Livestorm vs. GoToWebinar: 2024 Comparison
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 GoToWebinar.
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
- GoToWebinar review on G2
- GoToWebinar reviews on TrustRadius
- GoToWebinar reviews on HubSpot Marketplace
- 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 GoToWebinar 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.
GoToWebinar overview
Cost
GoToWebinar has a very clear and cheap pricing model based on the number of live attendees to your events. However, they only have annual plans.
These start at:
- $588 /organizer/year for <250 live attendees
- $1188 /organizer/year for <500 live attendees
- $2388 /organizer/year for <1000 live attendees
- $4788 /organizer/year for <3000 live attendees
This may seem like one of the cheapest pricings of all the webinar tools, however note that it is based on the number of organizer seats, meaning that if you need to scale up your webinar efforts, it can get pricey, fast.
However, some key features only unlock on some of the more expensive plans, notably (with the respective yearly prices):
- Standard: $1188 /organizer/year
— Recording
— Channel pages - Pro: $2388 /organizer/year
— Integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.)
— Source tracking
— No download interface
— Video upload and presentation
Free plan: GoToWebinar does not offer a free plan.
Free trial: GoToWebinar offers a 7-day free trial. This is enough to run an internal test if you prepare everything well, but won't be enough to run a full-sized test event.
Reviews
Gartner reviews: 4.3/5 (252 ratings)
Ease of use: 8.8/10
Support: 8.2/10
Support options: Email or live chat.
Platform availability: Online, download (on some pricing plans), all devices (mobile and desktop).
GoToWebinar is a webinar platform that is part of the GoTo suite (along with GoToMeetings and GoToTraning). They were one of the first players to make it to the webinar market and build a recognizable brand for themselves in the industry.
They focus primarily on marketing and training/enablement use cases and have a basic set of functionalities.
They offer a cheap and reportedly easy-to-use platform for marketing and hosting webinars (even though "User interface" is their #1 con on G2). They provide interfaces to create basic landing pages quickly and interactivity features like Q&A and polls.
GoToWebinar's CRM integrations are lackluster - providing the basic requirements of an integration but lacking deeper features like compound reporting or reporting on replay views. This makes it harder for the webinar owner (or team) to report back to management on the efficiency of their efforts.
Their per-organizer pricing model also means that it can be complex to enable other teams than the core webinar team to run their own sessions.
Looking for an alternative? Check out our top 10 GoToWebinar alternatives.
Livestorm vs. GoToWebinar Comparison
As you can see from the overview of Livestorm and GoToWebinar, 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.
GoToWebinar also offers a "webinar studio" to host and animate your webinars. They offer the same features as Livestorm but the interface is a little less user-friendly. They offer a lot of options and this can make the tool difficult to use, especially in a live context.
This interface is definetly not the most modern option of all the webinar platforms available on the market and can be daunting for people using it for the first time. But it gets the job done and covers all the main features.
Both tools offer similar speaker and moderator options to run your webinar, but Livestorm has a few more useful features (especially when it comes to branding) and set out in a much more user-friendly interface.
Winner: Livestorm
2. Pre- and post-webinar experience
When it comes to your viewers' experience, Livestorm and GoToWebinar 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, and replays (GoToWebinar and Livestorm do not record all webinars by default, so be careful if you go with them to run your events).
Livestorm has features for recurring events and simulive sessions (providing a live experience to the viewer with nobody managing the event), that GoToWebinar doesn't offer. They also provide more detailed viewer data.
GoToWebinar gives you a little bit more flexibility when it comes to emails and landing pages but the design is still basic and far from ideal.
But both tools allow you to build your own landing pages with 3rd party tools and send registrants to your webinars via automation tools.
Because of the additional features and similar ease-of-use, Livestorm takes the win in this category.
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.
GoToWebinar's viewer experience looks a lot like its live experience for admins, moderators, and speakers. They provide very limited features to brand your webinar, and not available on all plans by default. It's not great. Too many tabs, out-dated chat and complex settings make it a distracting experience for viewers and will have a negative impact on engagement.
No-download is the standard now when it comes to consuming content, and especially webinars. This is only available on Pro plans and above.
Both platforms let you stream in 720p, but Livestorm is going to provide a higher quality experience on all plans.
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.
Looking for the webinar tool with the best HubSpot integration?
Check out Contrast for free (4.9* on the HubSpot Marketplace).
GoToWebinar has integrations with Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, HubSpot, Salesforce and other major players. However, these are only available from the Pro plan and above (<1000 participants) so for smaller teams you might end up paying for a way bigger potential audience than you need. These integrations get average ratings across different marketplaces (3.8* on the HubSpot Marketplace).
Both GoToWebinar and Livestorm have Zapier integrations, allowing you to connect them to 3000+ tools. They both offer actions around the participant registering, attending a live and to register people to webinars. 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 GoToWebinar, making self-onboarding onto the tool easier and solving recurring problems or questions 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).
GoToWebinar also provides support documentation in the form of a help center where they answer basic questions you might have but it's more limited when it comes to complex topics.
Users rate the quality of Livestorm's support higher (8.8/10) than GoToWebinars's — even if the options are limited.
None of the two platforms is a clear winner on average across all plans, but the numbers have spoken (and we listen).
Winner: Livestorm
Which is better — Livestorm or GoToWebinar?
So we just took a look at each of these platforms, but which one is going to take first place?
Livestorm won on all 5 categories, however it is quite a bit more expensive than GoToWebinar depending on your volume and needs.
If your only goal is to run webinars while investing the least amount of resources possible, GoToWebinar is going to be the best choice for you. However, it won't be the best choice for your audience and will require extra work to integrate with your CRM or other tools of your marketing stack.
If you're looking to put on a more modern and professional webinar experience, Livestorm is the best option even if it will be a bit more costly. 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 GoToWebinar 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.
