Best webinar platforms: what each one costs to run

The best webinar platform for a coach or creator is the one that gets a registrant from the sign-up page to your offer with the fewest tools in between, at a price that still makes sense when a session goes well. The 9 below are the ones people genuinely weigh against each other, and what separates them is less the feature list than how each one bills for its audience: by the size of room you might fill, by each person who attends, or by the hours they watch.

Disclosure: we make Drry, which runs webinars inside a coach's own community, and we cover it at the end with the same scrutiny. Every competitor price below was read from that vendor's own pricing page, as checked in September 2026; where we could not read it, we say so and stay general. If you are still planning the session itself, our guide to hosting a webinar that sells covers the running order and the follow-up, and works on any of these tools.

How to choose a webinar platform

Six questions decide it for someone running webinars to sell, and the first one moves the bill more than any feature does.

• How big is your real audience, and how is it billed? Seat-tier pricing charges for the room you might fill, every month, whether it fills or not. Per-attendee pricing charges for each person who shows up. Hour-based pricing charges for time actually watched. For a coach drawing a few dozen to a few hundred people, the model matters more than the headline price.
• Registration and reminders. A branded sign-up page, a confirmation with a calendar entry, and reminders the day before and the hour before. Attendance is mostly decided here, not in the room.
• The replay. Many buyers come from people who registered and did not attend. Check that the recording can go back to registrants quickly, with your offer beside it.
• Selling the seat. If you ever charge for a workshop, check whether the platform takes payment itself, what it keeps, and whose account the money lands in.
• Stage size. How many people can present at once, and whether you can bring an attendee up to ask a question in their own voice. Most solo coaches need two presenters; panels need more.
• Where people land afterwards. The session ends and the offer page should be the next thing they see. A tool that ends on a blank screen leaves the most valuable minute of the funnel to chance.

The webinar platforms worth comparing

These split into three shapes that are not substitutes: dedicated webinar tools built around registration and selling, streaming studios that broadcast to social platforms, and community or course platforms with live sessions built in. Pick the shape first and the shortlist usually drops to two.

Zoom Webinars. The safe default for reliability and familiarity: most attendees already have Zoom, which removes a setup step and a source of no-shows. Webinars are a paid add-on separate from Zoom's meeting plans, listed from $89 a month billed monthly, or $66.67 a month billed annually, as checked in September 2026 on zoom.us, with price rising by attendee capacity. It handles registration, reminders and recording well. The selling itself, the checkout and the follow-up, usually lives in other tools.

WebinarJam and EverWebinar. Built by and for internet marketers, and it shows in the selling features: offers that pop up during the session, replays and automated reminders. WebinarJam's plans are sized by room, as checked in September 2026: Starter at $49 a month for 100 attendees and one host, Basic at $99 for 500 attendees and two hosts, and larger tiers at $299 and $499, all billed monthly, with lower annual prices and a $1 fourteen-day trial. EverWebinar is the sister product for running a recorded webinar on a schedule, sold separately.

Demio. A browser-based webinar tool with a clean attendee experience and good marketing integrations, so nobody has to install anything. As checked in September 2026, Starter is $63 a month billed monthly, or $45 billed annually, for 50 attendees and a single host, and the larger plans price per host with attendee tiers from 150 to 3,000. Its free trial runs fourteen days, limited to 20 attendees and one-hour sessions.

Livestorm. Browser-based and strong on registration pages, email and analytics, with a pricing model worth understanding before you buy: as checked in September 2026, its Pro plan is priced per attendee credit, at €2.50 each, where a credit is one unique participant per session over twelve months, with up to 3,000 attendees per event and sessions up to four hours. That is cheap for occasional small sessions and adds up for frequent ones.

GoTo Webinar. One of the longest-running dedicated tools, widely used for corporate training and B2B marketing, with tiers priced by attendee capacity and discounts for annual billing. We could not read GoTo's own pricing page when we checked, so we quote no figure here; it is the choice when a client or employer already standardises on it.

StreamYard. A streaming studio rather than a webinar platform: it broadcasts you and your guests to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and other destinations at once. As checked in September 2026, there is a free plan with the StreamYard logo on the stream and up to six people on screen, Core at $44.99 a month billed monthly, and Advanced at $88.99, which adds on-air webinars for up to 100 viewers. Right for reach on social platforms; less so for collecting registrations and following up.

Riverside. Best known for studio-quality recording, which makes it the pick if the recording afterwards matters as much as the live session. As checked in September 2026, its Webinar plan is $79 a month billed annually, with branded registration forms, reminder emails and up to 100 registrants, and a custom-priced Business plan for larger audiences.

Circle. A community platform with live streams built in, so the webinar happens where your members already are. As checked in September 2026, its Professional plan at $89 a month lists 100 live stream attendees, 15 live room participants and 10 hours, with Business at $199 (200 attendees, 15 hours) and Scale at $419 (500 attendees, 40 hours). Our Circle pricing guide covers the rest of those plans.

Kajabi. An all-in-one course and coaching platform that many coaches already run their programs on. We could not find webinars listed as a plan feature on Kajabi's pricing page when we checked in September 2026, so confirm with Kajabi what live options your plan includes before assuming it replaces a webinar tool. Kajabi alternatives compares it with the rest of that category.

Webinar platforms compared

The same 10 side by side. Prices are the entry point each vendor lists, as checked in September 2026, and change often; treat the billing model column as the durable part.

What a webinar costs at scale: a worked example

The numbers below are planning assumptions: a coach with a live room of about 100, running an hour-long workshop with a co-host. On a seat-tier tool, that coach buys the tier above 100 attendees and pays the same every month however often they go live. Here is the same pattern on Drry, where the audience is billed by the hours it watches.

The honest reading: for a monthly workshop an hours-based bill is hard to beat, and for a weekly one with a large room a flat seat tier can come out ahead. Run your own numbers with your real attendance, not the room size you hope for.

Is there a free webinar platform?

Not in the full sense. The dedicated webinar tools checked for this guide offer trials, not free plans: WebinarJam's is $1 for fourteen days, Demio's is free for fourteen days with a 20 attendee limit. What is genuinely free is a streaming studio such as StreamYard's free plan, which broadcasts to YouTube or Facebook with its logo on the stream, or a free video meeting plan for a small group. Both work for a first workshop. What you give up is the registration list, the reminders and the replay going back to the people who signed up, which is where most of the selling happens.

Where does Drry fit?

This is the openly self-interested section. Drry is a community platform for coaches and creators, and webinars run inside the same community your members already log into, on the Growth plan. You get a branded registration page on your own address, reminder emails and calendar entries, a stage of up to 5 presenters broadcasting to an audience of hundreds, live chat, raised hands so an attendee can be brought up to speak, recording, and a replay you release to the people who registered. Registrants join your contact list, and a paid seat goes through your own Stripe account with 0% taken by us.

The plan includes 150 viewer hours and 50 participant hours a month. Past them nothing bills unless you switch metered hours on and set a spending cap yourself, up to $300 a month on that plan; then it is $0.15 a viewer hour and $0.75 a participant hour, and it stops at your cap. Selling seats is where it compounds: 60 seats at $27 is $1,620 before Stripe's own processing fee, all of it yours.

The trade, stated plainly: Drry is not built for a ten-thousand-person corporate broadcast, and a dedicated tool has more selling gadgets inside the room. What it does is keep the whole loop, registration to replay to offer to the program itself, in one place, so the person who attends is already inside the community they would buy. If you run one-to-one calls alongside webinars, the same calendar carries bookable sessions too.