Top ON24 Competitors and Alternatives for Webinars

Looking for an alternative to ON24? This article explains the products that ON24 sells and the alternative competitors that are available.

What is ON24?

ON24 was founded during the dotcom era (1998) as a SaaS platform for broadcasting video press releases. The company endured financial losses during the 2000 recession. After downsizing, ON24 pivoted to provide webinar services.

in 2008, ON24 launched its virtual event platform which did well during the recession. However, by 2012 the virtual events business had started to become a drag. Sharat Sharan, ON24’s CEO, decided that virtual events were riddled with low revenues and high churn rates. The following year, Sharan decided to pull the company away from virtual events to focus exclusively on webinars.

Then, in 2020, COVID hit the travel and events industry so ON24 brought back its virtual events platform.

ON24 Core Service Offerings

ON24 Webcast Elite

Webcast Elite is an enterprise-grade webinar platform that is highly customizable to reflect your brand. Engagement features include Q&A, polls, surveys, and downloadable resources.

Pros

• In-platform outgoing emails can easily be customized to look like your in-house emails and deliverability on them seems to be very high
• They have a semi-live feature where you can pre-record the webinar and push out as a live event

Cons

• Home-grown hosting vs. AWS has limitations. Organizers hosting larger webinars must contact ON24 in advance and pay extra for the added bandwidth.
• Sometimes it is not compatible with a browser and we need to clear the cache or switch to an alternate browser.
• The main issue that we have is that the platform can be buggy for attendees at times. Polls don’t always pop up, and the audio/video feed will cut out.

*All reviews are taken from G2 and Capterra

Alternatives to ON24 Webcast Elite

1. Communique Webinar Platform:

Communique delivers features that you’d normally find in enterprise-level webinar platform, but without the enterprise-level price tag.With a flexible user interface, organizations can fully customize their webinars to match their brand.Additionally, the platform is hosted via AWS and can scale to any audience size.

Key Features:

• Audience engagement features including Q&A, polls, surveys, speaker bios, etc.
• Ability to host simulive webinars with ease
• Real-time data & analytics
• Customizable registration pages, email confirmations, and reminders
• Powerful recording & editing tools
• 3rd Party integrations to pass data to your CRM or marketing automation platform
• HD adaptive bitrate video ensures that everyone who joins your webinar has a high-quality experience, no matter what type of internet connection they’re using

2. Notified:

Formally Intrado and Intercall. Notified Webcast is a solid platform for live webcasting and video streaming for Enterprise and Fortune^™ 500 companies. The cloud-based SaaS webcast solution provides businesses with an easy-to-use, secure and scalable environment to produce high-profile, engaging webcasts for thousands of attendees worldwide.

Key Features:

ON24 Virtual Conference

Scale and localize global virtual conferences and drive audience engagement through networking, gamification and immersive event sessions. Execute your digital events with ease through guided support that ensures seamless production, day-of execution and performance monitoring.

Pros

• Immersive 3D design templates to leverage
• Built-in networking features
• Engagement tools including leaderboards

Cons

• Expensive price tag. Also, the contracting process is cumbersome and makes the overall customer experience challenging. The pricing for all On24 products and related add-ons is kept pretty secretive. The sales people use the old predatory negotiation tactic to ensure they get the most outrageous pricing out of customers
• On24 has a lot of technical  issues. We encounter problems more than 70% of our events. The prominent ones being Audio Video not in sync, Pulse check doesn’t come up most of the time, and polls don’t work well in Simulive sessions

*All reviews are taken from G2 and Capterra

Alternatives to ON24 Virtual Conference

• Communique Virtual Conference Platform: Communique’s enterprise-grade, cloud-based, virtual conference platform functions as a traditional in-person conference translating webinar presentations, exhibit booths, audience engagement and networking into a highly immersive virtual environment.Key Features:
  
  • One-stop-shop: Communique offers a choice of two virtual conference platforms to meet a wide variety of use cases and budgets
  • Customer service: 24×7 customer support and a range of managed services from set up project management to dedicated live day support
  • Robust reporting and analytics
  • Customizable registration pages, email confirmations, and reminders
  • Features to Facilitate Engagement:  Personal Agenda, Matchmaking, Meeting Scheduling, Networking Rooms, Briefcase, 1:1 and small group video chat, Webinars, Q&A, polls, surveys, gamification with leaderboard, scavenger hunt, live day broadcast messages, language translation, ADA support, social media wall, photo booth, and more.
• InEvent is the most powerful software for professional events and video productions. Create TV-like experiences for your live events, broadcasts or virtual events with the InEvent platform.
  • Virtual lobby and video conferencing
  • CRM integration
  • Registration landing pages, forms, and emails

Verdict

To sum it up, ON24 is a popular webinar and virtual event platform. ON24’s users appear to enjoy their services, but there are a few areas where they fall short. The most significant ones are the lack of support, aggressive sales tactics, and expensive pricing.