Virtual Conference Platforms have enabled businesses to organize large-scale expos and conferences online. Due to this ability, the virtual conference industry received a massive boost after the pandemic.
As businesses are re-aligning themselves with the new reality virtual event software was downloaded over 62 million according to BusinessWire source.
Now how to know that the virtual event platform you are looking for is suitable for business requirements and will sustain you in the long run?
So to make your decision easier I have ranked and reviewed the best virtual conference platforms based on pricing, support, ease of use, integrations, attendee experience, features, and more.
So let’s get started.
What Are the Best Virtual Conference Platforms?
Here is my list of the best virtual conference platforms to use this year.
1. Eventzilla
Eventzilla is a virtual event platform that allows you to set up, host, and manage all your virtual events like conferences, webinars, or live streaming.
Its platform is powered by video streaming partners like ON24, GotoWebinar, Zoom, etc to communicate directly via browsers. Moreover, it provides an automated waitlist, scheduled events, and automation of redundant tasks to help improve productivity.
Key Features
- Drag and Drop builder – This feature allows you to build registration forms for your webinars, live streaming, or online events without writing a single line of code.
- Built-in SEO and Marketing Features – Offers SEO-optimized pages for better search results on Google. Plus, it provides other key SEO marketing tools like discount coupons, personalized email campaigns, social sharing, registration widgets on blogs, and more.
- Advanced Dashboard – Eventzilla provides key metrics like registration, overall traffic, and orders in a single view on its dashboard. Plus, it allows you to integrate Google Analytics for further data consolidation. Finally, it accepts CSV imports containing attendee data and regular custom reports.
- Business Integrations – Supports multiple integrations with platforms like Mailchimp, Slack, Stripe, Paypal, Zoho, etc.
- Mobile application – Eventzilla provides a mobile app for event organizers to track attendance, gauge revenue, and monitor real-time ticket sales. Plus, it offers a mobile app for attendees too to access event locations, sponsor details, attendees, schedules, etc.
- Provides other key features such as customized meeting rooms, HD recording, screen sharing, live chat, and multiple breakout rooms.
Pricing Plans
Eventzilla offers three pricing plans to its customers
- Basic – $1.50 per registration
- Pro – 1.9% + $1.50 per registration
- Plus: 2.9% + $1.50 per registration
2. Livestorm
Livestorm is a virtual event platform that offers you to conduct customer training, live events, product demos, and internal communication. Plus, it provides a join-through link feature that allows you to join webinars without any kind of download.
Also, it provides you to host multiple HD webinars that support all major browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and more.
Key Features
- Meeting Scheduler – This feature allows you to set up scheduled meetings in a temporary meeting room. You can embed this meeting using Calendly.
- One-to-one meetings – This allows you to conduct a one-to-one meeting with attendees and share pre-recorded videos, polls, and allow Q&A sessions.
- Multi-language Support – LiveStorm offers multi-language support to its clients regardless of their geographies.
- Third-Party Integrations – Offers integrations with tools like Zapier, Slack, MailChimp, etc.
- Advanced Analytics – Provides detailed analytics reports with participant reports and registrant profiles. It also supports the referral tracking mechanism to understand where the conversion came from.
Pricing Plans
Livestorm offers three pricing plans to its clients
- Basic – Free plan
- Premium – $107 per month ( paid annually)
- Enterprise – Quote based
3. Demio
Demio is also another great virtual event platform that provides you with the creation of registration pages, host, and replay webinars. Plus, it allows you to host your marketing tools to help you promote your virtual event.
Key Features
- Hybrid Events – These are presentations that are having both live streams and recorded videos in the content.
- Template Library – This feature provides you with a beautiful collection of Thank You and Welcome page templates to increase engagement.
- Interactive Polls – These features allow you to create polls that are both rewarding to attendees via handouts or gifts and engaging.
- Custom Data Fields – This allows you to add custom data fields in registration or Q&A forms to extract other valuable data.
- Other Key Features include single-click joining, call-to-action buttons, direct video sharing, etc.
Pricing Plans
Demio offers four paid-price plans to its customers.
- Starter – $34 per month (Paid annually and offers 50 attendees room)
- Growth – $69 per month (Paid annually and offers 150 attendees room)
- Business – $163 per month (Paid annually and offers 500 attendees room)
- Enterprise – Custom Quote based
So now let’s cover the basics.
What Are Virtual Conference Platforms?
Virtual conferencing platforms allow you to host large-scale virtual conferences online. With the rise of social distancing and work-from-home culture, these tools eliminate the need for travel to a specific location and attending physical events.
It is similar to a webinar that offers features like polls, surveys interactive content, hosts, attendees, video recordings, and more.
What Features Do You Need in a Virtual Conference Platform?
Every virtual conference company will provide its own unique features apart from market standard features. It is all varies from a small company virtual conferencing solution to the one designed for large corporates.
However, there are some important features that should be there in a virtual conferencing tool regardless of the business requirements.
1. Third-Party Integrations
Conference calls and video conferencing require many other solutions to function fully to their potential. This is where third-party integrations come into the picture.
The more integrations your platform provides the lesser you are dependent on other business applications. For example, these virtual event platforms in this list offer integrations from Aweber, Kartra, MailChimp, iContact, etc.
2. Conference Ticketing
Any virtual event platform should provide an end-to-end ticketing solution for the registration of pre-planned webinars or events. These features include mobile and onsite ticketing, kiosk management, online ticketing, barcode/ ticket scanning, ticket brokering, etc.
3. Polling
Polling is a feature that allows you to gather public opinions on or during your webinar sessions. The ideal conferencing tool allows multiple polls consisting of multiple or single-choice answers for specifically curated webinar questions.
It should allow you to use this feature as per the scheduled webinar. Also, providing anonymous polling can be of great benefit to collect votes.
4. Breakout Rooms
Moderators can use breakout rooms to divide participants into smaller groups after splitting a large room. These help corporate teams to avoid any overlap in the video session and be a part of multiple teams.
Personalized windows and separate chat groups further strengthen productivity and personalize the agenda for communication.
5. Advanced Reporting
Analytics and crucial for any business to understand the level of engagement happening over a virtual conference. The real-time feedback allows moderators to improve on hosts and other factors almost immediately.
Thus, your virtual events platform should provide holistic engagement statistics on attendance, polls, registrations, etc.
6. Conference Recording
An ideal conferencing platform provides an automatic recording feature. This allows you to later record your virtual conferences and embed them on your website for your attendees.
7. Screen Sharing
Screen sharing tool is absolutely important for remote presentations. You should also look for related features like event apps, virtual event management, HD presentations, chat messaging, whiteboarding, and single-click registrations.
Best Virtual Conferencing Platforms – Final Summary
This wraps up my list of the best virtual conferencing platforms to use for your business this year. I will keep updating the list with more good virtual conference platforms available in the market.
Most of these software tools provide standard features like survey and polling options, private chat, screen sharing, analytics, and more. The thing is that you need to choose the platform based on your business requirements and budget.
Finally, make sure that you go thoroughly through every platform in the above virtual conferencing platform list before making the final purchase decision.
Which of these virtual conference platforms are you planning to use? Let me know in the comment section below.
More from Smashitbuck: Do check out my other articles on the OKR software, BPM software, and grammar corrector to use this year.
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