Increase attendance with these virtual event email templates.
A successful virtual summit explores a topic that’s highly relevant to your target audience and helps establish your brand among industry experts and thought leaders.
But planning and running virtual summits while managing busy expert speakers can be stressful. To do it all, you need a powerful virtual summit platform. With workflow automations and engagement features at your fingertips, the right platform will help create an immersive event experience while boosting your brand.
In this article, we explore the six best virtual summit platforms on the market right now—evaluating factors like branding options, engagement analytics, and ease of use.
Host electrifying virtual summits with Livestorm.
Engage attendees, boost your brand, and make scheduling easy with an all-in-one solution.
Access these 6 email templates to drive attendance to your virtual events.
We’ve assessed each of the virtual summit platforms on our list by looking at the features that boost engagement and branding before, during, and after the event, including:
Ideally, you need to be able to engage your target audience before the event without losing hours sending out emails. So, we assess which virtual summit platforms include:
From the design of your registration forms to the appearance of your virtual meeting room, there are a number of opportunities to generate noise around your brand at a virtual summit. A good platform will allow you to create a cohesive experience that reinforces your brand positioning at every stage.
Virtual summits can all too often feel fragmented and dominated by one speaker at a time. Designing an engaging virtual event means creating an immersive experience that mimics an in-person event. So, we assess which tools have the best features to keep people interacting.
High-level attendees often primarily attend online conferences for networking opportunities. For this reason, we take a look at which solutions include breakout rooms and virtual booths where attendees can connect in a more personal environment.
Data is your secret weapon for driving engagement at future events So, you need a tool that can give you insights about attendance, replays, and other key engagement metrics. To curate this list, we looked at the level of analytics provided by each platform.
The best virtual summit solutions have a smooth interface for organizers, speakers, and attendees alike. So, we’ve also evaluated how easy to use and accessible each platform is.
Here are our six top recommendations for virtual summit platforms. You'll find an overview of each solution with a description of what they are best for, key features, pricing information, and insights from the criteria above.
This leading video engagement platform can manage every aspect of your virtual events, including summits, trade shows, and expos. It’s designed to support you from start to finish, with scheduling and marketing integrations, a range of engagement features, and powerful analytics.
Livestorm is ideal if you just want one intuitive, all-in-one solution to handle all events and meetings at your organization. It’s designed for everything from internal meetings to virtual workshops and podcast interviews.
Livestorm includes:
You can use Livestorm to catch up with a colleague just as quickly as you can organize a virtual summit for 3000 participants. This means in one place, you can see multi-language marketing templates, customized meeting rooms, and features that are proven to create engaging online meetings.
Livestorm’s paid plans start at $79 per month and costs vary depending on numbers of attendees. Large businesses and enterprises will be given a custom quote.
Airmeet is a powerful virtual events platform that makes it easy to collect and analyze advanced engagement data in reports or in real time. You can also manage the entire journey, from planning to following up with emails, inside the platform. However, it’s important to note that Airmeet isn’t the most intuitive software to set up and users report a steep learning curve.
Inside Airmeet, you’ll find:
Able to handle over 100,000 attendees, Airmeet is aimed at medium and large organizations running large-scale summits - especially if you want to encourage networking.
Airmeet offers a free package for up to 50 event attendees for 90 minutes, but this doesn’t include branding options. Other packages cost between $500 and $1,500 a month and enterprise companies are given custom quotes.
Zoom Events was created to hold more advanced virtual experiences than the original Zoom software. And with advanced networking features and the ability to host multiple sessions at once, it’s great for larger summit groups where people have fewer existing connections.
For organizations looking to host large summits with lots of attendees, Zoom Events is a good option. This is mostly because the software uses a range of networking features to optimize connections in a big group.
Zoom Events costs $1490 per year and comes as a separate package to other Zoom software. Since you pay per user, the price increases when you add more event managers.
Microsoft Teams is part of the Office 365 Suite of products. This means that alongside planning, hosting, and optimizing virtual summits, you can connect with team members through instant messaging and video. However, it’s important to note that it can only host up to 300 people in one event so wouldn’t be suitable for larger summits.
If you’re running small virtual summits, Microsoft Teams is a good option. You can start to experiment with engagement features such as polls and breakout rooms and practice running the event in the Green Room.
The free version of Teams allows you to host 60-minute meetings with up to 100 participants. Then, you’ll pay $4-$12.50 per user per month, depending on which features you’d like to access.
Virtual Summits Software offers a dedicated solution for smaller organizations looking to experiment with virtual summits. With its database of speakers and easy customization options, it’s great if you’re just starting out.
Virtual Summits Software is particularly good at taking the work out of managing speakers through its automated communications. And if you need fewer features for lower cost, this one’s for you.
Virtual Summits Software offers three packages ranging from $36 per month to $226 per month. The main difference between them is that you can only include your own branding on the most expensive package.
vFairs have focused on building out the virtual environment that users experience before the summit. This means attendees can engage with exhibit halls, auditoriums, and networking rooms in a virtual space like they would in the real world.
If you have a large number of participants attending different sessions at your summit, vFair’s virtual environment features will prove useful in engaging them while they wait to get started. In the interactive interface, they can use breakout rooms and auditorium spaces.
If, on the other hand, your concern is more around engaging people in the event itself, look to a solution like Livestorm which includes a wider range of in-summit interactive features.
vFairs offers tailored packages and doesn’t list its pricing on its website. When you send over your details to get a quote, you’ll be sent a free demo.
Access these 6 email templates to drive attendance to your virtual events.
Choosing the right virtual summit platform comes down to weighing up functionality against costs. If you’re running a small-scale event with a few attendees, Microsoft Teams or Virtual Summit Software might be a good fit.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a solution you can scale with, one that boosts your brand identity and engages growing numbers of attendees and audience members, look to Livestorm.
This all-in-one platform allows you to schedule reminders, engage participants with an immersive virtual experience, and then analyze success afterward. And crucially, you can also save time by managing all of this alongside internal meetings and other events.
Host electrifying virtual summits with Livestorm.
Engage attendees, boost your brand, and make scheduling easy with an all-in-one solution.
A virtual summit is an event in which industry experts come together to discuss a certain topic. And a virtual summit platform is the software that allows this talk to be held. This means it will include a video livestreaming solution and it may also include event marketing features, engagement tools, networking spaces, and analytics.
The cost of virtual conference platforms varies depending on the features, number of attendees, and users, and length of meetings. Some platforms offer free basic versions, and others charge over $1,000 dollars per month. The average platform costs between $50 and $100 per month.
Virtual conference platforms give event organizers more control over planning and running their online events and help them to engage speakers while boosting branding. Livestorm, for example, offers scheduling software, customized room branding, and audience engagement features like polls, emoji reactions, and Q and A sessions.
Choosing which conference platform is right for you means considering the size of the events you want to hold and then weighing up which features will be useful to you. Livestorm is a great option for businesses of all sizes because it’s affordable, user-friendly, and allows you to use attendee engagement and branding features at scale. It also includes scheduling and data analytics tools.