Your next virtual event deserves to be more exciting and immersive than a standard Zoom call. Virtual event platforms can enhance the attendee experience by transforming a lifeless webcam environment into an amazing digital space where your guests can explore and interact.
In this guide, we’ll introduce you to the valuable role that virtual event platforms play in digital and hybrid events, share our thoughts on what to look for, and recommend some of our current favorite tools.
Virtual event platforms are tools that help your digital event take place and flourish. It’s a way to bring that live event feel into the digital world through the use of smart technology — complete with audio, visual, and interactive features.
At the heart of any great virtual event platform is a way for people to connect. The goal is to ramp up audience engagement through the use of interactive, immersive environments and touchpoints.
The best online event platforms take engagement tools and key features to new heights, including:
Some virtual event platforms — or event management software — also support you on the admin side of event planning with event registration and ticketing. These full-featured event management platforms help simplify your process to easily plan, run, and support a virtual event.
While a digital event lacks that face-to-face connection, the best virtual event platforms help you recreate that atmosphere, allowing people to connect from anywhere in the world.
Most people automatically and instinctively choose a video conferencing tool like Zoom for a meeting or a casual virtual event, but they’re always the best option for large-scale or immersive events. Virtual event platforms have a clear edge over video conferencing software because they’re designed with interactivity in mind.
Video call software can bring several people into the fold, but engagement with more than a handful of people is difficult. You don’t have enough space on the screen, and people often struggle to get their voices heard. A lack of ambiance is also a cause for concern. What you see on screen is mainly other people through their webcams — not exactly an enticing backdrop.
Virtual event platforms solve these problems and more. With separate keynote spaces, workshop rooms, and private meeting booths, starting and joining conversations at scale becomes simplified. You can quickly navigate the space as a digital character or enjoy a virtual version of an event venue, adding fun and excitement as a participant.
Every virtual event platform has slight differences. Some are designed with boutique press events in mind while others let you stage show-stopping global trade shows that people can visit from their sofa.
Whether you’re looking for a tool to run a high-profile conference or something to host your all-staff meeting, you’ll want to find the perfect platform for the job. Here are some of the main factors to consider when choosing your virtual event platform.
One of the most important features to consider is how easy the platform is to use — not just for your own team, but for attendees too. Frustrating or clunky interfaces can create friction for your event attendees and reduce active participation and engagement.
To evaluate your software shortlist and examine how user-friendly each tool is, follow this four-step process:
Not every event needs the capacity to handle thousands of guests, but for the ones that do — like large trade shows with a global audience — scalability is essential. The last thing you want is problems trying to join your virtual event, enter a seminar session, or interact with your video content.
If your event needs to reach a vast number of people, look for a virtual event platform that's geared toward large events. These tools have the capacity for a sizable attendee pool, and their customer service team can help choose the best way to cater to your audience.
For smaller events, use a scaled-back virtual event platform. Select a platform that makes your event feel cozy and intimate rather than uncongenial or distant.
As mentioned, one of the best ways to set your virtual event apart is to create an immersive experience for your guests. To do that, you need a virtual event platform with countless customization options.
If a fully branded virtual space is essential, look for a tool that’s highly customizable. Seek out a platform that lets you customize how your digital spaces look and feel, using imagery, color, video, and audio content. This transforms your virtual event from ordinary and uninspiring into a space that’s full of color, fun, and intrigue.
Customization options will also attract sponsors or exhibitors for your event. They’ll assuredly want to make their mark in your virtual event space. You can give them plenty of options, like branded banners displayed around virtual rooms, moving content on the walls, and their logos onstage when the main speakers present — everything that makes your virtual event something attractive to sponsors and exhibitors.
Events come in all shapes and sizes, and the same is true for the event technology that helps run them. Pricing can vary wildly for virtual event platforms, so budget accordingly when you build your shortlist of options.
Some virtual event tools only cost a few dollars per attendee, while others can set you back in the thousands per event. It all depends on your needs, how high-profile the event is, and what kind of on-demand support you want from your technology partner.
Many virtual event platforms require a monthly or annual fee to access the software. Depending on the size of your events or your needs, this can equate to a sizable upfront cost, so be deliberate about your decision. Ask if you can try a product demo first or sign up for a free trial to explore the engagement features before investing.
Adding a new piece of technology can feel daunting, especially if you haven’t used it before. To avoid the wrong software, seek out user reviews before you buy.
User reviews are a valuable way to understand exactly how a product works from the perspective of someone actually using it. There’s no marketing speak or curated testimonials from top clients. Instead, you get a feel for a real user’s experience with the tool, including how responsive the tool's support team is to help you.
Head over to software review sites like G2 or Capterra. Here, you can search for the virtual event platform’s name and see surface ratings and reviews from real users. Reading several reviews will give you insight into the tool's user experience, challenges, onsite solutions, and best-loved features.
Now that we know what to look for, let’s take a look at some of the best virtual event solutions on the market. We’ve broken this down into three categories, so you can find the most relevant tools whether you’re hosting a networking event, conference, meeting, or sales and marketing event.
All prices quoted were correct when this article was published, but always check current subscription rates as they may change over time.
Hosting a networking event calls for a tool that’s designed with conversations in mind. You need something that feels like an in-person event as much as possible. Here are five of our top virtual event software picks for networking events.
Best for: Highly interactive, user-friendly all-in-one large events.
Pricing: Quotes are customized to each event’s needs, and are charged as single-event, multi-event, or annual licenses. Prices start as low as $42 per month.
Description: vFairs is an award-winning virtual events platform that helps you host amazing virtual and in-person conferences of all sizes. You can even create a user-friendly virtual venue to mimic real-life venues. To enhance user connections, vFairs offers a variety of networking features, including:
They also provide detailed real-time reports on these spaces to measure how well your audience resonates with the experience. Other popular features include virtual scavenger hunts, leaderboards, photo booths, social media walls, trivia, and more!
Best for: Creative guest catering and corporate gifting
Pricing: From $5 per virtual card
Description: Hoppier is a virtual event platform that lets you create customized virtual experiences that increase attendee engagement. With Hoppier virtual cards, your event guests can order drinks, lunch, or treats from their favorite local vendors right to their door. It’s event catering at scale but without the logistics problems.
This creative approach to event catering creates a memorable experience for guests. It’s ideal for virtual lunches, happy hour drinks, meetings, and more. You can even use Hoppier virtual cards as a fun alternative to conference goody bags or as thank-you gifts for event sponsors and exhibitors.
Best for: Turnkey solution for fun teambuilding events
Pricing: From $299 per virtual event, based on your expected number of guests
Description: Good for groups as small as 10 and as large as 2,000, Weve is a game-based approach to virtual gatherings. Options include live broadcasts in a virtual lobby, breakouts, screen sharing, and almost every other basic meeting requirement.
However, Weve’s hosting options are what set it apart from competitors. Professional hosts and emcees provide more entertainment or take an activity off your plate. Of course, you can skip their host and do it yourself if you want. Dozens of customizable game modules like Fact Match, Pictionary, and Buzz-in make these events a crack up.
Best for: Immersive digital networking
Pricing: Free plan available, paid plans $3 per user per event, creating affordable scalability.
Description: Whether you choose a conference stage, virtual office setup, or poolside getaway, SpatialChat takes your event guests out of their homes or offices and into a virtual space — creating unique activities for your team or guests.
This visually impressive virtual event platform helps you create a more interactive place to host meetings, small events, team-building days, and cocktail parties. It not only offers text chat, but also screen sharing, video content, and a fluid chat system.
Best for: A retro, gaming-inspired atmosphere
Pricing: Free for up to 25 participants, paid plans start at $5 per user
Description: Microsoft Mesh helps you create fun virtual worlds for your event guests to explore. These 2D spaces are a refreshing alternative to busy backgrounds and are ideal for casual get-togethers or events in industries like marketing, gaming, or tech.
Guests can explore your event space in Mesh by navigating their character around the virtual event space. When someone’s close enough to talk, a chat window will appear. The spaces are also highly customizable, and you can work with the Mesh team to create personalized backgrounds.
Best for: Simple all-in-one events platform
Pricing: Free, except for the ticketing support, which has a 1% ticket fee plus $0.30 applied to each ticket sold.
Description: Mixily is a simple, all-in-one virtual event platform that lets you plan and manage small events for friends, family, and colleagues. It has a boutique, community-led feel, making it great for intimate gatherings and casual meetings.
This easy-to-use tool is a step up from Facebook events and lets you create branded video call experiences for your guests. The platform also features landing pages and ticketing support, providing everything you need in one place.
Hosting a virtual conference has many moving parts. Larger audiences can pose potential problems and organization — although difficult — is a necessity. Virtual conference tools simplify the planning process and allow interaction at scale. Here are six of our current favorites for conferences and trade events.
Best for: Marketers and event marketing strategies and insights
Pricing: Varies
Description: Purpose-built for B2B marketers, Goldcast is a virtual event platform that allows users to create engaging digital and hybrid events that drive revenue and produce rich post-event insights. It's becoming the defacto platform for growth-stage/IPO tech companies, with customers like Drift, Salesloft, GitHub, and Kong who use Goldcast as an essential part of their event marketing strategy.
Unlike other tools, Goldcast’s platform captures unique data for marketing and sales teams to drive the pipeline. Marketers can use the granular insights to create custom campaigns, and sales teams understand activity from their target accounts to engage in more personalized follow ups.
From small webinars to large multi-day summits and user conferences, Goldcast is a truly scalable, all-in-one virtual event platform for every marketer’s needs.
Best for: Connection-focused conferences
Pricing: Free up to 100 participants
Description: Hopin offers a comprehensive set of management and hosting features suited for virtual events of up to 100,000 guests. It’s a popular tool loved by event planners worldwide, giving teams multiple ways to recreate that in-person feel at a virtual event.
This leading virtual conference tool lets people:
Setting it apart from competitors, Hopin’s innovative speed networking feature is ideal for big conferences and trade shows. It’s a tool that caters well to passive guests who can watch a talk or session, then make themselves visible and interact with the group when they wish.
Best for: A great experience for all stakeholders
Pricing: Available on request
Description: Hublio allows businesses to scale their hybrid events and improve stakeholder return on investment by focusing on guest experience and sponsor experience equally.
By far its most intriguing feature, Hublio’s gamification presents a fun, competitive element to virtual events. Guests receive points for watching sessions, visiting exhibitor booths, and messaging other attendees. These points help them climb higher on a leaderboard, making them eligible for event swag. The increased engagement allows event organizers to pull in exhibitors and sponsors for future events with ease.
Best for: Intuitive interface, real-time analytics & dashboards, customer service, and growth acceleration
Pricing: Free trial; Plans start at $500 and only pay for attendees who show up!
Description: Accelevents is an all-in-one virtual and hybrid events platform that empowers event organizers and marketing professionals to create authentic human connections and drive sustainable growth.
With a focus on growth acceleration, the Accelevents platform captures actionable analytics throughout the event ecosystem that translates into measurable marketing and sales performance strategies. A few of the platform’s popular features include:
Accelevents supports multi-faceted online, hybrid, and in-person conferences, summits, fundraisers, educational seminars, team-building events, career fairs, community networking, festivals, and more. No matter the event, Accelevents’ customer support is available 24/7 to ensure a seamless experience for all involved!
Best for: Creative virtual photo booths
Pricing: Available on request
Description: Build connections and create authentic user-generated content with Snapbar’s web-based, virtual photo booths. The experience offers a custom start screen, color scheme, URL, overlays, stickers, and more. An optional AI background removal tool also makes it easy for you to add branded backgrounds for photos. Plus, your guests can walk away with a fun memento from the event.
Best for: An immersive virtual world
Pricing: Varies
Description: Inverse is an intuitive 3D virtual event platform that recreates a digital conference space or event hall complete with plenty of interactive elements for guests to enjoy. Your guests can use their avatars to explore the environment, approach booths, view videos, enjoy livestream talks, and interact with your branded content in various spaces.
Team meetings might happen every week, but sometimes you may want to organize a special team event. Whether you’re hosting a brainstorming session or trying to plan a new project, these three tools can help.
Best for: Creative visualization
Pricing: Available on request
Description: The Sketch Effect adds something creative and interactive to your virtual team meetings. This fun virtual event enlists the help of a live artist, who joins your event virtually and sketches your ideas in real time.
This virtual meeting tool is a great way to liven up an ideas-focused team meeting or help you create a lasting memory from an all-hands event. Your team can enjoy watching the live-streamed sketch and will walk away with compelling images and a time-lapse video they can look back on.
Best for: Visual digital collaboration
Pricing: Free
Description: Miro offers you a digital blank canvas and the tools to collaboratively bring your ideas, plans, and thoughts to life with endless whiteboard and canvas areas.
Organize virtual brainstorming sessions or run interactive workshops with Miro’s online collaborative environment. It works well for both real-time and asynchronous teamwork, using an approachable and accessible visual system.
Best for: Conversations within conversations
Pricing: Free
Description: With fun features like games, whiteboards, and breakout rooms, Rume infuses some extra pizzazz into virtual meetings. This platform is not only great for team meetings, but also for more casual moments like lunch and learns or virtual parties. You can collaborate, play games, and break into multiple conversations within one space — just like you would in person.
Sometimes you need a more formal tool than casual meeting platforms but without the unwieldy features of a conference-focused tool. These three virtual event platforms are ideal for sales and marketing meetings, events, and demos with ease of use in mind.
Best for: Clean and elegant video calls and demos
Pricing: Free with paid plans from $79 per month
Description: Livestorm is an events management platform that lets you examine the full event lifecycle — planning, running, promoting, and analyzing your virtual event. It provides seamless options for webinars, demos, and sales calls, but you can also easily transfer that information back to your CRM afterward — making it perfect for sales and marketing teams.
Instead of offering only webinars, Livestorm digitally broadcasts live, interactive sessions where guests can ask and answer questions and take part in polls. Hosts can also create automated webinars, which is great for busy organizations that want to run sessions for onboarding, training, or demoing new features.
Best for: Marketing lead generation, sales demos, customer adoption, & training
Pricing: From $34 per month; Demio offers a 14-day free trial so you can give it a go before committing to a month or year subscription.
Description: At its simplest, Demio makes marketers’ lives easier (and happier). It’s a seamless communication platform that uses webinars to fuel growth.
Demio is part of Banzai’s engagement suite: a collection of B2B marketing solutions that transform virtual events from “nay” to “yay.” Webinars should be fun, engaging, and effective to generate high-quality leads — and with Demio, they are.
Demio offers the basics, such as event chat, polls, Q&A, and downloads in an intuitive way that encourages attendee engagement. The app has a clear reporting dashboard as well that not only shows you the usual stats about time in webinar or poll response rates, but also how long your audience was focused and when they dropped off.
With this information at your fingertips, you can benchmark your performance and improve your content. What we love most about Demio is that it fits into your marketing stack and removes much of the hassle of running webinar campaigns. The software directly integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce Pardot, Marketo, and other commonly used marketing apps.
Best for: Running both virtual and in-person events
Pricing: Free, with paid plans starting at $9,500 per year
Description: Splash is a useful virtual event platform for event managers and marketers who run a mix of virtual, hybrid, and physical events. This tool organizes everything in one place so you can streamline the process and focus more of your attention on creating an amazing guest experience.
It’s designed to help you create a consistent brand experience at every step of the journey — including invitations, registration forms, virtual waiting rooms, live streams, and post-event content. Splash also plays well with others — meaning you can move your data seamlessly into your CRM, email marketing, or internal comms tools.
Sometimes the best virtual event platforms are the most unexpected. Enter Hoppier — a platform that lets you create fun experiences for your guests through a virtual card, loaded with credit they can spend on food, drinks, and treats as part of your event.
Our platform lets you add atmosphere to your virtual and hybrid events. Your guests can show up to the keynote or to a meeting with a luxury coffee in hand — instead of one they’ve made at home — or they can catch up with a new contact over lunch from their most loved deli.
Hoppier lets you bring some of that in-person event experience to people’s homes and offices. It’s an engaging way to add a hybrid element to your virtual event by mixing your digital sessions with in-person treats, drinks, and snacks from attendees' favorite vendors.
While your guests can’t head to the coffee bar in your virtual event, they can use their Hoppier card to get from their local coffee shop. And hitting the conference after party isn’t the same without cocktails — you can help them order the perfect drink for your virtual happy hour with their Hoppier card.
Adding Hoppier virtual cards to your next event is as simple as signing up, creating a program, and setting your preferences. Then, you’re free to distribute your cards to your guests. It’s about as easy as it gets.
Our convenient dashboard lets you have your program up and running in minutes. Give your program a name, customize your card with your event logo and colors, and set a spending and time limit. You can also limit the allowed vendors or keep it open so your guests can spend their balance as they wish.
When you’re ready to hit go, just send your virtual cards to your guest list. Craft a short and sweet email (or use one of our email templates), include the link, and the card is now ready for them to use when your event begins.
While running an in-person event can be hugely expensive, virtual events can be costly too. At Hoppier, we have a simple and affordable pricing structure that lets you affordably bring this fun experience to your guests.
From just $5 per virtual card, you can add Hoppier to your next virtual event. This makes it a low-cost way to treat your team during an appreciation day event or scale it up to bring hybrid catering to hundreds at your next conference. What’s even better is that any unused funds return to you at the end — something you can't get from those leftover sandwiches at a catered conference.
Your online event lives within your chosen platform, so finding the right one can help you throw a truly impressive meeting, conference, or get-together for your guests. Consider what your needs are, think about your budget, and decide which features matter most to you. From there, build a shortlist of your favorites — like those in our list above. From your shortlist, try demos and seek out reviews before making your final choice.
If you’re ready to cater your virtual event or create event swag that's fun and unexpected, give Hoppier a try. Our virtual cards make it easy for you to treat your guests to food, drinks, and treats wherever they are in the world — without the hassle of organizing deliveries. Explore the platform for yourself, or book a demo with our friendly team to learn how to use Hoppier for your next event.
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
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