Explore our detailed Zoom vs Livestorm comparison to understand their most important differences before purchasing. Based on our research, testing, and positive webinar software reviews found online, these are some of the top-rated platforms serving tens of thousands of customers across different industries and locations. With the comparative points shared about each software's features, integrations, and pricing, this post will help you choose the most suitable option for your current business and marketing goals.
What Is Zoom?
Zoom is a widely utilized video conferencing and communication platform founded in 2013, known for its user-friendly interface and extensive feature set. It facilitates real-time audio and video meetings, webinars, screen sharing, and collaborative tools, enabling individuals and groups to connect seamlessly from diverse locations worldwide.
Zoom has become an essential tool for various purposes, such as business meetings, educational sessions, and personal interactions, allowing users to host and join virtual gatherings across different devices easily. If you a looking for a unified business communication platform with audio, video, webinar, and phone capabilities, Zoom is one of the best options in today's market.
What Is Livestorm?
Livestorm is a versatile and user-friendly webinar and online meeting platform that is a pivotal tool for businesses, educators, and organizations. With a focus on simplicity and robust features, Livestorm enables users to host and participate effortlessly in live webinars, meetings, and online events. It offers interactive elements like Q&A sessions, polls, and chat functionalities, enhancing audience engagement and participation. Additionally, Livestorm provides comprehensive analytics to track performance and audience insights, making it a valuable resource for lead generation, marketing, and educational purposes, all accessible through a cloud-based, browser-agnostic platform.
Zoom Vs Livestorm: features
- Automated Webinar Hosting: Scheduling and hosting automated webinars is one major difference between Zoo and Livestorm. With Livestorm, you can set your event presentation on autopilot while busy doing other important things. With this feature, you can automate the start and end of your recurring events and the presentation of clickable calls to action.
- Embed Forms: Unlike Livestorm, Zoom doesn't have embedded forms featured. Using this feature, you can generate webinar leads by embedding the registration form on your website. For businesses generating significant traffic volume from search engine optimization, this is an important feature you should pay attention to.
- Maximum Number of Attendees: Another interesting difference between Livestorm and Zoom is the number of webinar attendees allowed on each platform. While Zoom allows users to host up to 10,000 attendees, Livestorm sets the limit at 3,000 unless you go for the enterprise plan. And that will require contacting the sales team.
- Business Email Limitation – To improve the quality of leads coming through your webinar registration page, you should consider limiting registration to people with private company email (example: jason@company.com). The thinking is that people who use company-registered email addresses tend to convert better when you send premium offers. At this time, Zoom doesn't offer users such a feature.
- Call To Action Buttons - Livestorm also leads one step forward by giving you the tool to create and display call-to-action buttons during a live event. Across many industries and business models, this is an important webinar software feature proven to work for selling products or services to webinar audiences. But then, you won't get such a feature from Zoom.
Zoom vs Livestorm: integrations
In addition to the native integration options, both platforms support seamless integration through an API. Depending on your intended use cases, the API access will help you connect other useful apps for running your business. With Livestorm, you can connect to other platforms like Salesforce, Drift, Hubspot, Intercom, and Miro.
Because of its global popularity and maturity in the marketplace, Zoom App Marketplace offers many more native integration options than Livestorm. From advertising to collaboration to analytics, marketing automation, HR, financial services, and education, you'll find many diverse applications you can integrate into your webinar platform.
For new and old users alike, Livestorm has a dedicated plugin SDK. Depending on your developer experience, you can use the SDK to build plugins around use cases like notifications, chat messaging, emoji reactions, video effects, and live streaming. Livestorm also has detailed plugin SDK documentation to support developers in this regard. From there, you'll learn some other useful things you can do with it.
Zoom vs Livestorm: pricing
Livestorm's basic offer is 100% free forever. However, it comes with a limited feature set or capabilities. For example, you can only use this plan to host 30 attendees for 20 minutes. Moreover, some of the other features in the advanced plan are absent in this basic plan.
With Zoom Meeting, you can hold 40 minutes for an unlimited number of times, but it wasn't built specifically for hosting webinars. You can host events for up to 30 hours per session from all the Zoom pricing plans. And that's quite the opposite of what you'll get from Livestorm, which allows users to host events for 4 – 12 hours per session, depending on your chosen plan.
In terms of pricing, you can host 500 attendees for $79 per month on Zoom, while Livestorm will allow you to host only 100 attendees for the same price. Remember again, there is a 4 vs. 30-hour session limit difference between the two webinar platforms.
On the other hand, hosting 500 attendees on Livestorm will cost you $365 per month. Anything above 500 attendees requires that you contact their sales team for a customized enterprise plan. For people who want to host 1,000 attendees on Zoom, you'll have to pay $340 monthly.
Both platforms offer robust webinar hosting technologies, but the pricing is different. Moreover, signing for and using the addons on the platforms will cost you more money.