especially if you added everything beforehand. Attendees can also request to speak, which could make for compelling question and answer sessions. Overall this is a polished and powerful app, and well worth checking out if you want a lot of control.

You can do more with WebinarJam when you connect it to your favorite apps through Zapier’s automated workflows. Automatically add event attendees to your marketing campaign or online class with one of these pre-made workflows:

See more ways to automate WebinarJam with WebinarJam’s Zapier integrations.

WebinarJam Pricing: From $42/month for the Basic plan, which includes unlimited webinars with up to 500 attendees

The best webinar software for automated re-runs

WebinarNinja (Web)

WebinarNinja is for companies who run a lot of webinars, whether paid or free, and offers marketers the most flexibility when it comes to pre-recording your webinars.

WebinarNinja offers four different webinar types: Live, the standard webinar type; Automated, which allows you to use pre-recorded content to simulate a live experience on certain dates; Series, which gives you the capability to run an online summit-type webinar series; and Hybrid, which will let you run a pre-recorded presentation while running things live in chat, polls, and Q&A.

One of WebinarNinja’s most unique features is the Offer widget, which lets you display an offer to webinar attendees directly within your webinar at any time. Extra features like one-click user registration and advanced notification and reminder settings serve to make WebinarNinja one of the most useful and versatile webinar software for marketers.

You can do more with WebinarNinja when you connect it to your favorite apps through Zapier’s automated workflows. Automatically add webinar registrants to your marketing campaign and more with these pre-made workflows:

See more ways to automate WebinarNinja with WebinarNinja’s Zapier integrations.

WebinarNinja Pricing: From $39/month for the Starter plan with 100 webinar attendees

The best webinar software for educators

Zoho ShowTime (Web, Android, iOS)

Zoho ShowTime isn’t jam-packed with features, but it doesn’t need to be. It offers some of the best value of any webinar service we tested, without a lot of compromises. It’s a particularly good deal for educators, who have access to the very generous Basic plan.

All of the features you need to run a webinar are here: chat, polling, and file sharing. You can upload almost any presentation for your slides—PDF, PowerPoint, and video files are all supported—or you can share your screen to demonstrate things in real time. When you’re done, you can record your session to share later, or you can re-broadcast them at scheduled intervals. You can also enable registration of the session, allowing you to collect contact information.

Where ShowTime falls short of other tools is the marketing side. This tool is more-or-less built on the assumption that you will handle promotion yourself. There’s support for registration, and you can embed the form on your website if you want. There’s support for basic email reminders. But none of this is terribly customizable. Still, this software works great for the webinar itself, and that might be what matters most to you.

Note that web users can only open ShowTime in Chrome or Firefox. This means mobile users will be told they can’t open the presentation unless they install the ShowTime app for iPhone and iPad. Keep this in mind when you send out invitations, because for some reason ShowTime does not inform users of this.

You can automate Zoho ShowTime with Zoho Showtime’s Zapier integrations, allowing you to do things like enroll new registrants whenever a trigger event happens in another app you use.

Zoho ShowTime pricing. From $10/month for the Basic plan, which is only available to educators. 14-day free trial.

Best webinar software for high quality video

Zoom (Web, iOS, Android)

Zoom is best known as a video conferencing tool, but the same reliable, clear video that makes it ideal for video conferencing also makes it ideal for webinars, specifically those that are video-heavy or feature multiple panelists. Since Zoom is primarily video-focused, you can count on clear, reliable video broadcasting for your webinars.

Zoom allows you to feature up to 50 panelists, who can all be easily added from your invited attendees. Customize your presentation style to match your content with a mix of video, screen sharing, and streaming video of your presenters. Zoom allows you to show two views side-by-side, so you can, for example, keep presenter video up while running a demonstration on a shared screen. Presenters can also view audience questions in a pop-up window, so you can run highly interactive, panel-style webinars with very little friction.

Zoom also allows streaming to Facebook and YouTube. Once you’re inside your webinar interface, an option in the More menu will let you broadcast to those services.

On Facebook, you can give your webinar a custom name, and choose whether you want to live stream it from your personal account, or from a page or group where you have admin privileges. Select your options and Zoom will take care of the rest, broadcasting your webinar on Facebook, with the content only delayed 20-25 seconds from your original webinar.

The feature works similarly on YouTube. Assuming your YouTube account is enabled for live streaming, just name your video and choose your desired privacy setting, and you’re set. Zoom will notify you that you’re live in the left corner of your webinar screen, where you can toggle, view, or share your live stream on either Facebook or YouTube.

To make things even easier, you can automatically register attendees for your Zoom webinar, put registrants into your marketing campaign, and more with these pre-made workflows from Zapier:

See more ways to automate Zoom with Zoom’s Zapier integrations.

Zoom Pricing: From $40/month for up to 100 attendees

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At the end of the day, the success of your webinar is about creativity and how well you engage your audience before, during, and after the webinar. So as you’re browsing these apps and choosing a tool for your webinar, ask yourself: Which app will best help you and your company to engage your unique audience?

Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash

Originally published in November 2017. Updated with contributions from Justin Pot in May 2020