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So, are you looking for the best webinar software for your business?
Is WebinarJam right for your business?
Are there any better webinar software alternatives than WebinarJam?
These are all valid questions that you have to ask before you commit to a webinar software platform because you don’t want to waste your money and time on the wrong webinar software.
In this article, I am going to share with you a very comprehensive review of WebinarJam and also compare it against all its alternatives to help you make an informed decision.
So, how do you choose the right webinar software for your business?
First, you need to know what’s your objective for doing webinars.
For example, are you using webinars to conduct live presentations, workshops, training, or events with your audience?
Or are you planning to use a webinar to sell your products and services online?
Knowing your objective for using webinars can help you determine which webinar software is best for you to achieve your goals.
Next, how do you tell if a webinar software is actually good?
Below are the 9 things that you should look at to determine if it is a good webinar software:
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- Is it easy to use and set up webinars even for beginners?
- Is it easy for webinar attendees to join the meeting? (e.g. do they need to download an app to join? Or can they simply join using a web browser? They can dial a phone number to join the meeting?)
- How many presenters and attendees are allowed? And what is the maximum webinar duration allowed?
- How good are the audio quality and video quality?
- Is there any delay in live streaming?
- What are the types of webinars that you can offer? (e.g. live webinar, on-demand webinar, just-in-time webinars, automated webinar, etc)
- Webinar registration (e.g. ease of registration, customizable registration page, etc)
- Webinar Presentation Features (e.g. screen share, live chat, survey, poll, launch offers and call-to-action, share handouts, etc)
- Are you able to broadcast your meetings and webinars to social media and other external sources such as YouTube?
- Are your live webinars automatically recorded, stored and available for replays?
- Does it offer free and unlimited video hosting?
- Marketing automation (e.g. does it allow you to send automated emails to follow up with attendees?)
- Webinar Analytics (e.g. how attendees watched your webinar and how effective is your webinar?)
Is WebinarJam Good?
Now, let’s take a close look at WebinarJam and see how it fares in all the areas mentioned above.
#1 Ease of Use
This is probably the very first question you want to ask if you are looking for a webinar software provider.
Personally, this factor plays a very important role in my decision when it comes to buying any software because I am not very tech-savvy.
Also, I don’t want to spend money on a piece of software that is going to make my life difficult by giving me a lot of technical headaches when it’s actually supposed to do the opposite.
So, is WebinarJam easy to use even for beginners?
To create a webinar, WebinarJam offers you two options:
- Express configuration with default setting ( your webinar will be ready in less than 60 seconds)
- Full configuration with custom settings (your webinar will be ready in about 10 minutes)
As for attendees, it’s easy for them to join the webinar because there is no app download is required.
They can join the live webinar through a web browser.
#2 What Type Of Webinars Can You Run Using WebinarJam?
With WebinarJam, you can ONLY do live webinars (no, you cannot do automated webinars with WebinarJam. If you want automated webinars, you have to purchase EverWebinar separately)
So, below are three scheduling options available for doing live webinars using WebinarJam:
- Right Now (i.e. this is for a one-off live webinar but there won’t be any notification emails or schedule)
- Schedule for Later (i.e. this is when you want an actual date and time for your webinar and also email notifications to your attendees)
- Always On (i.e. This is a webinar room that can be used repeatedly. It can be for meeting rooms, on the spot training but there won’t be any notification emails or schedule)
Most of the time, you will be using “Schedule for Later” because you want to specify the date and time for your webinar as well as have an email notification sent to your attendees.
Webinar Schedule
If you are doing a webinar, you will probably need to design a webinar schedule.
Before you set your webinar schedule, you have to decide if your webinar is going to be a single presentation or a series of presentations.
For a single presentation, you can schedule a single showing or multiple instances of the same content.
For example, you can create a morning and evening session for the same webinar.
For a series of presentations, you can schedule a recurring series of daily or weekly webinars. And your visitors will be registered for all the webinars within the series.
Webinar Registration
Let’s look at its webinar registration features.
The webinar registration page is important because it’s the first page that people are going to arrive to register for your webinar.
With WebinarJam, it offers a good selection of high converting webinar registration templates for you to choose from.
It’s customizable and easy to edit.
You can choose to put images, text, and even videos on the registration page to increase your webinar sign-up rate.
Also, WebinarJam offers One-Click Registration Hotlink which is an advanced way to allow people who are already on your email list to get quickly registered for your webinar by clicking on just one link.
This is very useful because people will be more likely to register for your event when the registration process is easy and quick.
However, it has been reported by its recent users that WebinarJam’s auto-detect registrant’s timezone does not work correctly.
If you have an international audience, then it might be an issue for you later on.
Webinar Presentation
Okay, this is probably something that you care about the most – running a live webinar.
What tools does WebinarJam offer to help you run a smooth and successful webinar?
- Upload a Keynote, Powerpoint, or PDF presentation
- Draw a mind map with WebinarJam’s drawing board
- Share a video from YouTube or a direct link to an mp4 video file
- Upload small files to share with your audience
- Launch product offers in the chatbox area with a countdown timer and provides a button for attendees to click
- Poll your audience
- Live chat
- Enable attendee to speak
#3 Audio & Video Quality
Now, how good is WebinarJam’s audio and video quality?
Also, is there any delay (i.e. latency) in live streaming?
When it comes to live webinars, we all know that audio and video quality are very important because it can affect the effectiveness of your webinar and ultimately your sales.
Since WebinarJam uses YouTube Live-based technology, your audio and video are compressed.
As a result, you might not be getting the best audio and video quality you can get.
#4 Live Streaming Latency
In terms of delay in live streaming, apparently WebinarJam does not do well in this aspect because it uses Hybrid WebRTC.
Judging from some of the most recent WebinarJam’s customer reviews who reported lag and delays between the audio and video, it seems that this might be true.
So, if there is going to be interactions between you and your audience, you should go for webinar software with zero latency live streaming.
For zero-latency live streaming, you can check out WebinarNinja.
#5 Limit On The Number of Presenters & Attendees
Now, how many presenters and attendees are you allowed to have?
Also, what is the maximum webinar duration allowed?
For WebinarJam, it allows up to 6 presenters and up to 5000 attendees for its most expensive plan.
As for maximum duration, it allows up to 4 hours for its most expensive plan.
#6 Marketing Automation
Pre-webinar and post-webinar email notifications are very important for a few reasons:
- Send webinar details to your registrants to confirm registration
- Increase your webinar attendance rate by sending reminders
- Send replay link to registrants who didn’t attend
- Follow up with your registrants to promote your products and services
With WebinarJam, you can send emails, SMS, and even recorded messages via phone calls.
Each webinar can have up to 10 email notifications before and 10 email notifications after.
Here are four kinds of email notifications you can create inside WebinarJam:
- Welcome message
- Pre-webinar reminders
- Last-minute reminder
- Post-webinar message
If you have your own Email Autoresponders, you can use that too because WebinarJam allows easy integration with a lot of third-party apps.
#7 Webinar Analytics
Analytics are very important, especially if you are using webinars to sell your products and services.
Because it allows you to measure the effectiveness of your webinar and gives you ideas on how to improve.
WebinarJam does a great job when it comes to analytics.
Here is a list of numbers and statistics you will see:
- Webinar Registration Page Traffic (e.g. number of visitors to your registration page, total number of registrants and webinar sign up rate)
- Webinar Attendance (e.g. number of the Live Attendees, Replay Attendees, and the Show Up Rate for both)
- Webinar Engagement (e.g. a graph depicting the number of viewers at a given time, average amount of time any attendee stayed, percentage of attendees that watched the whole webinar)
- Webinar Email Notification Engagement (email open rate, and click rate by registrants)
- Monetization (sales made from the Live and Replay Rooms, Sales Conversion, Earnings per attendee)
Try out WebinarJam and get a 14-day trial for $1 dollar
How Much Does WebinarJam Cost?
WebinarJam offers three annual plans with the cheapest plan at $499 a year.
Both three prices offer unlimited webinars.
Here are the key differences.
The other two more expensive plans allow a greater number of presenters, a greater number of attendees as well as the longer max duration for your webinar.
On top of that, you also get ” Always on live room”, “Panic button” and “control room”.
Now, let’s look at some WebinarJam alternatives.
WebinarJam VS GoToWebinar
GoToWebinar has been around for quite a long time and is an established webinar software provider.
There are quite a few similarities between WebinarJam and GoToWebinar:
- Easy to set up webinars
- No download join ( i.e. Attendees join instantly from their web browser. No need to download app)
- Multiple presenters
- Customized webinar registration page
- Flexible Scheduling
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Free & Paid Registration (i.e. you can accept payments for your webinar)
- Webinar presentation tools such as Drawing board, Polls, Handouts, Video Sharing and Q&A
- Marketing Automation
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Easy Integrations with third-party apps
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Webinar replay
- Data on attendees and webinar performance
So, is there any difference between WebinarJam and GoToWebinar?
Yes, here are the key differences.
First of all, GoToWebinar allows attendees to join via phone dial-in as well but WebinarJam does not allow that.
Secondly, GoToWebinar allows you to offer both on-demand (pre-recorded) webinars and live webinars while WebinarJam only allows you to do live webinars.
In terms of the maximum number of presenters and attendees allowed, GoToWebinar allows up to 26 presenters and have the option to host up to 5000 people while WebinarJam can only allow up to 6 presenters.
Also, in terms of latency in live streaming, GoToWebinar has much much lower latency compared with WebinarJam.
In terms of reliability, GoToWebinar is also much more reliable in the sense that quite a number of WebinarJam users complain about crashing mid-webinar which is very bad for business.
In terms of pricing, GotoWebinar is much more expensive with its most basic annual plan at $1,068 with 100 participants allowed while WebinarJam’s cheapest annual plan is only $499 with 500 participants allowed.
If you want 500 participants with GotoWebinar, you will have to pay more than $2,000 a year.
The only advantage that WebinarJam has over GoToWebinar is that it offers more marketing features to help you sell such as launch product offers in chatbox with a countdown timer.
Although WebinarJam looks much more affordable than GotoWebinar, I don’t recommend it because it’s very limited in terms of functionality and also it’s not very reliable as webinar software.
There are much better alternatives than WebinarJam in terms of functionality and pricing.
WebinarJam Vs Demio
Demio is my recommended WebinarJam and GoToWebinar alternative.
Now, let’s take a look at Demio and compare it with Webinarjam.
Demio allows you to run both live webinars, automated webinars, series of webinars, hybrid webinars, and on-demand webinars.
Basically, it’s an all-in-one webinar solution compared with WebinarJam which only allows you to do live webinars.
Demio also allows your audience to attend with one click right in the browser from anywhere and any device without having to download an app.
Demio’s user interface is very intuitive and easy to use even for beginners.
You can have your webinar set up your webinar within seconds.
Demio has a very clean and aesthetically pleasing design for everything from the registration page to the webinar room.
You can also apply your branding and logo across all of your event materials and eliminate any kind of distractions during the webinar.
With Demio’s, you get unlimited registration, unlimited webinars, unlimited storage and 24/7 live chat support.
On the other hand, WebinarJam does not provide video hosting for you.
That means you have to buy third-party video hosting such as Vimeo Pro or Amazon S3 if you need to store your videos.
For webinar registration, both Demio and WebinarJam offer customizable registration page and auto-email notification pre-webinar and post-webinar.
One key difference is that Demio allows you to add in custom field to collect more information from your audience while WebinarJam does not have that.
In terms of customer support, WebinarJam does not offer 24/7 live chat support, and you can only send emails to the support team and wait for up to a couple of days for a reply.
Personally, I prefer to go with a webinar software provider that offers 24/7 live chat support because I want to know that someone is always to help me when I need it.
Now, let’s take a look at Demio’s webinar presentation tools.
Demio offers a smooth and great webinar experience for both the host and the attendees through the following:
- Zero-latency real-time live streaming
- High definition video and clear audio
- Upload your presentation slides and share video
- Q&A and Poll
- Share handouts, gifts, and bonuses for your audience to download.
- Live chat
- Give microphone or webcam permissions to any of your attendees
- Display an offer for your product any time
On the other hand, WebinarJam does not offer zero-latency real-time live streaming because of the hybrid WebRTC technology it uses.
As a result of that, you will experience a lag between your video and audio with WebinarJam.
When it comes to recording your live webinar session, both Demio and WebinarJam allow you to do that.
With Demio, you can also repurpose it as an automated webinar to drive more sales for you on auto-pilot.
For webinar analytics and stats, both WebinarJam and WebinarNinja offer advanced webinar analytics to help you measure conversion and attendance rates, track retention rates, and offer clicks.
In terms of integration with external apps, both Demio and WebinarJam allow you to integrate with all the email marketing apps and CRM apps.
Now, let’s talk about pricing.
Demio offers both monthly plans as well as annual plans while WebinarJam only offers annual plans.
Demio’s starter plan is about $49/month(or $34/month if billed annually) while WebinarJam’s basic annual plan is $499/year (or $42/month).
For Demio‘s starter plan, you are allowed up to 50 live attendees while WebinarJam offers more.
If you are going to host more people, then you will have to go with the higher-priced plans.
Demio‘s Growth Plan ($69/month if billed annually) allows you to host up to 150 live attendees while Demio‘s Business Plan ($163/month if billed annually) allows you to host up to 500 live attendees.
Although WebinarJam’s basic plan allows up to 500 attendees and more presenters, it limits your webinar to a maximum of 2 hours which is quite a big drawback because you don’t want to have a time duration limit hanging over your head when you are trying to close a sale or give your audience the best experience they deserve.
With WebinarJam, if you want to run automated webinars, just-in-time webinars, and on-demand webinars, you will have to pay at least $500 a year to get their EverWebinar software.
Also, you have to pay third-party video hosting if you are going to upload videos for your webinars.
Lastly, the biggest downside of WebinarJam is that it does not offer you zero-latency real-time live streaming which leads to very poor user experience and might result in lost sales.
So, when you take all these into account, Demio is a much better choice although the price is on the high side.
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Summary
If you are looking for a webinar software solution to help you sell products and services, then Demio is the best choice for you because you get an all-in-one webinar solution that is much more reliable and have better user experience (no delay, no buffering and pixel perfect and high definition quality visual, etc)
Try out Demio for Free (No Credit Credit Required)
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