Zoom Alternatives : Compare Pricing, Features, and Integrations
Zoom Alternatives: Compare Pricing, Features, and Integrations
Let's be real: Everyone knows Zoom. And if you didn't before the pandemic, you certainly do now!
Zoom is the most widely used web conferencing tool in the world right now. People use it to host online meetings and webinars, conduct meetings and town halls with employees and staff, do 1:1 video chat check-ins, and more.
While Zoom can be a video conferencing handy tool, the fact that it's used the most doesn't necessarily mean it's the best option for B2B marketers and their needs. Today, we'll dive into more about Zoom, its functionality, and some of its top competitors.
What is Zoom, and why do companies use it to host online meetings, webinars, and events?
Zoom is a video conferencing platform that became more popular than ever during the pandemic. Aside from meetings, video calls, and live messaging, Zoom can also power online events and webinars.
Zoom's webinar tool includes live broadcasting for marketing and training. It's a great product for meetings, but B2B marketers looking to host incredible brand experiences for customers and prospects will find the personalization and engagement options to be very limited.
What can B2B marketers and sellers accomplish using Zoom?
Zoom offers a wide range of use cases, which can be helpful for B2B marketers. Your audience likely knows exactly how to use Zoom and is already familiar with the tool, which is helpful, and you can expect a baseline level of quality for presentations and webinars.
As a conferencing solution and collaboration tool, Zoom is best in class. The tool offers stellar quality for conference calls, easy screen sharing and collaborative whiteboards, breakout rooms for team hangouts, and robust security features that have improved greatly to meet enterprise team requirements.
However, it's worth noting that Zoom's integrations with marketing automation tools and CRMs are basic. They won't allow you to run meaningful post-event campaigns using event data, which you will likely need as you scale your webinar program.
And Zoom is, first and foremost, video conferencing software. They’re great for video meetings and broadcast-style events, but the tool lacks the engagement and branding features that many B2B brands require for super-polished events and webinars.
Where does Zoom fall short as a webinar and digital event Platform?
Here are some of the challenges marketers have reported when using Zoom for webinars and digital events:
Here are the key challenges we found:
The attendance rate may be lower than expected because people are resistant to attending "another" Zoom meeting
Speaker-audience audio delays
Limited editing capabilities
Inability to clone events
Subpar customer service and onboarding process
Limited customization capabilities
Some customers report glitchy experiences during live sessions, which annoys audiences
User interface for attendees and set up of events is not user-friendly or intuitive
Simply put, Zoom is best suited for video conference needs and falls short of delivering a beautifully branded and engaging experience.
Zoom pricing
Zoom offers a free version and several paid options, depending on what you'll be using it for. depending on what you'll be using it for. The Zoom webinar package starts at $690 per year per license, while the more robust events package starts at $890 per year per license. Features, functionality, and add-ons vary widely, so be sure to check their website for a full pricing breakdown.
The best Zoom alternatives for beautiful and engaging webinars
Here are some of our top picks to go head-to-head with Zoom when you're looking to create impactful webinar content for your audience.
Goldcast
Goldcast is built specifically for B2B marketers to create engaging digital events, from webinars to large-scale conferences. And unlike Zoom, our cloud-based solution doesn’t require any downloads or mobile apps to use.
Goldcast clients include: GitHub, Pure Storage, Zuora, and Amplitude, as well as growth-stage companies such as Drift, Salesloft, Lattice, and Definitive Healthcare.
Companies rely on Goldcast for demand generation and event marketing and love its ability to provide a consistently great event experience, drive event engagement, and capture unique post-event insights with an array of CRM and marketing automation integrations.
Goldcast Pros & Cons
Simply put, Goldcast is built to drive revenue. Our revenue-driving event formula has three key pillars:
High-quality, gorgeous attendee experience
Simple-to-build (and run) events
Limited editing capabilities
All of this is built to increase attendance rate and engagement, as well as drive pipeline and retention for B2B marketers. Goldcast is truly an all-in-one digital event solution for B2B teams.
To see this in action, check out our attendee experience below:
Here's how our engagement data syncs to your MAP and CRM systems, making it easy to pull valuable insights:
Our formula is simple. We believe that in order to drive revenue, you need to provide these three things:
Proven results
The numbers show that our approach works. We see an increase in attendance rates, time spent per event, demo requests, and more when companies use Goldcast for their events.
Rate
every month
Goldcast Pricing
With the Goldcast pricing package, every team of five users will have access to unlimited event types and attendees, as well as our hands-on implementation team to help you set up and execute successful events. Here’s a quick summary:
Unlimited event types: There is no cap on the number or type of events you can hold, including webinars, conferences, and internal events.
Unlimited attendees: There is no cap on the number of attendees you can have at your events. We don’t believe in charging by attendees/registrants.
Hands-on implementation: Our team will now be available to help you set up and execute two event templates that can be used throughout your time as a Goldcast customer.
The simple, no-frills pricing and robust feature set built for B2B marketers make Goldcast one of the best alternatives to Zoom.
Hopin
Hopin is a virtual event software designed to help organizations of all sizes create, host, and manage large-scale virtual summits to connect with team members or external stakeholders.
The platform is designed to handle large events with 10,000+ attendees, and it was one of the first virtual event platforms to raise large amounts of capital ($1B). It falls short, however, for B2B marketers who want to use webinars to drive pipeline and retention.
Hopin Pros & Cons
Bizzabo
Bizzabo is a great platform for businesses that need a comprehensive solution for in-person events. The platform offers registration landing pages, ticketing, check-in and badging solutions, exhibition management, lead retrieval, and a mobile app for in-person events.
During COVID, Bizzabo also added a virtual component to the solution and has become a great alternative to Cvent for hosting large in-person and hybrid summits. But for B2B marketers who want to use repeatable webinars to engage with their prospects and customers, the tool becomes complex to use both for organizers and speakers leading the webinar.
Bizzabo Pros & Cons
Bevy
Bevy is a community events software platform built for community managers to scale events across local chapters. Large enterprises use it to grow their existing communities across cities. This platform is great for facilitating regional events across multiple cities, but it lacks functionality for marketers who want to scale webinars easily.
Bevy Pros & Cons
Welcome
Welcome hosts internal events, webinars, and virtual conferences. Founded in 2020, the company is relatively new to the events industry. In 2021, they switched to being an employee engagement platform but have reverted to virtual events in the last few months.
Welcome Pros & Cons
GoTo Webinar
One of the first players in the webinar market, GoTo Webinar made live broadcasting simple for businesses, particularly for marketing and training and enablement use cases.
Because of its flagship product, GoTo Meeting, which was well-known alongside Cisco Webex and BlueJeans before Zoom and Microsoft Teams were created, the majority of people are familiar with the GoTo name.
While it's a terrific brand for simple webinar software needs, GoTo has some limitations in terms of personalizing and attracting potential clients and customers.
GoTo Webinar Pros & Cons
Livestorm
Livestorm is a video engagement platform used to manage meetings, webinars, and virtual events.
Small organizations use Livestorm largely to break down the barriers between traditional video conferencing silos and to employ an end-to-end video engagement platform for meetings and events.
However, Livestorm is lacking for B2B marketers who want to utilize webinars as a channel to increase leads and create a positive experience for prospects and customers, despite having a wide range of use cases and fundamental characteristics to make a webinar successful.
Livestorm Pros & Cons
Airmeet
Airmeet is a virtual and hybrid event platform used for tradeshows and expos, hackathons, job and talent fairs, town halls, community meetups, and marketing webinars.
It’s a simple-to-use tool that’s built for a broad set of use cases, but Airmeet has yet to see adoption across mid-market and enterprise marketers who want to scale their webinar program to engage with prospects and customers.
Airmeet Pros & Cons
BigMarker
BigMarker is a browser-based online platform for learning and sharing through web conferences and webinars. It was one of the early players in the space but hasn't kept up with contemporary B2B marketers' needs.
BigMarker Pros & Cons
Hubilo
Hubilo began as a mobile app for in-person events and shifted to virtual in 2020. They work with a wide range of event agencies, event management companies, and associations to support their clients' event strategies.
The platform is designed for events with 10,000+ attendees and was one of the first virtual event platforms to raise large amounts of capital (~$150M). Hubilo is a horizontal event platform designed for large events, but it falls short of delivering the results B2B marketers need to drive pipeline and retention through webinars.
Hubilo Pros & Cons
Cvent
Cvent specializes in in-person events. Features include online event registration, venue selection, online and onsite marketing, and attendee engagement.
In-person marketing is well covered by the Cvent solution, but customer engagement through repeatable webinars can be complicated, both for organizers and speakers.
Cvent Pros & Cons
Webex Events (Socio)
Webex Events started out as Socio, a mobile app for in-person events. Then, in 2020, the company pivoted to a virtual focus.
Webex Events works with many event agencies, event management companies, and associations and is designed for large events with 10,000+ attendees. In July 2021, Cisco acquired Webex Events and added large-scale, multi-session in-person conferences to their portfolio.
Webex Events (Socio) Pros & Cons
Brandlive
With Brandlive, you can stream video content for virtual events with a large number of guests. Users can customize virtual and hybrid meetings and event pages, as well as include features like chat, resource downloads, product links, and social integration.
The Brandlive software is mostly used for large, internal, corporate all-hands and town hall meetings.
Brandlive Pros & Cons
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