Wistia vs. Livestorm: Which Live Event Platform Should You Use?

Trying to decide between Wistia and Livestorm for your webinar needs? We’re here to break down the details and help you find the perfect fit!

Livestorm at a glance

Livestorm is an all-in-one live hosting platform that simplifies the process of hosting meetings, webinars, and virtual events for businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.

It comes with features like customizable registration pages, email automation, real-time engagement tools (polls, Q&A, and emoji reactions), and seamless integrations with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot.

Wistia at a glance

Built for marketers by marketers, Wistia is a video marketing platform that helps you create, host, market, and measure your videos. And it comes with a browser-based webinar hosting feature.

Our webinar software makes scheduling, hosting, and managing your webinars a breeze. And after your event ends, you can tap into other built-in features to edit and share the recording, create clips for social, capture leads, and track its performance — all in one spot.

Ready for a deep dive into both platforms? Check out this head-to-head comparison:

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Hosting marketing webinars

Wistia is the better option for hosting webinars to showcase your brand and build your audience. It’s designed to help you seamlessly deliver great content, engage your audience, and easily turn your webinar recordings into evergreen marketing assets.

Team collaboration

It takes a lot of teamwork to pull off a webinar, especially one with a large audience. That’s where Wistia shines. It comes with features that make collaboration easy.

Our webinar software supports multiple hosts, so you’ll have some help moderating the chat, bringing people on and off stage, and changing layouts in real time. Plus, presenters can chat with each other privately via text or voice during the event.

Audience engagement features and customizations

Wistia isn’t just built to make hosting webinars easy for your team — it’s all about giving your audience a great experience too.

You can enable interactive features, like the audience chat, Q&A, and polls, for your audience. If you want to show off questions or poll responses on your virtual stage, you can do that, too.

W’ve got the viewing experience down pat. When you play pre-recorded videos during your presentation, you can do it right from your Wistia account without juggling multiple tabs or worrying about laggy screen shares.

If you’re on a higher-tiered plan, you can use even more audience engagement features like event room customizations. This means you can choose dark or light mode, customize the logo, add a custom button, and set a stage background image or color (which will apply to all the questions and poll responses you pin on your virtual stage). And you can switch between layouts on the fly to create a more dynamic and engaging experience.

Post-event tools

When your webinar ends, you can easily edit your recording for on-demand viewing and turn it into bite-sized clips — all without leaving Wistia!

Just open your recording in the built-in editor and polish it up before sharing it in emails, on your site, or anywhere else. You can also use AI to find the most memorable bits to share on social media.

If you host regular webinars, Wistia’s video gallery called Channels is a great solution for organizing and displaying your webinar recordings. And you can add lead capture forms to turn your recordings into lead-generating machines.

Plus, Wistia’s analytics will help you get the insights you need to sharpen your strategy for the next time you go live. You can see your live event’s data as soon as it wraps up, or you can dive into the data anytime for your on-demand recordings.

Hosting sales-focused meetings and webinars

If your goal is to run sales webinars or meetings and collect leads, Livestorm might be a solid option for you.

With Livestorm’s browser-based setup, participants can join instantly — no software downloads needed. Sales teams will also love its seamless integrations with marketing automation tools and calendar schedulers. Plus, Livestorm lets you blur or customize your background to keep the focus on you.

Marketing automation integrations

Livestorm integrates with HubSpot. If you’re on a higher-tier plan, you can also integrate with Salesforce, Marketo, and Pardot.

Scheduler integration

Livestorm’s scheduler integration feature can help you speed up your sales process by automatically creating Livestorm meetings through your Google or Outlook calendar.

Which one is better for your business?

Now that we’ve compared Livestorm and Wistia, we hope you have a clearer picture of what each platform can do for you. Livestorm might be a good fit for virtual meetings and sales webinars, while Wistia is a solid choice for running high-quality marketing webinars that impress and engage your audience.

If the latter resonates with you, why don’t you try Wistia for free?