Competitors
2/27/24

Top BigMarker Alternatives in 2024: A Comprehensive Guide for B2B Marketers

By:
Rachel Meyrowitz

We know the words “engaging webinar” can feel like an oxymoron. Whether it’s product demos, sales presentations, or sharing thought leadership with your audience, there’s nothing worse than realizing your attendees are nodding off or checking their email, despite your best efforts and hours of careful preparation.

It’s (probably) not your fault. A lot of traditional webinar platforms can be more of a hindrance than a help — think clunky interfaces, unstable connections, and lackluster features. That holds you back when it comes to converting attendees into leads, promoting your brand, and building stronger customer relationships with online meetings.

Yet webinars remain a golden opportunity to connect with your audience. You just need the right tool to not only engage your audience but also measure that engagement with analytics and make sure you’re putting your best foot forward with customer acquisition.

One popular choice for large-scale virtual events is BigMarker: a robust webinar hosting service designed to support interactive events for up to 50,000 attendees. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, with some users reporting issues with complexity, a steep learning curve, and a high price point.*

At Demio, we're here to help you compare webinar software and help you better understand what functionality you need to meet your goals. Whatever interactive features you need to create a high-quality webinar experience as dynamic and engaging as an in-person event, we’ve got the virtual event platform for you!

Because at the end of the day, it's not just about hosting webinars — it's about delivering unforgettable experiences that grow your brand and engage your audience. 

*Based on user review data from G2 and Capterra, accurate in February 2024.

4 BigMarker Alternatives for Impactful Virtual Events 

BigMarker is undoubtedly one of the best tools for interactive webinars. But if you want to improve webinar engagement, it might not necessarily be the best tool for your use case.

To help you understand which alternative makes the most sense for you, we’ve summarized the key features, pricing, and ideal use cases of the four best BigMarker alternatives currently on the market in 2024.

Whatever your budget, goals, and functionality needs, there are options available that can take your virtual events to the next level. Your chosen webinar software must work at your speed and be capable of connecting your brand with your audience. 

We’re covering:

  1. Demio: Best BigMarker alternative for attendee engagement and ROI
  2. Airmeet
  3. Zoho Meeting
  4. Livestorm

1. Demio: Best BigMarker Alternative for Attendee Engagement and ROI

Demio makes it seamless to present slides and pre-recorded video while enabling engagement features like live chat, polls, and handouts

Demio is a hassle-free webinar platform designed to provide data-driven marketers with the transparent insights they need.

Its features not only empower you to engage audience members but also measure that engagement so you can attribute genuine results and measure ROI. Demio is designed to make it easy for you to create great webinar experiences from the landing page right through to post-event follow-up. 

You’ll get customized branding, automated attendance reminders and notifications, real-time conversation, polling, and interaction features, and more. In parallel, the tool collects rich marketing-relevant analytics so you can gain powerful insights from your events and achieve your goals. 

🛠️ Key Features 

  • Participation tools — Interactive polls, surveys, Q&As, tagging features, and more, which are proven to increase attendee focus
  • Downloadable resources — Upload presentations, videos, and value-add documents. For on-demand, automated events, you can even set up timed handouts
Demio gives you a variety of useful and intuitive tools to drive engagement during your webinars like adding resources
  • Intuitive interface — Easy for both hosts and attendees to navigate
  • Insights reports and segmentation — Powerful engagement data showing who interacts with your content, downloads, and chats, so you know which leads to prioritize 
  • Focus time analytics — Understand exactly how long people are paying attention for and see when they’re dropping off or losing focus.
  • People reports — Track registrations, attendance rates, conversions, and other webinar KPIs
  • Wide-ranging integrations — Connect tools like Hubspot or another CRM to build webinar analytics into your workflow
  • Evergreen webinars — Repurpose events and use Demio AI  to chat with on-demand attendees 24/7
  • Events Showcase — Easily create a branded showcase of your webinars to embed on your website or share online
  • Spotlight audience members — Bring attendees to the stage so they can be part of the content
  • Customized branding — Keep your logo visible on your registration page, email reminders, and webinar room 
  • Personalized interfaces and backgrounds — Look professional and creative, no matter where you're broadcasting from
  • Guest speakers & moderators — You can add guests to manage the chat and Q&A or share their expertise
  • User-friendly solution — Simple, no-download tool that’s easy to use 
  • 24/7 customer support — Speedy solutions to any issues or questions to keep everything running smoothly
  • Strong security and data protection — Encrypted data communication channels, Unique Join Links, and secure storage 
  • Boost add-on Makes it easy for your registrants to drive further signups with social sharing and incentives

Demio is your all-in-one solution with all the right tools to amplify webinar registrations, engagement, lead generation, and end-to-end ROI.

💰 Pricing

Demio offers a 14-day free trial and flexible pricing plans suitable for diverse needs.

Per-month pricing for our annual plan looks like this: 

Starter: From $42/month, up to 50 attendees

Growth: From $75—$567/month, 150-3,000 attendees 

Premium: From $184–$734/month per host, 150-3,000 attendees and white-glove support, key integrations, and value-adds

🤔 Demio vs BigMarker 

We believe Demio stands out as the premier choice for most B2B marketers aiming to significantly boost webinar attendance and engagement through a robust, user-friendly, and reliable platform. With Demio, you'll gain access to more detailed engagement analytics and segmentation capabilities, alongside the ability to accommodate more hosts (up to 15, depending on your plan).

Of course, BigMarker could be the right fit for certain users — especially those looking for a platform that supports large-scale events. BigMarker's strength lies in its ability to host webinars with up to 50,000 attendees, though if you look at our Demio vs BigMarker comparison table, you’ll see it may not be the best option for a premium onboarding experience, adaptive streaming quality, and speedy customer support.

If your primary goal is to drive engagement and gather actionable insights from your B2B webinars, Demio's specialized features and analytics could be more aligned with your needs. However, for those seeking the ability to scale up to very large events, BigMarker's extensive functionalities might be more appealing. 

📢 Hear what customers say

Here’s a review from Demio customer Nancy at Digiliterate:

“The best thing about Demio is the platform's ability to automate the management of webinars. From creating a registration page to sending automatic email reminders, Demio has significantly improved the efficiency and productivity of my work. 
The platform's intuitive design and easy-to-use interface have also made it easier for me to plan and execute webinars from start to finish.”

2. Airmeet

Airmeet is a virtual event platform that prioritizes inclusivity and connectivity on a global scale. Its browser-friendly design allows for easy access from various devices, enhancing user flexibility. The platform also supports closed captions, making events more accessible to a wider audience.

Airmeet provides 24/7 assistance, ensuring users receive timely help with any issues related to events or the platform itself.

🛠️ Key Features 

Some of the features you’ll find in Airmeet are: 

  • Mobile app support
  • Breakout rooms
  • Multiple speakers for town halls, workshops, and other events
  • In-browser support
  • 24/7 live support

💰 Pricing

Airmeet offers a few distinct plans:

Free: 50 attendees per event (up to 90 minutes) and one organizer license 

Premium Webinars: $1,999 per year, 100+ attendees per event, and one organizer license 

Virtual Events: Custom quotes for packages with five organizer licenses and advanced features

All in Suite: Custom quotes for packages with ten organizer licenses and advanced features

3. Zoho Meeting

Zoho Meeting is a video conferencing and webinar platform for industries with a strong emphasis on security.

Attendees can join from any device without having to download any applications. It is relatively feature-light, particularly when it comes to engagement, but is well-suited to those seeking something simple and very easy-to-use. It’s not specifically developed as a webinar platform but it’s a great option for those primarily interested in hosting virtual meetings.

🛠️ Key Features 

Zoho Meeting has lots of unique and useful features that can benefit your brand, including:

  • Meetings locked and encrypted for security
  • Screen sharing and whiteboards
  • Recording, replaying, and sharing options for all hosted video webinars
  • Video and audio conferencing options 
  • Meeting notes and chat feature 
  • Continuous virtual support 

💰 Pricing

Zoho Meeting offers a few distinct plans:

Free Forever: 100 webinar participants for up to 60 minutes with minimal features

Webinar Standard: Starts at $8 per host/month billed annually for 25 attendees, with limited features (not including analytics and source tracking)

Webinar Professional: $16 per host/month billed annually for 25 attendees

4. Livestorm

While we’ve previously covered alternatives to Livestorm, it’s a great engagement platform focused on features like Q&As, polls, and easily live streaming pre-recorded video.

A good choice for small businesses with its focus on engagement for both webinar events and virtual meetings. 

🛠️ Key Features 

Livestorm has the following features: 

  • Live Q&A sessions
  • Polls
  • Private and public workshop hosting
  • Easy meeting scheduling for on-the-go attendees
  • Registration pages
  • Automated, live, and on-demand webinar creation

💰 Pricing

Livestorm offers the following pricing plans: 

  • Free: 20-minute sessions with up to 30 active contacts per month
  • Pro: $99/month, billed monthly with 4-hour sessions and 100 active contacts per month
  • Business: Contact sales for 4-hour sessions and 500+ active contacts per month
  • Enterprise: Contact sales for 12-hour sessions and 500+ active contacts per month plus advanced features

🔍 Get everything you need to make an informed decision in one place

Download Banzai’s detailed buying guide to understand costs, support, training, metrics, and use cases for different webinar platforms. 

How to Choose the Right Webinar Platform

Choosing the right virtual event platform isn’t a simple case of assessing the lowest price option with the longest feature list: you need to consider what your marketing goals are and find the platform that’s right for your use case.

We think any data-driven marketer in 2024 needs to consider the following features to be able to engage attendees, understand your customers (through advanced analytics), and drive ROI:

Comprehensive Analytics and Lead Identification

Demio makes it easy to measure the success of your event, review the results of engagement features like polling, and then export that data

It’s tempting to pat yourself on the back when you manage to promote your virtual event, get the message out to your carefully curated contact list, and see your product demo attendance wind up in the hundreds. That’s a lot of hard work.

But you know you can’t afford to stop there: in this data-driven climate, with department budgets shrinking, you need to be able to prove ROI.

An ideal webinar solution will let you track webinar attendance, engagement, and attendee behavior, crucial for identifying high-intent leads and optimizing follow-up strategies so you can show clear ROI supported by detailed analytics.

For example, Demio webinar analytics enable you to pull insights reports to understand how focused attendees were, how many downloaded your handouts, and who dropped from your session to help you identify leads.

Automation and Integration Capabilities

All that analytics isn’t going to amount to much if the data remains siloed off and difficult for the people who need it to meaningfully use it. That’s why the best modern webinar platforms need to seamlessly integrate with marketing automation platforms like HubSpot and CRMs like Salesforce to efficiently manage leads and measure the success of webinar campaigns within broader marketing efforts.

Demio integrates with those tools and many more to provide useful automations that will save you precious hours and impact your ability to drive results. For instance, you can connect your Demio signup form to a Mailchimp list to gather contacts and segment them instantly.

Engagement and Interactive Tools

Live polls and Q&As are proven to increase engagement during webinars, increasing the chances of converting attendees into leads for your sales team

According to the 2024 Banzai Webinar Statistics Report, engaged webinar attendees are more likely to take action. Research shows it’s more difficult to engage attendees during live webinars versus on-demand content — but focus rates increase significantly when attendees are encouraged to actively participate.  

To increase your chances of engaging your hard-won webinar audience, you need a tool that emphasizes interactivity features such as polls and Q&A. These not only enhance the webinar experience, directly impacting conversion rates but also help you gather quantitative data about your customers and prospects.

Demio is built with engagement features in mind, giving hosts the power to run live polls, distribute handouts, and even direct attendees to CTAs directly from the webinar.

Customization and Branding Opportunities

Demio makes it easy to personalize your event registration page with your branding 

A dull or unappealing landing page for event registration can start your webinar off on the back foot. But marketers don’t have the time and resources to build a page from scratch that will serve as a worthy brand ambassador. 

This is why you might want to look for software with decent customization functionality (like Demio! 👋), that not only lets you quickly and easily build an event registration page with your branding but also gives you the ability to send branded automated reminders to registrants.

 24/7 AI Interaction to Maximize Engagement

Demio AI can automate 24/7 support by answering attendee questions during your webinar event

AI chat features allow marketers to engage with their audience 24/7, answering questions and enhancing user experience without constant manual oversight. This can help you avoid people becoming unengaged and even dropping out of your event.

Demio AI lets you interact with attendees around the clock without needing to be there in person, making it easier to answer questions and keep the conversation going.

After your webinar, you can see what attendees asked and how Demio AI responded, helping you tailor your follow-ups to what your audience truly cares about. It's all about making your webinars more interactive and your follow-ups more targeted, enhancing the overall experience for attendees.

H2: Choosing Demio: Your Ideal Webinar Platform 

Whether you’re looking to move away from BigMarker, or simply in the market and considering alternatives, you need a platform that aligns with your marketing and ROI goals. A platform that prioritizes attendee engagement and provides you the tools to understand the data behind that engagement so you and your sales team can create the perfect follow-up.

Demio stands out by offering all the key features you need in 2024: comprehensive analytics for lead identification, seamless CRM integrations, customizable engagement tools, and 24/7 AI-driven interaction for on-demand and evergreen webinars. These features enhance audience engagement and simplify tracking ROI and managing leads efficiently.

Explore your options with Demio’s 14-day free trial. It’s an opportunity to experience firsthand how these features can elevate your webinar strategy, ensuring you make an informed choice about your next webinar hosting platform. Whether you choose Demio or another solution, the goal is to find a platform that truly supports your marketing efforts.

H2 Frequently asked questions about BigMarker alternatives? 

How can I migrate to a new platform without losing my audience?

Migrating to a new webinar platform while retaining your audience involves careful planning and communication. Here are steps to ensure a smooth transition:

  1. Evaluate and choose wisely: Before making the switch, thoroughly evaluate potential alternatives to BigMarker to ensure they meet your needs for functionality, scalability, and budget. Consider factors such as ease of use, integration capabilities, and specific features that are important to your audience.
  1. Inform your audience early: Once you've decided on a new platform, communicate this change to your audience well in advance. Use multiple channels to convey the message, such as emails, social media, and announcements during your webinars.
  1. Provide clear instructions: Offer clear, step-by-step instructions on how your audience can join future webinars on the new platform. Consider creating tutorial videos or guides to ease the transition process for them.
  1. Run test events: Before hosting a large-scale event, conduct test webinars to familiarize your audience with the new platform's interface and features. Invite feedback and address any concerns that arise to ensure a smooth user experience.
  1. Leverage engaging content: Ensure your content remains as engaging and valuable as ever. High-quality content is a key factor in retaining your audience during the transition.
  1. Offer incentives: Consider offering incentives for attendees to join your webinars on the new platform. This could be exclusive content, access to Q&A sessions, or discounts on products or services.
  1. Gather feedback: After migrating, gather feedback from your audience about their experience with the new platform. Use this feedback to make adjustments and improvements as needed.

Which BigMarker alternatives offer the best engagement features?

Several BigMarker alternatives are known for their strong engagement features, catering to a variety of needs and preferences. Here are a few noteworthy options:

  1. Demio: Demio offers a sleek user interface and engagement tools like real-time polling, interactive forms, and automated reminders to get your audience’s intention — plus gives marketers deep-dive analytics to improve ROI.
  1. Zoom: Known for its reliability and ease of use, Zoom offers interactive features like polling, breakout rooms, and hand raising, making it suitable for engaging webinars and meetings.
  1. Webex by Cisco: Offers a comprehensive set of engagement tools, including Q&A, polling, and interactive whiteboards. Its robust security features make it a favorite among corporations.
  1. GoToWebinar: A popular choice for its user-friendly interface and engagement tools such as polls, surveys, and Q&A sessions. It also provides detailed analytics to help understand audience engagement.
  1. Adobe Connect: Stands out for its customizable virtual rooms and immersive experiences. Features like interactive quizzes, simulations, and breakout rooms can enhance participant engagement.

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