Wistia vs. Zoom: Which Webinar Platform Is Better?

So you’re still using Zoom to host your webinars? It makes practical sense — we’ve all been on Zoom since at least 2020, right? But that’s exactly why you should evaluate the experience you’re providing to your webinar attendees.

Zoom fatigue is so 2020. If you want your webinar experience to stand out from a Zoom call, you’ll need a webinar platform like Wistia Live! Rather than being a virtual meeting software adapted for webinars, Wistia Live is built specifically for marketing and it’s designed to keep your audience engaged during your live webinars and virtual events.

Let’s zoom right into the head-to-head comparison of Wistia and Zoom for webinars, shall we?

Why Wistia Live is built for marketing

Unlike Zoom, Wistia Live is designed to save you time by covering the entire webinar process from beginning to end. We’re talking about soup to nuts. A to Z. The whole nine yards. Check out what you can do within Wistia with our live webinar feature:

Grow webinar registrations

With Wistia, you can create a registration page to seamlessly capture leads and sign-ups ahead of your live event. Collect registrations and pass all that information right into your customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing automation platform.

Plus, Wistia lets you embed your live event onto any page on your site, just like any other video! Just copy a snippet of video embed code and paste it onto your website and like magic, the live event stream will show up directly on your site.

Increase audience engagement

Wistia Live offers the webinar tools you need to create an engaging experience for your audience — and your panelists.

When it’s time to go live, there’s a backstage area to communicate with your panelists, a live chat to connect with your audience, and even multiple video layouts that you can change on the fly to keep viewers engaged in your content.

With simulcasting built in, you can stream your webinar from Wistia Live to your connected social media platforms. In terms of reliability, Wistia is second to none!

Automate webinar workflows

Once your live event is over, the webinar recording automatically saves to your Wistia account. This means you can edit it with the built-in video editor, customize the video player, and turn your recording into an on-demand webinar in just a few clicks.

You can even add an email collector to the webinar video to keep those leads flowing!

If you really want to tidy things up, you can add all your webinar recordings to a Wistia Channel to display on an events page on your site.

Track webinar analytics

Wistia shows you who has watched your webinar, how many folks signed up and attended the event live, how much of the video they got through, and what was discussed in the chat. Talk about a super handy way to measure the performance metrics of your webinar!

How Zoom Webinars breaks down

While the Zoom software is great for video calls, meetings, and internal town halls, it just doesn’t have the marketer, video producer, or webinar attendee in mind for webinar production quality.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the hurdles you might encounter with Zoom Webinars:

Dreaded Zoom fatigue

The well-known video communication software can’t escape the “Zoom fatigue” that everyone feels when hopping onto a Zoom webinar. It’s the new GoToWebinar experience — sorry, it had to be said.

While Zoom might be familiar, it’s not at all exciting. Zoom may work fine as an internal communication tool, but you need a more seamless and engaging platform for your webinar marketing efforts. It will go a long way with your live and on-demand audience.

Tedious post-production process

With Zoom, it’s not easy to use your webinar recording for marketing purposes (like sending follow-up emails) right after the event.

To get your Zoom webinar recording ready to host on your website after the event, you’ll have to:

• Save your webinar recording
• Export it as a video
• Download it to your computer
• Bring it into an editing program
• Trim off the beginning and end
• Export it
• Re-upload it to a video hosting platform (like Wistia)

Phew. Overwhelming, time-consuming, and not ideal for a fast-paced marketer like you!

Which is better, Wistia or Zoom?

If your enterprise company is already using Zoom for meetings, town halls, and internal communications, you might feel comfortable using it for webinars too, especially if you’re not already using Wistia to edit and host your Zoom webinar recordings.

But the question of which webinar software is better for your business may be best answered by your webinar marketing strategy goals. Are you just looking for a familiar way to run webinars, or does your marketing strategy demand that you host exceptional-looking webinars, offer a great attendee experience, and seamlessly have your webinar recordings ready to generate leads well after your event is over?

Wistia Live offers all the webinar features you need to take a webinar from registration to creation to distribution all in one place. Companies that are already using Wistia to harness the power of video marketing are now using Wistia Live to take their webinar marketing to the next level. It’s because Wistia also offers lead generation tools, marketing automation platform and CRM integrations, and advanced viewing analytics to track the performance of your webinars — both live and on demand.

That’s Live, from Wistia: the all-in-one video (and webinar) marketing platform for businesses!