Among the most popular products with an impressive volume of positive webinar platform reviews, Zoom and GoToWebinar stand out because of their robust technology infrastructure. With a detailed review of their differences, our Zoom vs GoToWebinar comparison will help you choose the best option for the most valuable use cases you have in mind. Through this webinar software buying guide, you'll get a detailed highlight of the differences in core features, integrations, and pricing.
What Is Zoom?
Zoom is a widely recognized and versatile video conferencing and communication platform that facilitates virtual meetings, webinars, and online collaboration. It offers a range of features, including high-definition video and audio, screen sharing, chat functionality, and the ability to record sessions. Zoom's user-friendly interface and scalability gained significant popularity, allowing individuals, businesses, and educational institutions to connect and interact remotely across various devices. According to reports from Reuters Media, the Zoom platform hosts over 300 million meeting participants daily. And that's a testament to how the video conferencing platform has matured since its inception in 2011.
What Is GoToWebinar?
GoToWebinar is a video conferencing and unified business communication platform with diverse features to support all webinars and online meetings. This platform offers unique tools for web audio, phone communication, and business meetings. GoToWebinar stands out for relatively large companies' enterprise-grade security and robust video technology infrastructure. At the time of this writing, this platform hosts over 80 million annual online meetings for users across 190+ countries and diverse industries.
Zoom vs GoToWebinar: features
Though there are many similarities, it's rarely easy for everyone to find the variations when looking into the Zoom vs GoToWebinar comparison. And that's the essence of this webinar software buying guide. As some of the top-rated webinar platforms in the market, here are some details on how they work differently.
- Video And Audio Quality: Based on the volume of webinar software reviews researched before writing this post, Zoom is known to have comparatively higher video and audio quality than GoToMeeting. And that, my friend, should be a high priority if you care enough about delivering the best virtual event experiences to your audience. With a wide array of audio and video quality settings, Zoom also leads the pack regarding audiovisual output. Unlike GoToMeeting, you can turn on the background noise suppression feature to improve audio quality.
- Automated Webinar Hosting: Running automated webinars will be an advantage for generating and converting leads into paying customers on autopilot. Interestingly, that's one important feature you'll need help finding on the Zoom Webinar platform. If this is a high priority, GoToMeeting should be your best option.
- Unlimited Meeting Time – Here is one of the best outstanding features of GoToMeeting. Regardless of the webinar software comparison posts you'll come across on the web; unlimited meeting time makes GoToMeeting stand out. While Zoom will allow you to host up to 10,000 attendees, you'll not be able to host for unlimited time.
- Clickable CTA: If you plan to make or sell premium offers on your webinar, clickable call-to-action buttons are a must-have—no need to wait until your events end before sending offers via promotional email campaigns. Unfortunately, Zoom doesn't offer users a clickable call to action feature.
Zoom vs GoToWebinar: integrations
Inside GoToWebinar's platform, you'll have access to over 24 native integrations. Whether you are interested in sales, analytics, CRM, advertising, or email marketing-related integrations, you'll find an option on this platform. Based on our findings, both platforms offer APIs for developers to build even more apps to improve their webinar marketing and business outcomes.
Because of how mature the Zoom platform has become, you'll find many more integration options for almost any business use case. In other words, it has more depth and diversity when compared to GoToWebinar.
As an experienced developer, you can also explore the SDK offered on both platforms to build other useful apps.
Even though GoToWebinar integrates with many apps in the key categories, such integration won't allow you to interact with them during a live call. And that's one of the things that makes the two platforms different. Moreover, Zoom has a distinct new integration app category called conversational AI. You should explore this if you want to leverage AI to enhance your webinar hosting experience.
Zoom vs GoToWebinar: pricing
Besides clarifying the most important features you want in webinar software, the dynamics of what is offered or allowed in each pricing plan is another important fact to consider. Even when two platforms have the same features, your pay for each pricing plan differs.
You'll notice right off the bat that GoToWebinar pricing packages are relatively simpler. Gaining access to the GoToWebinar platform costs $49 monthly, hosting 250 participants. Comparatively, hosting 500 attendees on GoToMeeting will cost you $99 per month (billed annually), while hosting the same number of attendees on Zoom will cost you $79 per month, and you can pay monthly. Hosting 1,000 participants on GoToMeeting will cost you $199 per month, while the same goes for $340 per month on Zoom, but you can pay monthly. For businesses needing to host up to 3,000 attendees, you should prepare to pay $399 for GoToWebinar, which is billed annually. On the other hand, Zoom will charge you $990 monthly.
Both platforms offer different types of add-ons, which will cost extra money. Moreover, accessing the enterprise plans requires that you contact the sales team.