BuzzCast vs. Communique Conferencing vs. ON24

BuzzCast is great for large, complex online events - especially during the pandemic when it's been hard or impossible to gather folks in person. If you only need a smaller group of 5 or 10 people, BuzzCast is probably overkill. Once you have lots of people / multiple sessions, or want to capture and save presentations for later, you'll want to start looking at BuzzCast.

Communique Conferencing would be best suited for mid- to large-sized organizations that require reliability, scalability, and high data security. They can definitely support large-scale events that are customized to reflect the event's brand and objectives. You can go the self-service route or engage their project team as much as you need.

Communique Conferencing is less suited for small, basic Zoom style events.

I find that ON24 caters for all types of organisations, having it allows for more choice/options. The experience around virtual events if fantastic and the ON24 team is constantly improving the platform. If you want to run a virtual events programme where you want to generate leads and track engagement, then ON24 is the platform for you

Incentivized

• The BuzzCast platform was excellent in every way.
• The platform is sleek and easy to use, both the backend and the UX.
• The entire team at BuzzCast is supportive and works hard to make your event a complete success.
• Building and deploying the conference was made easy by the expertise and hard-working BuzzCast staff.

Incentivized

• Delivering a unique and elevated experience by using a platform with a unique look and feel.
• The platform capsulizes everything and makes information easily accessible.
• It's the team support that keeps us coming back. We have a dream team which is why our events go off so well without a hitch.

• Registration pages are easy to build and look clean
• Console (audience view) offers many tools to use for presentations and to engage the audience
• Reporting and analytics are robust and provide detailed reports that help us process attendees in our marketing database
• Support team and responsive and helpful

Incentivized

• Within the platform it would be great to have direct access to make edits changes (I believe this functionality is in process)

• Nice to add personal agenda, which is on the roadmap this year

• There was a recent update within the past year where the UX designer or developer thought it would be best to wide all titles from the audience view until they placed their mouse on top of the window. That was the worst mistake, as we have a moderator script where we tell the audience what each of the tool bars are and they can’t grasp what the tool is without putting their mouse there. From an accessibility standpoint point, it’s back to 1999 when there was no laws about accessibility.
• Number one above is a major pain point.
• ON24 needs to do a better job of introducing features and soliciting feedback from their customers vs making a high impactful change like #1 described above.

Incentivized

ON24 is everything we expected and everything we needed. It's simple to use, extremely customizable, and scales very easily. The integration to our CRM makes ON24 major lead generator for our sales team from our established webinars series. We can automate lead delivery to our sales team as well. If anything, we will look to expand our partnership in the future.

Incentivized

Usability is critical with virtual events both for our team to set up and administer as well as for our attendees. Communique Conferencing is easy for our team to administer. We survey our attendees during and after virtual events. The feedback regarding usability is very positive.

97% of our attendees say it is the best trainings they have every attended. But they other 3% have a horrible experience (while watching the event live) interesting fact. On24 uses two different encoders for live vs OnDemand. I have never had issues with the On-Demand experience. My only complaints come during live events

Incentivized

ON24 is always available when I have a question about a new feature, if I'm having issues during a live webinar, or if I'm having issues with a webinar on the backend. Our client support specialist, Heather Haines, has always been incredibly consistent with getting me the answers I need when I need them.

Incentivized

Sometimes (it may be my computer) i cant login to ON24. I create a new PW and then i still cant get in. I clear cache/try new browser etc. and nothing works. I come back in a few hours and its like the problem never existed, its the strangest thing. Outside of that everything works pretty seamless. We've ran into a few bumps with Marketo talking to ON24 and passing reg through but have that figured out now. Not being able to be on a VPN when connecting to webcam on the presenter side does cause issues for our government speakers.

Incentivized

The Communique project team is

• Knowledgeable
• Responsive
• Willing to go above and beyond to make our events successful

ON24 support is really good with the 24/5 support chat line, where someone actually responds within 30 seconds. The customers success team is also really good and our rep is very helpful with all our questions. Whenever we have more technical questions, she will bring on a IT designer or a tech specialist on our calls for additional comments and help.

Incentivized

Most points of relevance were covered as far as I can remember.

Incentivized

On24 has amazing ON-Demand trainings that you can use at anytime and they walk you through step by step on different topics/ they are always updating and innovating and putting out new trainings. I would highly reccomend the trainings and reading the documents they have created. They also do live webinars on a rolling basis that are filled with so much knowledge and Information

Incentivized

We had a few training's, which were broken up, and focused on specific areas of how to use the platform. Mostly though, a lot of it is just dedicating your time to learning and exploring what the possibilities are for enhancing your webinars

BuzzCast platform has the most amount of features that our events require (public chat/private chat, breakouts, auto-scrolling agenda). The entire platform is built and designed so that it's intuitive for our viewers and they are shown exactly how to operate the platform in under a minute. The quality of the stream is superior. The BuzzCast team is great to work with and are true partners who are all solution-oriented.

ON24 - A better platform, better support, much better pricing

Patchable - They laid off a lot of staff this past year. This had a tremendous negative impact on the product quality and support.

From what I've seen, ON24 is built specifically to meet the needs of event marketing (or marketing generally), versus the other platforms which are more about simply providing a mechanism to hold virtual meetings. The integration with sales and marketing systems is really valuable. I don't know about pricing differences, but if the competitors were comparable, I would still select ON24.

Incentivized

The ON24 platform is straightforward to use and train clients on, which is a huge plus. Clients appreciate its features and simplicity. Internally, we receive valuable analytical data from webinar events, enabling the organization to make data-driven decisions. This helps us optimize strategies and drive success for B2B businesses effectively.

• BuzzCast enabled one of my clients to deliver an investors' meeting that resulted in a $10 billion increase in market cap

• We always get positive feedback regarding the platform on our attendee surveys.
• Their incredible support team saves us time and money. For example, there was a problem with a live stream at our last event. Although the problem was not on Communique's end, their experienced tech support team were able to provide insight that helped the on-site production company quickly isolate and resolve the issue.

• We get a lot of MQLs from our webinars. The integration with SFDC is a game changer over platforms that don't offer that integration.
• The addition of emojis and chat to our event consoles has greatly increased our engagement.
• We love marketing the fact that on-demand viewers can still submit questions and we'll answer them by email. Who else can say that?
• We would like to be able to make changes to all console elements after events have taken place. Sometimes stuff just needs to be updated.
• As we improve our audience segmentation, we are looking forward to the segment customization options that are now available on the console.
• The webinars ON24 sponsors provide us with some great ideas for improving our overall strategic marketing.

Incentivized