Melissa Kwan
Cofounder and CEO, eWebinar, ProfitLed Podcast, Webinar expert
Cofounder and CEO, eWebinar, ProfitLed Podcast
Melissa Kwan is the Cofounder and CEO of eWebinar, a platform that turns pre-recorded videos into automated, interactive webinars. The idea was born from the...
View all posts →Automated webinar software shouldn’t force you to choose between scalability and a great attendee experience.
We were trapped for years in webinar hell, hosting the same live trainings, onboarding sessions, and sales demos over and over again. Our business kept expanding because of it, so we couldn't just stop, but the cost was painfully high and prevented us from focusing on other things that were also critical for a growing startup. (Here is our full backstory.)
To escape from this hell, we started looking at automated webinar software. We soon learned, however, that if we switched to webinar automation, we'd have to make a trade-off:
We could either keep running live webinars and accept that a lot of our time and energy would continue to be exhausted by hosting them, OR…
We could start running automated webinars and accept that we wouldn’t be able to offer the same personalized, interactive experience to our attendees.
We could either have scalability or a great attendee experience, but not both.
Years later, after selling that company, we decided to build eWebinar, the first webinar platform 100% dedicated to automation, designed to deliver an attendee experience so exceptional that it doesn’t matter that the presentation is pre-recorded.
We’ve now been running automated webinars daily for over five years.
But in our experience, and based on conversations with many of eWebinar’s thousands of users, we've found that most people don’t understand the automated webinar space — they think automated webinars are just static recordings without any interactivity or chat, so they think they must either pick between hosting every webinar live or sending a boring old video. And we see folks asking many of the same frequently asked questions and sharing these same misconceptions.
In response, we put together this comprehensive guide to clear this all up. We review the best automated webinar platforms, show you how to use them, and explain what to expect from these tools.
Skip to the section you’re most interested in:

eWebinar is one of the most popular automated webinar platforms because we provide our users with everything they need to run personalized, interactive, accessible, and truly automated webinars — resulting in higher attendance and engagement rates (by 2X!) than live events.
Since our debut in 2019, eWebinar has boldly reimagined what an automated webinar is — which is why our ratings have held strong at 4.9 stars. Users love our all-in-one automated webinar platform for its:
Ease of use: Anybody can create attention-grabbing webinars without any training. Our webinar builder walks you through the steps, and we provide user-friendly templates to help you hit the ground running.
Wide variety of interactive features: From polls, quizzes, Q&As, special offers, tips, agenda items, feedback requests, and more, our platform offers the most extensive collection of interactions to encourage engagement throughout webinar sessions. Our system also lets you send each participant a personalized welcome message that invites them to chat in and engage with webinars.
Asynchronous chat: Hosts can chat with attendees in the eWebinar dashboard (on desktop or mobile devices), Slack, or email at any time, before or after webinars. We’re the only tool that offers a hybrid chat system, one that lets you chat live with attendees when you can, or respond to them later by email when you can't. This freedom enables you to automate webinars fully and run them 24/7. You never miss a conversation or a chance to engage with your audiences.
Flexible scheduling options: Run automated webinars on a recurring basis, make them available for on-demand or just-in-time viewing, or set them as a one-time event. Plus, our system lets you combine options so you can accommodate all participants when they’re ready to watch, often resulting in 3X attendance.
In-depth analytics: Our system goes beyond basic stats like attendance and engagement rates by providing detailed heatmaps that show precisely when viewers engage, how they engage, and when they join or drop off. That way, you know exactly what works and where to fine-tune.
We work with a variety of teams and professionals, including onboarding and training teams, sales teams, financial advisors, real estate agents, fitness coaches, solopreneurs, course creators, and more. Whether you host occasional webinars or spend your days running recurring calls or presentations, our platform can support you.
In the following sections, we’ll discuss each of these benefits in more detail. But if you’d like to skip to our demo for a more in-depth walkthrough, please join below (to watch instantly or register for a later time).
As mentioned above, our system’s webinar builder guides you through the steps to create a professional webinar, eliminating confusion and guesswork. It shows you how to:
Upload your webinar recording: You can add files from your device or import recordings from Zoom, Vimeo, or Descript’s video editing software.
Create a catchy name for your webinar.
Select the webinar event type: One-time event, recurring webinar, available only on specific days/times, or on-demand webinar.
Choose the goal of your webinar: Do you want users to book or request a meeting with you, sign up for a free trial, try a particular product feature, purchase your product, or advance to another webinar?
Add branding elements like logos and colors: These appear on registration pages, notification emails, in webinar rooms, and, of course, throughout the webinar experience.


Add interactions throughout your webinar: Our video timeline editor makes this as easy as can be; you simply select an interaction and the exact moment you want it to appear. You can even preview webinars to tweak interactions before publishing live.
Create a personalized welcome message for all webinar attendees: This adds a human element and invites your participants to interact with webinars and chat with your team.

Enable chat and manage chat settings: You can add moderators, choose how they’re notified, enable our Slack integration to reply via messenger, and set auto-responses for webinar times you won’t be available to respond instantly (these give attendees an idea of when you’ll be able to get back to them, so you don’t leave anybody hanging).

You can also use our templates to expedite this process.

One of the more common fears we hear about automated webinars is that they won’t elicit engagement or have the same feel as a live session. “Isn’t it just like watching a recording?”
It's a fair concern — especially if you've seen what most automated webinar platforms actually offer. Usually, it's one or two interaction types, a poll and a CTA, and even those are a pain to set up, requiring you to manually copy timestamps and toggle between different parts of the tool.
The reason the bar is so low is that these platforms were built to mimic live webinars, where a host has to trigger every interaction manually and can realistically do so only once or twice without losing their train of thought.
But automated webinars aren't live webinars — and if your content is evergreen and your interactions are preprogrammed, there's no reason not to build something genuinely engaging from start to finish.
That's exactly the problem we set out to solve and why we prioritized interactivity when building our platform — providing preprogrammable interactions to support all types of webinars.
eWebinar has the largest selection of interactions of any webinar software platform. (There are 18 at the time of writing, and the list is growing, which you can find here.) Check out our gallery below:

You can customize all interactive elements with your own copy and media (images, GIFs, emojis) to give them a more personalized touch.
Our system also offers:
AI-powered interactions: eWebinar can suggest interaction types, complete with copy and placement suggestions, based on your webinar transcript and goals.
Conditional interactions: Our system can serve up different interaction types based on attendee behavior and previous responses.
The problem with chat on most automated webinar platforms is that they force you into a tradeoff.
Either you show up to every session to chat live with attendees — which defeats the whole point of automation — or you turn off live chat entirely and route messages to email, which means you lose the real-time opportunity to answer questions, address objections, and make attendees feel like there's a real person on the other end. It's one or the other, but never both.
eWebinar's chat system is the only one built to give you both: live when you can, async when you can't. This is what really allows our users to run webinars 24/7 without burning out. It gives moderators the freedom and flexibility to respond when they’re available — during regular operating hours — and provide all attendees personalized attention.
Here’s how it works:
When an attendee joins your webinar, a personalized welcome message invites them to ask you questions.
Chat is private, not public, so attendees feel at ease and are more likely to reach out.
With unlimited team members, you can assign as many people as you need to help stay on top of chat, including a centralized support account.
Your team gets notified when someone sends you a message in one of three ways: by email, browser notification, or via Slack (when you enable the integration).
If a team member is available, they click the notification and start chatting live with the attendee.
If someone is free but not at their computer, they can still chat live with the attendee from our mobile-friendly chat admin or via their Slack app.
If no one on the team is available to chat live, an auto-response lets the attendee know you’ll get back to them later (after a set number of minutes).
When you or your team responds later, the attendee receives your reply by email.
This flexibility is essential for running successful automated webinars. Otherwise, you still need hosts to moderate chats around the clock, or you miss out on the chance to engage with participants altogether.
As of this writing, we’re the only automated webinar software that provides this asynchronous chat feature. Which is why we’re consistently voted the best solution for automated webinars.
Most automated webinar platforms let you pick one scheduling option — on-demand or a recurring schedule — but won't let you enable both for the same webinar. Some support replays, but only as a separate listing. Some offer just-in-time sessions but no recurring schedule.
The underlying logic seems to be that you have to choose, but that makes no sense when the webinar is pre-recorded and can run an infinite number of sessions. If attendees have to pick between time slots, tune in at inconvenient hours, or wait days to view, you risk losing them entirely — and once they’re lost, there’s very little chance of them returning.
Why risk losing them over a scheduling limitation when the content is already recorded and ready to go?
That’s why we let you offer attendees so many ways to tune in; they never have a reason to miss your webinars!
While creating your webinar, you can set a standard event type and enable:
With this combination of options, attendees can easily register for a time that works for them, allowing you to capture them at their peak moment of interest.
The result: eWebinar's average attendance rate across all customers is 65% — compared to an industry average of 40–50% for live webinars.
Another convenience is eWebinar’s automatic time zone adjustments. Once enabled, webinar schedules automatically adjust to attendees’ local times. So you could set a recurring schedule with webinars running at, say, 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. (the optimal times to host webinars), and they’ll be available at those local times for all audiences.
eWebinar automatically builds a professional, branded registration page for your webinar — including design, layout, and pre-written copy. You can use it as-is or customize it however you want.

If you'd rather use a third-party landing page, we offer more registration widgets than any other webinar platform: embed forms, pop-up widgets, button widgets, fixed bars, and card widgets for blog posts. However you're driving traffic, there's a widget for it.

Once someone registers, eWebinar takes it from there. They get an immediate confirmation email with a calendar invite, followed by automated reminders at preset intervals — one day before and one hour before their session. You can customize this sequence, add more touchpoints, or integrate with Twilio to send SMS or WhatsApp reminders.

After the webinar, the system automatically sends follow-up emails segmented by engagement. Attendees and no-shows get different messages — you might send attendees a CTA or next steps alongside a replay link, while no-shows get a nudge to watch what they missed. Every email comes with pre-written templates you can use as-is or make your own.
You can only strategically leverage automated webinars if you have the data to understand how they’re performing with your target audiences. That’s why we provide some of the most detailed analytics dashboards, so you can see exactly what’s working for you and identify ways to improve.
Our dashboard lets you measure:
Registration and attendance rates (the gap between how many people register and how many actually attend)
How users tune in (whether they watch on-demand, register for a later session, or view a replay)
Completion rates
Conversion rates
Then, our heatmaps let you visualize engagement, so you can see exactly when users interact with content and “like” or react to it, and understand what prompts them to chat. Our heatmaps also show when users join webinars or drop off, so you can see if and when you’re losing viewers during sessions.
Take a look at an example heatmap below:

Our analytics dashboards calculate the number of hours you’ve been able to run automated webinars through our platform — showing how much time you’ve saved (and gained) by letting our system do the heavy lifting.
For example, automating our product demo has saved us 1,627 hours and 20 minutes just this year alone!
Ready to see our automated webinars in action? Join our free demo below! You’ll be able to experience our webinar just as your customers will experience yours — as we use eWebinar to power all of our demos.
Take a look at our short explainer video below:
If you’re ready to jump on board after watching, we offer a 14-day free trial and three plans:
Packages scale to support your needs — you can add attendees in increments of 1,000 for $49/month.
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Bonus: Webinar Series Our newest feature — Webinar Series — allows you to build multi-webinar learning paths and create online courses, certification trainings, product tutorials, onboarding resources, and more. You can make a series from existing webinars or create an entirely new experience. The Webinar Series feature allows you to set minimum watch times and add mandatory action items — such as quizzes, surveys, feedback requests, and more — between webinars to ensure users understand what they need to continue forward. Participants who enroll in your webinar series receive a dedicated page to track their progress, access replays, reference chat transcripts, and receive completion certificates. Our analytics dashboard also allows you to monitor participants’ progress, review responses to action items, and see when they earn certificates. Learn more about eWebinar’s Webinar Series here. |

WebinarGeek is another popular player in the automated webinar space because the platform offers:
Advanced customization and branding tools, custom domains, real-time page editors, and custom CSS.
AI that helps optimize scheduling, aggregate performance metrics to pull key insights, and automate manual administrative tasks.
A variety of integrations so you can connect WebinarGeek with other tools in your daily workflows and instantly import webinars.
Users also appreciate WebinarGeek for its ease of use and available support; there isn’t a steep learning curve to understand features and create professional webinars, and their team is highly responsive when you need help.
Now, WebinarGeek also supports live chat and post-webinar email replies like eWebinar, but there’s a catch: you can’t enable both in the same webinar. You have to choose between chat or email communications.
There are a few additional downsides here:
WebinarGeek doesn’t let you combine scheduling rules. You can create recurring schedules and enable on-demand viewing, but you have to create separate webinar listings to do so.
It also doesn’t support automatic time zone adjustments.
Interactions are limited to polls, quizzes, and contact forms.
Check out WebinarGeek reviews here.
WebinarGeek offers three plans:
The Basic plan ($85/month) supports live and on-demand webinars and up to 50 viewers.
The Premium plan ($125 to $499 per month) includes everything in the Basic plan, plus automated webinars, interactions, and custom branding.
The Enterprise plan provides full feature access and supports up to 5k attendees. Plans start at $349/month and require custom quotes as you upgrade.

BigMarker is a more advanced automated webinar software, supporting teams running repeat webinars and large multi-day summits. It earns positive reviews (and a 4.7-star rating) for its:
Extensive selection of interactions, such as polls, Q&A, offers, handouts, surveys, and public/private chat
Variety of supported session types, including automated, on-demand, evergreen, breakout sessions, series/multi-session events, and 24/7 live streaming
Advanced scheduling tools, time zone adjustments, and options to display only relevant sessions to attendees based on their registration forms
Flexible chat tools and the ability to respond within chat windows via SMS or Slack
Impressive marketing automation tools
Customizable branding options
Paid webinar support (with built-in event ticketing and payment processing)
Comprehensive event lifecycle management — from registration through follow-ups
Detailed analytics to understand where you’re performing well and identify areas of improvement
However, BigMarker comes with an expensive price tag and a steep learning curve. It’s best suited for enterprises, as many smaller businesses are priced out during initial sales conversations.
BigMarker offers custom quotes for all packages.

Demio is a highly-rated automated webinar solution built specifically for marketers and sales teams.
It’s easy to use and requires virtually zero training; you don’t need developers or designers to assist.
It offers strong lead gen tools that collect each person’s name and email when they sign up for a webinar — powering all communications (like reminders before webinars and follow-ups) and retargeting campaigns.
It integrates with popular tools like Mailchimp and HubSpot to build contact lists easily and fuel email marketing initiatives.
While Demio offers handy tools to support sales and marketing processes, there are a few things to note when determining if it’s the best tool for automated webinars:
It only supports a few preset interactions, such as polls, Q&A, and CTAs.
Scheduling rules are a little inflexible; like WebinarGeek above, it doesn’t let you combine rules and offer both one-time or recurring schedules and on-demand access together (if you want both, you must create two webinar listings: one event for recurring times, and one separate event for on-demand).
It doesn’t support automatic time zone adjustments.
Another thing to note here is that Demio’s chat only allows you to interact with attendees while webinars are running. It isn’t available for on-demand sessions — which, as we explained above, doesn’t lend itself to true webinar automation.
The last note here is that Demio’s pricing can be expensive as you add moderators and participants. The most popular plan, Growth, costs between $117 and $855 per host per month — so you could wind up paying thousands just to support a handful of hosts.
Read verified Demio reviews here.
Demio offers a 14-day free trial and three paid packages:
The Starter plan ($63/month) supports a single host and 50 attendees.
The Growth plan ($117 to $855 per host per month) supports multiple hosts and up to 3k attendees.
The Premium plan (starting at $196 per host per month, paid yearly) includes everything in the Growth plan plus dedicated account support.
Read more: Best Demio Alternatives

EasyWebinar is another top-rated automated webinar software that holds an impressive 4.4-star rating for its ease of use, helpful customer support, and flexible scheduling options.
EasyWebinar is a popular contender in this space because it lets you pre-record webinars and set them on a recurring schedule, enable just-in-time sessions, provide replay links, and adjust webinar times to attendees’ local time zones.
We include EasyWebinar in our list of automated webinar software because it’s a name you’re bound to run into, but it’s not a top choice for a few reasons:
Interactions are limited to polls and special offers — not super impressive — and placing them is a tedious process (you have to enter the timestamp manually for when you want it to appear).
EasyWebinar doesn’t support chat for pre-recorded sessions unless you integrate a third-party chat tool; otherwise, attendees must contact you via email to ask questions or learn more.
It doesn’t offer the best value for money. EasyWebinar is just as expensive (if not more expensive) than other automated systems, but doesn’t include even half of the conveniences.
Find EasyWebinar reviews here.
Scheduling tools, including one-time, recurring, just-in-time, or on-demand webinars, plus automatic time zone adjustment
EasyWebinar offers three plans, but you need the Pro or Growth plan to access automated webinar features.
Both plans include the full EasyWebinar feature set, with optional add-ons for their built-in CRM or paid webinar support at $49/month each.
Read more:

EverWebinar automated webinar software (the sister product to WebinarJam live webinar software) is another name you’re likely to encounter while researching webinar automation.
While the webinar platform is easy to use, provides quick support, and offers some advanced tools for sales teams running product demos (like the ability to provide discounts and simple checkout links), we suggest avoiding this brand because it’s bloated with disingenuous features to trick webinar attendees into thinking they’re attending a live experience.
After you pre-record your webinar and set a schedule, the platform incorporates fake attendee counts, chats, interaction responses, and more to make automated webinars look like live events.
User reviews also warn against this software, saying you’re better off being upfront about offering automated webinars vs. faking people out.
Read EverWebinar reviews here.
EverWebinar offers three billing options, all of which include full access to its features:

WebinarNinja is a popular platform for both live and automated webinars, used by sales teams, marketers, HR teams, and online educators.
It earns solid marks for flexibility and ease of use — teams can spin up a webinar quickly, run both live and pre-recorded content from the same account, and lean on 24/7 customer support via phone, chat, and email whenever they need it.
It's also one of the few platforms that let you charge attendees for access directly through Stripe, making it a natural fit for coaches and course creators who want to monetize their content.
Here's the catch: the automation features are thinner than they look.
Interactions in automated webinars are limited to polls, Q&A, handouts, and sales offers — and there's no interaction timeline where you can choreograph moments of engagement throughout your presentation the way you can in eWebinar.
Live sessions get full public and private chat, but automated webinars don't support real-time chat at all. Attendees can submit questions, but you reply via email after the session, which significantly undercuts the feeling of a live experience.
And while the per-attendee pricing ($1.20 per attendee per month) looks affordable at a glance, it can add up quickly depending on your volume — so it's worth running the math against a flat-rate platform before committing.
Find WebinarNinja reviews here.
WebinarNinja charges $1.20 per attendee per month.
All users get access to the full feature set. WebinarNinja also offers custom enterprise plans for larger teams.

StealthSeminar is one of the oldest automated webinar platforms on the market — it's been around since 2010 — and it's built squarely for marketers running evergreen sales funnels. If you're looking for scheduling flexibility, it's genuinely impressive: you can run recurring sessions, just-in-time starts, and on-demand replays all at the same time for a single webinar, which is a combination that a lot of platforms still won't let you do.
That said, the platform is built around simulation in a way that's worth understanding before you commit. You can preload chat messages to create the appearance of live audience activity, display simulated attendee counts, and run what they call a "hybrid" mode — where the webinar plays automatically while you or a team member joins to run live chat.
That last feature sounds convenient, but it means someone still has to show up to every session for chat to feel real, which undercuts the whole point of automation. If no one joins, you're left with preloaded messages and no authentic back-and-forth.
Interaction options are fairly limited (polls, CTAs, some custom HTML), and pricing is somewhat steep — starting at $69.95/month for the most basic package (supporting only 100 attendees) and going up to $175/month for plans that support only a couple of hundred attendees.
Find more StealthSeminar reviews here.
StealthSeminar offers four paid plans:
Starter ($69.95/month): This plan supports 100 attendees, live and automated webinars, interactive features, and analytics.
Professional ($99.95/month): This plan also supports 100 attendees and includes additional advanced features, such as customizable registration forms, white-label custom domains, and white-label custom emails.
Growth ($175 to $280 per month): This plan supports 300 to 500 attendees and includes white-glove support.
Plus (Custom Quote): This is StealthSeminar’s enterprise plan that supports over 25k attendees.

GoTo Webinar is one of the most recognizable names in the webinar space — it's been around for over two decades, and that longevity shows in the product. It's polished, reliable, and deeply integrated with the broader GoTo suite of business tools, which makes it a natural fit for enterprise teams already invested in that ecosystem. Its security credentials (end-to-end encryption, GDPR compliance, SSO) also make it a common choice for larger organizations in regulated industries where those things aren't optional.
For automated webinars specifically, though, the product shows its live-first roots pretty clearly.
They only support a simple recurring schedule (one session per day, week, or month) and an on-demand (“Watch Now”) option, but there's no just-in-time option, and you can't combine viewing formats as some dedicated automation platforms allow.
Interactions are limited to polls, Q&A, handouts, and surveys, and you can’t set the timing for when they appear. They appear from the very start of the webinar.
There's no live chat for automated sessions; attendees get a post-session email report instead, which isn't exactly the engagement experience most teams are after.
Read more GoTo Webinar reviews here.
GoTo Webinar offers three plans based on webinar room capacities:

ClickMeeting is a browser-based webinar platform that covers a lot of ground — live webinars, automated webinars, online meetings, and large-scale virtual events up to 10,000 attendees. It's popular with educators, trainers, and corporate teams, and earns solid marks for ease of use, reliable performance, and a clean interface that doesn't require a learning curve to get started.
As for its automated webinars specifically, this solution is functional but lean.
You can build an automated webinar timeline with your video, CTAs, polls, and surveys, and the platform will run it on a (simple) recurring schedule (once a day, week, or month — with up to 30 recurrences).
What you can't do is combine that recurring schedule with on-demand viewing in the same webinar — the two options are separate, which means more setup if you want both. There's no just-in-time scheduling either.
Chat in automated sessions works. You may join sessions to chat live with attendees or send post-webinar email replies, but you cannot enable both options for the same webinar.
There’s one genuinely useful feature, though: ClickMeeting lets you upload multiple videos into a single automated webinar timeline, which most platforms don't support.
Find more ClickMeeting reviews here.
ClickMeeting offers a free trial with up to 25 attendees and basic features. After the trial, you can choose from three paid plans: Live, Automated, or Enterprise.
The Live plan ($48 to $335 per month) supports live webinars and 50 to 1,000 attendees.
The Automated plan ($58 to $385 per month) supports automated and on-demand webinars for 50 to 1,000 attendees.
The Enterprise plan (custom quotes) supports all webinar types and up to 10,000 attendees.

Livestorm is a polished, browser-based platform that's found a loyal audience among B2B marketing and customer success teams — companies like Sony, Dolby, and Verizon use it for product demos, training programs, and internal events. It's genuinely well-designed: clean interface, strong integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Marketo, detailed engagement analytics, and no downloads required for attendees. If your priority is live webinars with a professional look and deep CRM connectivity, it's a strong option.
However, Livestorm only allows you to use automation features during a live webinar (and run what we call “hybrid webinars”).
You can upload a pre-recorded video and schedule it to run, but Livestorm doesn't support automatic audience interactions. Polls and questions can only be triggered manually by a host who's actively present during the session. Which means if no one shows up to run it, attendees are watching a video with no interactive layer at all. That's a pretty fundamental limitation.
It’s also worth pointing out:
They don't have a recurring schedule option, but you can add as many individual sessions as you'd like.
You can only chat live with attendees by joining sessions. (For greater chat capabilities, they offer integrations with chat software, like Intercom and Drift.)
They support two types of interactions: questions and polls.
The pricing model is also worth understanding before you get too far in. Livestorm charges based on "active contacts" — anyone who registers for or watches a replay of an event in a given month. For teams running multiple webinars with consistent audiences, that contact cap can become a meaningful constraint.
Find more Livestorm reviews here.
Livestorm offers a free trial, the Pro plan, and custom enterprise plans.
The Pro plan is attendee-based, starting at $3/attendee for up to 400 attendees — and the per-attendee rate drops as your audience grows. For example, Livestorm charges:
After 4,000 attendees, you need to opt for an enterprise package.
Read more: Best Livestorm Alternatives

Zoom is the most recognizable name on this list, and for most teams it's already in the tech stack — which is exactly why it ends up in conversations about automated webinars even though it wasn't really built for them. Its live webinar product is robust, reliable, and capable of scaling to massive audiences, and its deep integration with the rest of Zoom's ecosystem makes it a natural fit for enterprises already invested in there.
The automation story is a different matter. Zoom's basic on-demand webinar feature is really just a gated cloud recording — attendees register, get a link, and watch a video. There are no interactions, no chat, nothing that creates a genuine webinar experience.
A closer option is Simulive, which broadcasts a pre-recorded session at a scheduled time and allows a moderator to run live chat and Q&A during playback. But it comes with a significant list of constraints: the video must be a Zoom cloud recording (you can't upload an external file), moderators can't appear on camera during the session, and attendees have to join from a desktop — no mobile support. Once the session ends, the ability to respond to chat disappears with it.
If your team is already running live webinars on Zoom and wants a lightweight way to repurpose recordings, the on-demand option is easy enough to set up. But if you're evaluating platforms specifically for automated webinar functionality, Zoom requires significant workarounds to get there — and the attendee experience reflects that.
Find more Zoom Webinar reviews here.
Zoom offers three packages: Webinars, Webinars Plus, and Events. You need the Webinars Plus plan to access Simulive sessions.
The Zoom Webinars plan is $89 to $2,490 per month and supports up to 5,000 attendees. You can choose between a monthly and an annual subscription here.
The Zoom Webinars Plus plan starts at $99/month for 100 attendees. To accommodate more viewers, you have to opt for an annual plan. These range from $82.50 to $1665.83 per month and support 100 to 3,000 attendees. They also offer the option to pay per attendee.
The Zoom Events plan starts at $149/month for 100 attendees. As with Webinars Plus above, you just choose an annual plan to unlock more seats. Annual plans range from $124.17 to $2,207.50 and support 100 to 3,000 attendees. They also offer a pay-per-attendee option here.
Read more: Zoom Alternatives for Engaging, Interactive Automated Webinars
You can also compare more of the best webinar software in our guide here.
The process of creating an automated webinar is similar to developing the content for a live webinar, but with a different mindset.
Automated webinars can require more upfront planning and preparation, but the payoff is that you get an evergreen webinar that can effectively and consistently deliver results for a long time over hundreds, if not thousands, of webinar sessions.
Like eWebinar or another name from our list above.
Automated webinars are a two-way conversation. They can be as interactive as you wish since everything is preprogrammed. If you weave interactivity throughout your webinar script, you will keep your audience engaged until the end of your presentation and gain valuable insights about them.
This requires planning, which can be made easier by following a customizable webinar template and a few simple scripting instructions.
Before you record your webinar, you’ll need to figure out your recording setup, including what you plan to use for lighting, a mic, a camera, and recording software. (Here are some recommendations.)
Practice your webinar a few times in front of a live audience to see how well it works and make improvements. Since your webinar will run on autopilot, you want it as optimized as possible.
When it’s time to record, test your camera setup by recording yourself speaking, and play back the video to make sure it's clear and easy to understand.
Then, present your webinar as if you were doing it live. If you mess up a little, correct yourself and keep going. No one expects a webinar to be perfect. It is the content itself that matters.
Aside from a pre-recorded video, an automated webinar has other components that you will need to create and customize within your software of choice, such as:

eWebinar has a straightforward, step-by-step method for creating an automated webinar (outlined above). The process typically takes less than 10 minutes and requires no special instructions.
The final step is to publish and promote your webinar to your target audience through various channels, such as online communities, social media, organic content, or paid advertisements.
Regardless of your level of marketing expertise, one easy thing you can do to drive sign-ups is to install a webinar marketing widget on your website or blog.
(If you want to see what that would look like, go to our homepage and look in the bottom left corner for the pop-up promoting our demo.)
One of our customers, Nectar HR, created an on-demand product demo and installed our pop-up registration widget on their home page. They saw these results in 3 months:

Automated webinars are best suited for the types of presentations you give repeatedly — where the content remains largely the same every time. This is especially helpful if you’ve hit the limit of how often you can provide those presentations or of the size and type of audience you can reach.
Some examples here include sales pitches, product demos, onboarding webinars, training sessions, info sessions, and company overviews.

Automated webinars are also great for presentations you wish you could deliver repeatedly, but can’t, due to resource constraints or the nature of the webinar (e.g., one with a special guest). This includes activities such as content marketing, webinars, top-of-the-funnel lead generation, and thought leadership.
Some companies simply convert recordings of their live online events into automated webinars to recreate their interactivity and engagement, but as evergreen content.
Read more about the use case for SaaS customer success teams on our website, or read the two mini case studies below:

Later, the #1 Instagram marketing platform, automated their customer success webinars for onboarding and training and experienced these results:
“We used to host 2-4 live webinars a month at capacity. Now we host 100+ a month and only spend about an hour a day responding to chat messages. Attendance has gone up 6x!”
– Anett Vándor, Customer Engagement Manager

BombBomb started using eWebinar to automate its onboarding and saw these results:
Watch time increased from 70% to 90%
Registration and attendance increased
Engagement and customer questions increased
Attendees are thanking them and giving 5-star ratings
“Literally everything across the board has gone up. We are having more people register. We're having more people attend. We're having more people stay longer in the webinars themselves. And they are interacting and engaging with the webinar more.”
– Kevin Andrews, Client Enablement Manager
Watch Kevin’s full testimonial or read a transcript of it here instead.

The Sales team at visitor management system, The Receptionist, started using eWebinar to automate the live weekly sales demos they were doing for prospects that didn't warrant an immediate one-on-one demo and experienced the following:
“We're running between 80% and 90%, with multiple weeks of 100% attendance. It's pretty extraordinary to be quite frank with you. It has outperformed our traditional format in not only engagement, but also participation and conversions to paying customers. To say our sales team loves eWebinar is a bit of an understatement.”
– Tom Foster, Director of Sales
Watch Tom’s full testimonial or read a transcript of it here instead.

Shayna Oliveira of Espresso English uses eWebinar to offer a free workshop teaching English as a second language that generates leads for her paid program, and has seen the following benefits:
“We see nearly a hundred percent retention rate in terms of people watching the whole webinar from start to finish. I think one of the reasons is eWebinar's built-in interactive features. Students can respond to questions, take polls, and click on links. And that really keeps it moving, keeps it interesting so that the student is actually interacting with the training and not just sitting there and watching it passively. And it helps students stay all the way through the end, which I am thrilled to see.”
— Shayna Oliveira, Founder and CEO
Read the Espresso English case study →
Other software providers avoid this question altogether because it is not possible to do so using their software. They either require you to:
It’s one or the other, but not both.
75% of consumers feel that automated experiences are impersonal.
eWebinar's proprietary chat system lets you address that sentiment while balancing it against the need to deliver webinars at scale. It lets you chat live with attendees 1-on-1 when you can, and respond to messages personally later via email when you can't.
There are five key benefits to automated webinars over live webinars:
The most significant and most obvious benefit of automated webinars is how much time they save you, since no one needs to present them live.
Although our customers are always astonished by the sheer number of hours they save, they are even more amazed by what they can accomplish with the time they regain.
But it goes much further than that…
An automated webinar essentially lets you clone yourself, which means you can do as many webinar sessions as you need. Our customers have been able to scale their time in ways they previously thought impossible.
For example, one of our larger customers was doing two to four live webinars a month before they started using eWebinar. Now they host 100+ webinar sessions per month and spend only an hour or so each day responding to chat messages. It’s as if they conjured hundreds of hours out of thin air.
The average attendance rate for live webinars across the industry is only 40% to 50%. Meanwhile, average attendance rates across all eWebinar customers are 15 to 25 percentage points higher — at 65%.
At the time of writing, the attendance rate of our own 20-minute product demo is 87%. And we have customers regularly report weeks of 90% to 100% attendance!
The primary reason for the higher attendance rates is convenience and accessibility. Because they are pre-recorded, they can be made available as often as necessary, including on demand, to reach the largest possible audience.
Webinar attendees can either find a time in their own time zone that fits their schedule or join a webinar immediately after finding it, at the peak moment of high interest.

With live webinars, people may sign up with every intention of attending, but then their schedule changes, they lose interest, or they just plain forget. Live webinars can only be done as often as the host can present them, which is never going to be convenient for every potential attendee.
With the advent of Netflix and other streaming services, consumers' expectations have changed. People expect to be able to access their video content when they want it, without having to wait. Automated webinars let you do just that.
While it may seem counterintuitive, automated webinars can be more interactive than live webinars — when planned and created with the right software. Our customers often report significant increases in engagement and watch time after transitioning from live to automated content.

Live webinars are pretty passive. They generally don’t have much audience participation outside of Q&A at the end. The presenter might take a poll or ask the audience a question, but it’s too distracting to do that more than once or twice because those actions have to be triggered manually. Creating an interactive audience experience requires planning and scripting, which is generally not worth the time spent on a one-time event.
It’s the opposite with automated webinars. Since they can run indefinitely, it is worth spending a little extra time scripting them in a way that makes the experience more interactive for the audience. You can incorporate elements such as polls, questions, tips, contact forms, handouts, and links directly into the presentation.
Since these interactions are preprogrammed, you can add as many as you want. Everything is automated.
Having interactions appear every few minutes throughout your webinar gives the audience something to do, keeps them engaged, and helps maintain their focus so they stay until the end. eWebinar offers more interaction types than any other webinar software, giving you more tools to keep your audience engaged.
We also offer a unique interaction editor, inspired by video editing software, that makes it easy to add, edit, duplicate, and move interactions around on your video’s timeline.
There’s an aspect of engagement in automated webinars that gets overlooked: live chat.
Live chat is the most interactive aspect of any webinar. Yet other automated webinar software providers only let you chat live with attendees if you show up for every single session (and we don’t count that as an automated webinar, since someone must be there).

As explained above, eWebinar is the only platform that's solved the live chat problem in webinar automation.
Every inquiry gets a response. Nothing falls through the cracks. If attendees can’t get an answer from you during their session, they know their message was received and that they will hear back from you later.
Meanwhile, you can run your webinars around the clock without sacrificing the opportunity to chat live with attendees when you are able.
Live webinars don’t always come off smoothly. The presenter might have an off day or accidentally leave something out.
Or maybe they’re burned out from having to give the same presentation over and over.
Or maybe technical difficulties ruin the event for everyone.
If you’ve run live webinars before, you know that things go wrong. But with automated webinars, these problems go away.
You can perfect and record the best version of your presentation, so it always goes exactly as planned. Automated webinars are less prone to the tech problems common to live webinars. You can always show the best version of yourself.
The result is a reliably consistent attendee experience that ensures you always make a great impression.
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eWebinar is the only automated webinar solution that offers all of these benefits. |
The short answer is no — and this is actually one of the biggest traps buyers fall into. The needs of live and automated webinars are fundamentally different, and tools that try to do both end up compromising on both.
Think about it: the features that make automated webinars great — async chat, a wide variety of preprogrammed interactions, flexible scheduling options that run 24/7 — aren't things a live webinar platform is designed around. And vice versa. When a platform tries to serve both use cases, automation ends up as an afterthought.
Every eWebinar customer we know still uses separate software for their live webinars (we do too!) — not because they have to, but because they've learned firsthand that a dedicated tool always outperforms a jack-of-all-trades. A wrench will never be a hammer.
Our advice: don't evaluate automated webinar software based on whether it also does live. Evaluate it on the features that actually matter for automation — chat, interactions, and scheduling. Then test it yourself. Every platform on this list offers a free trial, so you can find out what's actually true rather than taking anyone's word for it (ours included).
Automated webinars have a bad reputation, and not without reason. Other automated webinar tools (like EverWebinar above) have features that were specifically designed to deceive attendees.
Our frustration with these types of webinar features was a driving force behind our decision to build eWebinar.
eWebinar customer, Paul Thomson, had this to say on the topic:

To illustrate the kinds of features other software platforms offer that are designed to trick attendees, imagine the following scenario:
You discover a webinar that looks interesting. The landing page warns you to register quickly because of “limited space.”
When you join the webinar, you see a “LIVE” indicator, making you think that you’re watching a live event.
As the webinar starts, you see other (fake) attendees slowly join. The attendee count slowly climbs until it reaches the hundreds.
Audience members start posting comments in chat: Jan says, “Sounds good to me!” Alexis adds, “That’s a great point!” followed by Marcus, “God, I love that!”
The host takes an audience poll that pops up for you to answer. When the results of the poll are shared, you are surprised how different they are from what you thought they’d be.
Later in the presentation, the host makes a sales offer. Shortly after the offer is made, you start to see alerts pop up, “Sally just signed up!” “Mahesh just signed up!” They just keep coming.
If you have been in a similar situation and felt like something was off, your instincts were right. It was all BS. The webinar was, in fact, designed to trick you.
Everything about the experience is fake: the “limited space,” that it is being done “LIVE,” new attendees joining, the chat messages, the poll results, the sales notifications — all of it.
The creator of the webinar made everything up to manipulate their audience, which was only possible because of the software they used.
Of all these features, we think fake chat is the most problematic. It leads attendees to believe they will receive answers to their questions when, in fact, their messages either go into a void — never to be seen by anyone — or there is no mechanism in the software for the host to send a response.
It is all smoke and mirrors.
To be fair, no single platform has all of these deceptive features, but they do exist, and many platforms have most of them.
These are flawed marketing and communication tactics for businesses seeking to maintain their credibility and build long-term customer relationships. Modern consumers are savvy, and once trust is lost, it's nearly impossible to regain.
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eWebinar was built for authenticity and transparency Our philosophy at eWebinar is that if the experience is engaging and authentic — and attendees have a way to connect with you — it shouldn’t matter that the webinar is pre-recorded, nor should that fact need to be hidden. We encourage our customers never to lie in their videos and claim their webinars are live. In our own webinars, we always make it clear that they are pre-recorded, but the chat is live for those with questions. We do more than just preach authenticity and transparency to our customers; we built it into our platform. Here are five examples of how we did that:
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When people share this thought with us, our immediate response is, “We agree!” Live webinars are and will continue to be a critical part of any mature webinar strategy. They are essential for special events, guest speakers, panel discussions, and any presentation where it only makes sense to give it once or twice (i.e., the content loses relevance immediately).
We would never advocate for the elimination of live webinars. Instead, we believe people should automate their repetitive webinars — the ones where they must deliver the same content again and again — so they can free up their time and focus on other things, which could very well be developing new live webinars.
If you read between the lines of this misconception, however, you will find other common misconceptions from this article hiding within it.
People think automated webinars could never replace live ones, because live webinars are “just better” — they are more engaging, authentic, personal, and impactful. And people like them better.
While there's some truth to these statements in the context of — and only in the context of — the kinds of presentations mentioned above that are best suited for live webinars, we believe automated webinars are generally superior to live ones for delivering repetitive content, provided you utilize the right software.
In our experience, the opposite of this statement is true. People actually engage more with automated webinars — at least they do with ours.
Attendees don't just sit there. They get to participate in the experience, which makes it fun and interactive. Each attendee can message you or your team directly via chat at any time. Direct, private communication is the best kind of engagement!
eWebinar was built with the attendee experience in mind first and foremost. With a bit of planning and preparation, our interactions and live chat system create a more personal, engaging, and interactive experience than could ever be achieved in a live webinar.
People often prefer automated webinars to live webinars without realizing it.
When it comes to things like product demos, onboarding, and training, consumers expect to receive the information they want, when they want it. They don’t want to have to wait a week for a product demo (let alone talk to a salesperson) or wait for the next onboarding webinar a month from now.
The scheduling features of automated webinars (especially just-in-time and on-demand sessions) let consumers watch your webinars at their convenience, which they love!
Another thing people like about automated webinars (created with eWebinar, at least) is that they tend not to be as dull as live webinars, where you simply sit and watch. Real-time interactions and live chat provide people with a way to participate in the experience, making them feel more invested.
Finally, people are happiest in any webinar when they have a forum to get answers to their questions during it. eWebinar is the only webinar platform that supports live chat while keeping your webinars available 24/7.
If you’ve considered automated webinars to deliver your video content, you have probably had this same thought. I mean, how different could they really be?
For specific types of video, the difference is enormous, and the benefits of automated webinars are so much greater than what you can get from standard video; you may never go back to video once you have experienced those benefits for yourself.
Learn more about eWebinar by joining our on-demand demo below or sign up for a free 14-day trial.