When looking for the best webinar software to compare, these two brands always come out among the top contenders. Whether you have used another alternative that didn't meet your expectations or not, our GoToWebinar vs Livestorm comparison will help you make a fulfilling purchase decision. Regardless of the most important use cases you have in mind, understanding the core differences in features, integration, and pricing will make choosing the best webinar platform for the job easier.
What Is GoToWebinar
GoToWebinar is a web-based video conferencing and online meeting platform that enables individuals and businesses to collaborate and communicate remotely in real time. It offers a range of features such as video and audio conferencing, screen sharing, chat, and the ability to schedule and host virtual meetings, making it a popular choice for remote work, team collaboration, and virtual presentations. With its user-friendly interface and cross-platform compatibility, GoToWebinar facilitates seamless and efficient communication, fostering productivity and connectivity among participants, regardless of their physical locations. At the time of this writing, the platform hosts over 80 million events per year.
What Is Livestorm?
Livestorm is a browser-based video engagement platform that facilitates webinars, business meetings, and other virtual events for businesses and individuals across different industries. The company was founded in 2016. With over 118 employees, Livestorm empowers businesses of all sizes to explore the benefits of hosting webinars and other virtual events. When you sign up for the platform, you'll gain access to a unique set of features, including screen sharing, audience polls, surveys, live chat, and analytics. And the best part is that you can use the platform on mobile and desktop devices.
GoToWebinar vs Livestorm: features
- Ease of Use: In subjective terms, it is usually hard to determine how easy a webinar platform might be, especially when looking at beautifully designed sales pages. But when you look at the webinar software reviews on the leading platforms, you'll notice differences from other people's usage experiences and opinions. In this case, Livestorm is known to be easier to use than GoToMeeting.
- Emoji Reactions: Offering attendees more ways to engage during an event improves the overall outcome. Emoji reaction is just one example in this regard. While GoToMeeting offers other options like webinar audience polls, surveys, and live chat, you won't get emoji reactions on their platform.
- Upvoting Questions: Another important area of webinar audience engagement is through upvoting questions. With this Livestorm feature, it becomes easier to understand the exact questions and topics that interest most of your attendees. In addition to addressing most upvoted questions directly, you leverage the insights from the questions to create more attractive webinar topics that align with your audience's interests, goals, and challenges.
- Registrant Source Tracking: Even though Livestorm offers some level of webinar analytics, GoToMeeting provides better insights regarding tracking the source of your registrations. If you are spending some money to attract webinar attendees, this is an important difference between the two platforms that you have to consider seriously.
GoToWebinar vs Livestorm: integrations
Depending on how you want to use each platform, both offer great integration options for new and potential users. Some of the native integrations you'll find on the Livestorm platform include Hubspot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. With these and other options, you can sync your attendee data for further lead nurturing and conversion optimization.
Inside the GoToMeeting platform, you'll find native integration options like Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo, and Salesforce.
However, one slight difference between Livestorm and GoToMeeting is that Livestorm offers more features for advanced email automation. Even with other features, there is a high emphasis on automation when you compare the two webinar platforms.
From the developer's perspective, Livestorm has more detailed and extensive API documentation than GoToMeeting, so if you intend to use an API for any form of integration, you should consider that. The two webinar platforms also offer public plugin SDK for building new apps. Some core integration categories where people find the most valuable use cases include advertising, email, calendar scheduling, landing page builders, and payment gateways.
GoToWebinar vs Livestorm: pricing
With the Livestorm free plan, you can test almost all of the features in their premium plans, and it doesn't expire within any period. However, the plan has some limitations, like hosting only 30 attendees for 20 minutes. Contrary to this, GoToWebinar offers a 7-day free trial on the $199 monthly plan.
Hosting 500 attendees on Livestorm will cost you $365 per month, and the time limit is 4 hours per session. For you to host the same number of people on GoToWebinar, the cost is $99 monthly. However, all GoToWebinar pricing plans require that you pay for one year. Besides the price, you must identify the most important features to achieve your business and marketing goals.
For example, if you need source tracking, unlimited cloud storage, or to accept payments, you must pay for the GoToWebinar Pro pricing plan.
Livestorm's basic pricing plan is $49 monthly, allowing you to host 100 attendees for four 4-hour sessions. Anything above 500 attendees on Livestorm requires that you contact the sales team. On the GoToWebinar platform, only when you want to host more than 3,000 attendees will you have to contact the sales team. Hosting 3,000 attendees on GoToWebinar will cost you $399 per month.
Again, it is helpful to narrow down the most important features you want, which will make the webinar software comparison process easier. Depending on your goal, signing up for some of the add-ons on each platform will cost you extra money.