Livestorm Review: Low-Cost
Platform for Webinars + Meetings?
Livestorm is a webinar software bundled with a video conferencing platform.
If you’re regularly hosting webinars and running regular video meetings, this might be the perfect solution for you.
In this Livestorm review, we’ll comprehensively answer 3 big questions:
- How well can the Livestorm registration funnel convert webinar registrations?
- Do the live webinar interaction tools actually help you sell?
- Is the free Webinar Basic plan worth it?
Live & Automated Webinar Sessions
Livestorm is mainly for one-time live webinars.
The webinar setup is simple – just add a description & the starting time and you’re done.
It’s possible to schedule multiple sessions for a webinar, making it a recurring webinar.
Basically, you can host automated webinar sessions on Livestorm as well, but you can’t add any automatic audience interaction features.
On automated webinar events on Livestorm, you can just:
- Schedule a video
- Schedule the end of the event
- Schedule when to redirect attendees to an external URL
That’s it.
Livestorm also includes the Meeting software. It’s convenient to have your webinar software and your meeting software in one place.
However, the free package only gets you up to 4 meeting participants, so you’ll probably want to upgrade if you’ll start using it more frequently to host meetings.
Webinar Funnel Pages
On the webinar registration page, you can customize:
- The background & text colors
- Button colors
- Add your logo
- Add a cover image
Here’s how a customized registration page would look like for the attendee:
As a first step, the attendee fills in their email and clicks the call-to-action button. After that, the registration pop-up appears. Then they can fill in more info:
On the right-hand side, there’s the quick access to webinar registration page, as the attendee sees it.
If you want to integrate the registration widget to your own website, you can grab the registration widget snippet.
You can set up custom registration fields on the registration page. That’s useful for asking specific questions from your registrants, so you can prepare better and tailor your webinar contents specifically to your audience.
A unique feature for Livestorm is the “Only company emails” checkbox.
Livestorm Email Tools
The cool thing is that the design you set up in the webinar registration page will automatically reflect in the webinar reminder emails as well:
The scheduling of reminder emails is not very flexible. You can set up the reminders to be sent out:
- 5 minutes before the webinar starts
- 1 hour before the webinar starts
The webinar confirmation email has all the essentials:
- Your logo and design
- Webinar confirmation message
- Webinar link
- Links to add the webinar to calendar
For the post-webinar follow-up emails, you can segment the registrants who attended and the ones who didn’t attend. You can create separate emails for these segments.
The user interface in the webinar emails setup is really intuitive. Setting up these emails was one of the smoothest parts of this Livestorm review.
You can easily preview how the emails would look like for the attendee and you can edit the contents of any email.
That includes changing the email texts, adding shortcodes, editing the button texts and colors.
Audience Interaction Tools
In the setup, you can set the chat as public or private (attendees can only talk to you).
You can Show/Hide the “Peoples” tab to make the attendee list visible to everyone.
A unique feature is that you can make the slideshow immediately available to download as a PDF file to all the attendees.
That’s a useful feature, because often attendees want to get the slides to review the material later on.
Livestorm has polls and call-to-actions, but you can’t pre-configure them in the webinar setup.
To set them up earlier you’d have to go to the webinar room and set them up before you start the webinar and “Save as draft”.
The poll will not pop-up or launch automatically. The attendee has to navigate to the Polls tab and vote on the poll there.
As a host, you can set up call-to-actions during the webinar. This is where you make your offer to the attendees and where the sales start coming in.
The call-to-action includes a description, button text and button link. Unfortunately, you can’t add an image or a countdown timer.
A huge problem with the call-to-action is that it opens as a pop-up. And once the attendee closes it, there’s no way to bring it back up again.
Webinar sales take time and persuasion. So, when a pop-up appears, you can’t expect everyone to click it immediately. Instead, they’d want to close the pop-up at first, listen to you speak, show testimonials, list out all the benefits of the offer again.
As you’re doing that, you’ll start winning the attendees over.
The call-to-action should be visible all the time, tempting and inviting the attendees to click.
Unfortunately, Livestorm call-to-action is pretty bad at doing that.
However, Livestorm has nailed the Q&A feature.
Attendees can ask questions and upvote each other’s questions as well.
So, when you’re taking questions at the end of your webinar, you’ll know exactly which ones are the most interesting questions to your attendees. Answer them first.
Webinar Video Engine & Support
The video quality on Livestorm webinars is above average. On my 1080p webcam the graininess is barely noticeable.
In case some of your attendees are experiencing bad video quality, they can run the connectivity troubleshooter.
It’s an easy way to fix some common issues with the connection quality, browser or the audio.
Regarding getting help and support of Livestorm – Do it yourself.
There’s the Livestorm Documentation page, which is essentially a knowledge base.
You can email their support and ask for specific questions, but the live chat is reserved only for Enterprise customers.
Also, they don’t have a Facebook community.
Livestorm Webinar Presentation Tools
As you’re starting to present, you’ll very soon notice that there’s no slideshow upload feature.
You can only share your screen and show your slides that way. That’s a downside, because this slightly decreases the slideshow quality.
One strange thing about the presentation tools is that the webcam is mirrored for the attendee for some reason.
At any point during your webinar presentation, you might want to show a video to your attendees. With Livestorm, you can do that.
You can add a video clip from YouTube or choose a video file from your computer.
Joining the Webinar on Mobile Devices
The first thing that I noticed when testing the mobile experience during this Livestorm review, was that there’s a 15-second video delay on mobile devices.
However, the polls launch instantly.
This might cause a brief confusion for your mobile attendees.
However, joining on mobile is very smooth. Everything is perfectly mobile responsive and joining the webinar was seamless.
The webcam and the slideshow presentation are clearly visible.
The chat and all the interaction tools would appear below the webinar video.
The call-to-action would also appear at a slight delay, but it doesn’t bother me.
What bothers me again, though, is that once the attendee dismisses the call-to-action, they can’t bring it up again.
This is perhaps the biggest flaw I noticed during this Livestorm review.
Webinar Replay Recording
By default, the live webinar recording is shared with everyone who registered for the webinar.
You can change that in the webinar setup. And you can upload your own custom video for the webinar replay.
In fact, after the webinar is over, the recording start playing automatically for all the attendees.
The recording will start for the host as well. While you (as the host) are watching the webinar recording, there’s a “Download recording” button.
A great feature about the webinar replay recording is that attendees can ask questions.
The questions will be emailed to you, so you can engage with the attendees who couldn’t make it live, but are still interested in what you have to say.
In general, the Livestorm webinar replay recording interface is extremely well built for engaging attendees during the replay.
During the webinar replay, attendees can:
- Ask questions
- Answer polls
- Write chat messages
What’s missing is the call-to-actions during the webinar replay. However, if you’re in the webinar replay (as the host), you can launch the call-to-actions manually to anyone who’s watching at that moment.
Another way to go is sending the call-to-action link in the chat.
The replay engagement features are one of the most positive surprises I had during this Livestorm review.
Livestorm Analytics & Exports & Integrations
Livestorm integrates with:
- Google Analytics
- HubSpot
- Intercom
- Pipedrive
- Slack
- Drift
- HelpScout
- …or you can create custom webhooks
With Zapier, you can create countless integrations with other systems:
Under the “People” tab, there’s the Livestorm webinar analytics dashboard to learn the most important insights about your past webinars.
In the analytics dashboard you can learn:
- What channels did your attendees use to register (using UTM parameters)
- When did your attendees lose attention during the webinar
- When did your attendees leave the webinar
- What was each attendee’s attendance duration
- What operating system, browser and device did they use
- Where are your attendees from (country, city)
You can also download Excel reports. These reports include:
- Number of registrants
- Number of live attendees
- Number of replay views
- Number of chat messages
- Number of questions
- Number of poll answers
- Webinar duration
- Start & end time
- What exactly were the questions the attendees asked
- What were the chat messages – is there anything to learn
However, Livestorm analytics still has some room for improvement. For example, you can’t learn:
- What was the email open rate and click-through rate
- How many attendees clicked on the call-to-action during the webinar
In conclusion, the webinar dashboard gives you the most important data – the webinar registration conversion rates and sources and the continuous attendance tracking.
Is Livestorm Free? What Does it Cost?
Livestorm is a free webinar platform.
With the Free Webinar Basic package, you can have:
- Unlimited webinars forever
- Up to 1 host
- Up to 10 attendees
- Up to 20-minute webinar sessions
As you can imagine, these limitations don’t really enable you to host actual webinars. The free package is just for trying out the software and deciding if it fits your needs.
If you want to remove those limitations, you’d have to subscribe to the Webinar Premium package, which allows you to:
- Have up to 100 attendees
- Have up to 4-hour webinar sessions
- Host unlimited on-demand webinars
- Invite unlimited moderators to assist you during the webinar
- Have up to 1 host (including an additional host adds $ 109 / month)
To accommodate more attendees, you’d have to pay a bit more:
| Attendees in webinar | Price per month |
|---|---|
| 100 | $ 109 |
| 250 | $ 218 |
| 1000 | $ 338 |
Like with most webinar software pricing packages, you’ll get a discount if you opt for the annual subscription.
Livestorm Review Conclusion
To conclude this Livestorm review, here’s a summary of the Pros and Cons:
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Can host automated webinar sessions | Can’t schedule polls and offers in automated webinars |
| Registration page is easy to customize, has a clean UI | Can’t change the registration page layout |
| Can add custom questions to the registration page | Only 1-hour and 5-minute email reminders, can’t add or change |
| Can enable “Only company emails” in the registration form | No slideshow injections, have to screen share the slides |
| Can add a product image or a product video to the registration page | Polls & offers have to be pre-configured in the webinar room |
| Email editing is smooth & easy. Beautiful design | When the attendee closes the call-to-action, they can’t bring it up again |
| Attendees can ask questions and upvote on each other’s questions | No automatic call-to-action during the webinar replay recording |
| Can insert and launch videos from YouTube or from file | The free plan is not that useful for hosting actual webinars |
| Webinar recording is shared with all attendees automatically | |
| People can ask questions even when watching the webinar replay recording | |
| The analytics dashboard has clear conversion statistics and attendance tracking |