Finding the best webinar platform for your brand can be hard, especially when there are so many options to choose from.
If you’ve been looking at the different tools available to host your webinars, you’ve probably encountered tools such as Livestorm and WebinarJam.
Both platforms offer a basic coverage of the features you need to run webinars, no matter what your objective is. But how do they compare to one another in terms of offering, value, and pricing?
In this article we'll take a look at the key features and offering each platform has to offer. Let's jump right in.
How we sourced this data
To make sure we provide you with the best and most unbiased comparison possible, we look at 20+ websites.
These websites include user-review websites, specifically those specialized in SaaS, and the websites of the mentioned tools of course.
Information from these different sources were prioritized in the following order:
- Third party websites (no sponsored posts/content)
- User reviews (G2, Gartner, marketplaces)
- Websites of the tools themselves
Some examples of those relevant sources:
- Livestorm reviews on G2
- Livestorm reviews on Capterra
- WebinarJam review on G2
- WebinarJam reviews on Capterra
- Livestorm reviews on HubSpot marketplace
Pricing, viewer limits, feature list, and customer support options are sourced directly on the website of the tools themselves.
We will try to provide the most unbiased review possible. However, the quality of the viewer experience for each tool is subjective. We will be judging it on the modernity and interactivity of the experience.
Before we get into the key features, here’s a brief overview of the two products, including Livestorm vs WebinarJam pricing and online review ratings.
Livestorm overview
Cost
Livestorm offers monthly and yearly (20% off) pricing plans. They are centered around active contacts: unique people who register or join (one or several) Livestorm events.
- <100 active contacts: $99/month
- <200 active contacts: $198/month
- <500 active contacts: $495/month
- Pricing plans for 500+ active contacts are unavailable
Team members are unlimited on all pricing plans, but some key features only unlock after certain pricing tiers:
- HubSpot integration: Pro plan
- Salesforce integration: Enterprise plan
- PowerPoint embed: Enterprise plan
Free plan: Livestorm has a free plan that's good for testing out the platform internally, but won't be enough for most companies to run a "real" webinar. The plan includes:
- 30 active contacts/month
- 20 minutes/session
- Base integrations + features
- Email support only
Free trial: No. But freemium plan available.
Reviews
Gartner reviews: 4.4/5
Ease of use: 9.1/10
Support: 8.8/10
Support options: Email and live chat (depending on plan).
Platform availability: Online, no download, all devices (mobile and desktop).
Livestorm is one of the newer webinar platforms on the market, and at first glance, it looks like they cover pretty much everything you need to run webinars.
Users report it's relatively easy to use, and having an unlimited team member policy makes it easy to scale webinar efforts as you onboard new people. The price of Livestorm will only increase if you are getting more leads.
However, some features being gated to higher pricing plans can make it very expensive for smaller teams wanting to integrate webinar data into their CRM.
They also offer SSO, quarterly business reviews and technical support consulting for enterprise plans.
Looking for an alternative? Check out our top 10 Livestorm alternatives.
WebinarJam overview
Cost
WebinarJam only offers yearly pricing plans. They are centered around the number of live attendees and the number of host and team member licenses.
- <100 attendees: $39/month (1 host + 1 team member)
- <500 attendees: $79/month (2 hosts + 5 team members)
- <2000 attendees: $229/month (4 hosts + 10 team member)
- <5000 attendees: $379/month (6 hosts + 25 team member)
The limited number of hosts and team members can be problematic when trying to scale events as a channel. Most features are available on all plans except for Automated webinars which are only available on the Basic plan ($79/month).
Free plan: WebinarJam does not offer a free plan.
Free trial: No. However, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Reviews
G2 reviews: 3.6/5
Ease of use: 7.9/10
Support: 6.4/10
Support options: Email or live chat.
Platform availability: Online, no download, all devices (mobile and desktop).
WebinarJam is one of the cheapest webinar platforms on the market, and they offer all the basic features you're going to need to run webinars.
Users report lackluster support options and a platform interface that is not very intuitive to use (both for viewers and for the people organizing the webinar).
They also do not currently offer HubSpot or Salesforce integrations, meaning you have to use Zapier or Make to send registrant data to and from your CRM.
The "Panic button" is a WebinarJam feature to create a new webinar room and redirects everyone into it. Does this mean they often run into reliability issues? Some reviews seem to say so.
Looking for an alternative? Check out our top 10 WebinarJam alternatives.
Livestorm vs. WebinarJam Comparison
As you can see from the overview of Livestorm and WebinarJam, they offer very similar products. This makes it difficult for users that are trying to figure out which solution best fits their needs.
Let's compare these two tools across 5 main topics:
- Live experience (host and speaker)
- Pre- and post-webinar experience
- Viewer experience
- Integrations
- Support
1. Live experience
As a host, the tool you choose is going to have a big impact on your capacity to put on a good show for your audience.
Most webinar tools offer a webinar studio to help you run more interactive webinars. Livestorm has just that: an admin interface where you can create, edit, start polls, manage microphone and camera access, share screen, see live attendees and more.
Livestorm's admin interface is user-friendly even though it offers quite a few features to choose from. It can be easy to get lost between the viewer list, questions, polls, chat, and all the other options. But it gets the job done.
WebinarJam also has its own version of a "webinar studio" to host and animate your webinars. They offer pretty much all the same features as Livestorm but the interface is significantly less user-friendly. Sometimes too many options ends up making a tool harder to use.
Both tools offer similar speaker and moderator interfaces to run your webinar, but WebinarJam's complex (and a little out-dated) interface makes it a more difficult tool to use.
Winner: Livestorm
2. Pre- and post-webinar experience
When it comes to your viewers' experience, Livestorm and WebinarJam are pretty evenly matched when it comes to the pre-and post-webinar experience, and both cover the basic features.
They both offer customizable and branded registration pages, automated reminder and follow-up emails, recurring sessions, automated webinars, and replays (WebinarJam and Livestorm do not record all webinars by default, so be careful if you go with them to run your events).
WebinarJam has a few more landing page templates to chose from (even though their design isn't as modern as we'd hope). But both tools allow you to build your own landing pages with 3rd party tools and send registrants to your webinars via automation tools.
As an organizer, however, WebinarJam users have reported that the interface as an organizer offers too many options and can get quite complex to set up and run a webinar strategy. Livestorm offers fewer (but better) options, streamlining the process.
Winner: Livestorm
3. Viewer experience
Livestorm offers a relatively modern viewer experience and lets you brand your webinar with profile pictures, background images, logos, social links, and more.
Polls, questions, and chat all have their own separate panels - forcing users to navigate back and forth to cover everything that's going on. This distracts users from your content, and reduces engagement on polls (because users might miss them).
Advanced users can also use the Livestorm SDK to personalize the experience even further, but this requires technical knowledge most webinar teams don't have access to.
WebinarJam is by far one of the cheapest webinar tools on the market, and when it comes to the live experience: it shows.
The viewer experience looks like it's straight out of 2010 and will definitely not do your content justice. Too many tabs, an old-fashioned chat, and complex settings are going to distract viewers from your content and negatively impact engagement.
Both platforms let you stream in 720p, but if you're looking for a platform with the best high video-quality and the most engaging experience: you know who to go with.
Winner: Livestorm
4. Integrations
Livestorm integrates with Google Analytics, Intercom, HubSpot, Salesforce, and many other tools of the modern marketing stack. However, some of these integrations are only available on their more expensive plans. Some users have reported that these native CRM integrations are "good enough to get the job done" but far from what they were expecting in terms of quality. Livestorm also offers an API giving tech-enabled webinar teams more flexibility when it comes to running and automating they webinar strategy.
WebinarJam integrates with MailChimp, ConvertKit, Active Campaign, and other autoresponders and CRMs. They currently do not offer native integrations to the most common CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive. However, setting up these integrations can be pretty complex and requires setting up automated rules and "if this then that" conditions. Non-technical webinar teams could find this challenging.
Looking for the webinar tool with the best HubSpot integration?
Check out Contrast for free (4.9* on the HubSpot Marketplace).
Both Livestorm and WebinarJam offer Zapier integrations, allowing you to connect them to 3000+ tools. They both offer actions around the participant registering, attending a live, watching a replay. However, Livestorm offers both triggers and actions around organizing webinars: create event, create session, trigger when webinar is published. This makes it easier to automate the operations surrounding webinars.
Winner: Livestorm
5. Support
Both tools offer very similar support options: email and live chat.
Livestorm has a better help center than WebinarJam, making it easier to onboard yourself onto the tool and solve some of the problems you might run into. They also offer additional support and "Livestorm Learning" on their Business and Enterprise plans, and shadowing by an expert for clients on their Enterprise plans (usually +$10k/year).
WebinarJam's support documentation is a bit of a mess, they answer basic questions you might have but it's more limited when it comes to complex topics. This can be a problem especially considering that you need to set up custom integrations between WebinarJam and your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive).
None of the two platforms is a clear winner, but for clarity's sake.
Winner: Livestorm
Which is better — Livestorm or WebinarJam?
So we just took a look at each of these platforms, but which one is going to take first place?
If your only goal is to run webinars on the cheapest budget possible, WebinarJam is going to be the best option for you. However, it won't be the best choice for your audience or in terms of usability of webinar data in your CRM or other tools.
If you're looking to put on a more interactive and modern webinar experience, Livestorm is the best option. The unlimited team member policy will allow you to scale webinar efforts into other teams more easily, and the integrations to other tools will allow you to leverage webinar data to close more deals and improve your strategy.
Go beyond webinars
Both Livestorm and WebinarJam are great tools for running your webinars.
However, there are many other alternatives to these two webinar tools offering a wide variety of features and pricing plans — and of course don't forget to take a look at Contrast.
Contrast is the most modern webinar tool on the market, covering all the basic features you're looking for in a tool while providing a fun, authentic and engaging experience to your audience.
We also offer tools to help you repurpose your webinar, a Netflix-like branded Channel to host all of your replays and upcoming events, all while providing the highest quality branded video experience on the market and stellar CRM integrations.
