Livestorm Review 2023: Most Comprehensive Feature Analysis
Livestorm is a browser-based webinar software bundled with a video conferencing platform.
If you’re regularly hosting webinars and running regular virtual meetings, this might be the perfect solution for you.
Some of the most popular use cases for the Livestorm platform are weekly webinars, product demos, employee onboarding webinars, online training courses, podcast interviews, and instant meetings. And it has a free version for webinars!
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?
- What does Livestorm pricing look like and is the free version worth the money?
Live & Automated Webinar Sessions
Livestorm allows you to create online events that are either live or pre-recorded webinars on a browser-based platform.
It’s possible to schedule multiple sessions for a webinar, making it a recurring event. Each event would show up in the upcoming events.
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
Livestorm also includes online meetings software. It’s convenient to have your webinar software and your meeting software in one place.
However, the free plan 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 Livestorm registration forms, you can customize:
- The background & text colors
- Button colors
- Add your logo
- Add a cover image
Here’s how customized registration forms 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 sign-up pop-up appears. Then they can fill in more info:
On the right-hand side, there’s quick access to the webinar registration page, as the attendee sees it.
Registration Widget to Inject to External Landing Pages
In case you don’t like the design of Livestorm landing pages, there is an alternative – set up the landing pages on your external website.
To set up your own custom landing pages, you can grab the code snippet and paste it into the source code in the landing pages on your website.
Custom Fields on the Landing Pages
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 event content specific to your audience.
A unique feature for Livestorm is the “Only company emails” checkbox.
Livestorm Email Tools
You can completely customize and automate emails in the Livestorm platform.
The cool thing is that the design you set up on the webinar registration page will automatically reflect in the event reminder emails as well:
Email Scheduling for Online Events
The scheduling of automatic email reminders 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
Email Follow-ups
For the post-webinar email follow-ups, 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 email setup is really intuitive. Setting up these email invitations was one of the smoothest parts of this Livestorm review.
You can easily preview how the email follow-ups would look for the attendee and you can edit the contents of any email.
That includes changing the email texts, adding shortcodes, and editing the button texts and colors.
Webinar Room Audience Interactions
Public and Private Integrated Chat
In the setup, you can up an integrated chat that is either public or private.
You can Show/Hide the “Peoples” tab to make the attendee list visible to everyone.
Slideshow Available to Download
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.
Polls
The Livestorm platform 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.
Call to Actions
One of the most important video engagement features is the 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, and 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.
Q&A Feature
A Livestorm platform feature that has gained a lot of positive feedback is the Q&A tool.
Attendees can ask questions and upvote each other’s questions as well.
So, when you answer questions at the end of your webinar, you’ll know exactly which ones are the most interesting questions to your attendees. Answer them first.
Video Engagement Engine for Online Events
Video Quality Test
Considering that Livestorm is a browser-based platform, the video quality is above average. On my 1080p webcam, the graininess is barely noticeable.
In case some of your attendees are experiencing bad quality on the video, they can run the connectivity troubleshooter.
It’s an easy way to fix some common issues with the connection quality, browser, or audio.
Customer Support
Getting a helpful reply from Livestorm customer support can take up to four hours.
There’s the Livestorm Documentation page, which is essentially a knowledge base.
You can email their customer support but the live chat is reserved only for the Enterprise plan.
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.
Share a Video Clip
At any point during your webinar presentation, you can show a video clip to your participants.
You can add a video clip from YouTube or choose a video file from your computer.
Screen Share
Another important video engagement feature is screen share. This is an important feature, especially if you’re running product demos. It’s also a must-have tool for online meetings or live events where you want to show something to the participants on the go.
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, which has an impact on the event performance. This is understandable since Livestorm is a browser-based platform.
However, the polls launch instantly.
This might cause a brief confusion for your mobile attendees and team members.
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, 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.
After the webinar is over, the recording starts 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.
Ask Questions in Replays and On-Demand Events
A great feature of 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.
Ask Questions in Replays and On-Demand Events
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
Ask Questions in Replays and On-Demand Events
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.
A workaround is to send the call-to-action link in the chat, which can be scheduled.
The replay engagement features are one of the most positive surprises I had during this Livestorm review.
Livestorm Analytics & Exports & Integrations
Livestorm integrations
Livestorm integrates with these apps:
- Google Analytics
- HubSpot
- Intercom
- Pipedrive
- Slack
- Drift
- HelpScout
- …or you can create custom webhooks
With Zapier, you can create countless integrations with other systems:
Livestorm Analytics Dashboard
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 (by using UTM parameters for Google Analytics)
- 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)
Livestorm Excel Reports Exports
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
Analytics Downsides
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
My final thoughts on the analytics are that the Livestorm dashboard gives you the most important data – the webinar registration conversion rates and sources and continuous attendance tracking, and other metrics.
Livestorm Pricing
Livestorm Basic Plan Includes Unlimited Webinars
You can use the free version to host unlimited webinars. However, the Livestorm Basic Plan does have some limitations:
- Up to 1 host
- Up to 10 attendees
- Up to 20-minute webinar sessions
- No on-demand webinars
Livestorm Premium Plan
If you want to remove those limitations, you’d have to subscribe to the Livestorm Premium Plan, which allows you to:
- Have up to 100 attendees at each event
- Have up to 4-hour webinar sessions
- Host unlimited live or pre-recorded events
- Invite unlimited moderators to assist you during the webinar
- Have up to 1 host (including an additional host adds $ 109 / month)
One downside of Livestorm pricing is that inviting team members gets expensive.
To accommodate more attendees, you’d have to pay a bit more.
Like with most pricing for webinar platforms, you’ll get a discount if you opt for the annual subscription.
Livestorm Review Conclusion
Livestorm is a browser-based webinar platform that also supports instant meetings, live and pre-recorded events. The on-demand events have a lot of video engagement features. In fact, the Livestorm platform is one of the best webinar platforms.
The flexible webinar registration page customization options and rich audience engagement and video engagement features make it an excellent webinar platform.
One of the most attractive parts of the platform is the free plan. Livestorm pricing is set up in a way that you can instantly start running webinars and meetings with the free version.
However, if you found that it’s missing some important feature, then there are many other free webinar platforms out there.