GoTo Webinar Review – Pros & Cons [2023]
GoTo Webinar is an all-in-one webinar software platform that allows users to host multiple types of events, from pre-recorded sessions to multi-day conferences. It offers impressive customizability with interactive features that make it easy to create engaging webinars for hosts and fun to join the webinars for attendees. GoTo Webinar also offers insightful analytics to keep track of your webinar’s performance. With a number of powerful integrations, you can tie in a number of other SaaS tools with ease. Letβs explore the top features of GoToWebinar and the pros and cons to see how this tool stacks up against others.
Top Features of GoTo Webinar
Large Scale Webinars
As your audience grows, you might face difficulties in accommodating everyone in one webinar. Not so with GoTo Webinar. You can have up to 3,000 attendees in one webinar at the same time! It also has a multi-presenter feature where six hosts can be present in the webinar, too.
Browser-based Application
You can now host webinars right from your browser. Attendees also donβt need to download any application on their devices to join the events. But if they do, the GoTo Webinar app is available for multiple operating systems. So, it becomes much easier for anyone to join events on GoTo Webcast.
Pre-Recorded Events
Recording videos prior to the event and a final touch of correction makes the quality of your events touch the peak. After recording your events, you can host them on GoTo Webcast, and that will look exactly like a live event.
Flexible Scheduling
You have complete flexibility while creating event schedules. One-time events are trendy among users, but you can also create a series of videos for multi-day events. Creating on-demand events is also possible on this platform. So, the events on GoTo Webinar are much more accessible to your audience.
Custom Registration Forms
Generalized registration forms are too mainstream now. You need something enchanting in the form to hook visitors and make them register for your events. With excellent customizability, you can create engaging registration forms and add multiple fields to the form to collect as much data as possible from registrants. It will also give you an idea of who might be present in the event.
Event Templates
You donβt need to tweak every setting while creating a new event. Simply choose from a collection of professionally designed templates and customize them according to your needs. Or you can also save your current event settings for upcoming events. It saves a lot of time and hassle.
Custom Branding
You can customize the color theme, logo, and other materials to keep all your events and resources seamless. Saving these resources for your events lets you create multiple events using the same tone and helps the audience to feel a stronger connection with the brand.
Webcam & Screen Sharing
Recorded videos might not always be enough to keep your audiences engaged. Hosts can share their webcams to make short speeches or screens to show a tutorial right away. And this is applicable to all six presenters. If hosts permit any attendee to become a host or panelist, they can also share their webcams or screens.
Interactive Attendee Features
- Polls and surveys are excellent for grabbing the attention of the audience and keeping them engaged throughout the event. Whether you want the audience to answer a quiz or give their opinions, you can create interactive polls and get instant results on GoTo Webinar. The poll result can also be shared with the audience.
- Raise Hand – During the discussion, attendees might get confused about something and want to ask questions. They can use the raise hand feature to draw the attention of hosts and ask their questions.
- Downloadable Handouts – Besides recorded videos, you can share other study materials or leaflets with the attendees using this platform. You can either attach those resources before starting the webinar or upload them during the webinar. Attendees can easily download those handouts with a single click.
Webinar Analytics & Reporting
- Engagement Dashboard – You donβt need to wait till the end of the event to check engagement reports. GoTo Webinar offers an engagement dashboard to get real-time data on audience participation. See who is present at the event and whether they are taking part in interactive polls to measure the level of engagement. But this feature needs a bit more improvement to give detailed results.
- Attendee Reports – Not every registrant or attendee will be a potential customer. You need to identify valuable prospects, and GoTo Webinar helps you find them with comprehensive attendee reports. These reports show the activity of the attendees in detail to help you make informed decisions about future events.
- Analytic Reports – Analytics is one of the crucial features of any webinar platform. It should mirror exactly what happened during pre-webinar, webinar, and post-webinar activities so that hosts can track every performance metric with no fuss. GoTo Webinar does a decent job in this case. But its analytic engine is much weaker compared to other popular webinar platforms. The metrics shown here are minimal, and getting a quick overview of everything in one place is difficult. The feature needs some tweaks to improve the analytics.
- Source Tracking – Finding out the most effective channels in driving traffic to your event is absolutely important. You can do that by tracking the sources of registrants. It helps you improve your strategies to make the other channels effective as well.
Automatic Reminders and Follow Ups
Once someone registers for your event, GoTo Webinar will send automated reminders to them to increase the rate of participation. If someone misses the event, the platform can send follow-up emails to help them attend the event later.
Third-Party Integrations
Integration is probably the most powerful feature of this platform. It seamlessly integrates with multiple applications to help you manage events better. With third-party integrations like AWeber, Unbounce, and Hubspot, you can create a seamless digital experience for your customers – especially when combined with the Stripe integration, receiving payments for paid webinars becomes a smooth process! You can also integrate with multiple CRM software to manage information about your attendees.
Pros & Cons of GoTo Webinar
While GoTo Webinar is packed with useful features there are some drawbacks to consider.
Pros
- Works with multiple operating systems
- Ability to accommodate up to 3,000 attendees
- Pre-recorded event capabilities
- Multi-presenter functionality
- Interactive polls and surveys
- Webcam and screen sharing with on-screen notes
- Downloadable analytic reports
Cons
- The Lite plan is expensive, considering the number of participants and features
- Some features feel unstable
- GoTo Stage requires a bit of a learning curve
GoTo Webinar Plans & Pricing
GoTo Webinar offers four different pricing plans, each including different features.
- Lite β starting at $49/mo β up to 250 participants, and includes features like full-service registration, automated emails, a mobile app, and basic reporting and analytics.
- Standard β starting at $99/mo β up to 500 participants and includes all of the Lite features plus online and local recording, VoIP and phone audio capabilities, custom branding and URLs, along with access to GoTo Stage.
- Pro β starting at $199/mo β up to 1,000 participants and includes all of the Standard features plus payment processing, unlimited cloud storage, source tracking, video sharing and embedding, and attendee certificates.
GoTo Webinar also offers an Enterprise plan that starts at $399/mo. It can support up to 3,000 participants and includes all of the features found in their Pro plan.
Our Take on GoTo Webinar
GoTo Webinar is one of the best webinar software platforms that makes hosting and joining webinars a breeze. It lets you create and share webinars from your browser without requiring you or your attendees to download clunky software. any downloads. Streaming pre-recorded events enable you to create near-perfect webinars. We really like that GoTo Webinar lets you create templates for future use – this can save you a ton of time! Interactive features like polls and Q&A will help you draw the attention of the audience and keep them engaged throughout your event. With the ability to reach up to 3,000 attendees, the scalability of this platform is impressive but this comes at a cost. Overall, GoTo Webinar is solid software for hosting webinars. Their Lite plan includes all of the essential features and costs $49 per month.