Lightning Tools Lightning Conductor vs. Livestorm vs. WebinarJam

Having experience of SharePoint On Premise and also SharePoint Online, there isn't an out of the box app/webpart that enables you to 'roll up content' from a variety of source's (in my case SP Lists, but there are many other data sources it works with) across site collections with an easy to use and intuitive interface which is what Lightning tools excels at.

Livestorm is well suited to use when you need to reach a group of more than ten people. It wouldn't be a good solution if you wanted interaction from the audience in more than the form of chat.

Incentivized

We have used WebinarJam for many reasons. Our main reason is to host large free webinars but we have also used it for smaller live training courses that people paid for, we have held private training classes for companies, and so on. I guess you could get creative and use it for a conference-style virtual event but wouldn't really recommend it for that. You could use it for internal training within an organization and things but I still feel it best suited for webinars and marketing purposes.

Incentivized

• Aggregate documents across SharePoint site & libraries
• Filtering for owner/person responsible & due dates
• Ease of end-user filtering on columns
• Color-coding & other formatting

• Very intuitive to use and easy to customize.
• Excellent customer service.
• Lots of good data for analytics.
• Participants do not need to download anything.
• Feedback and recommendations are acted on.
• Easy to logistical information on registrants and attendees.
• Supports integrations.

Incentivized

• ADMIN/USER STRENGTHS: Easy to use the dashboard to start a webinar on demand, or schedule one in the future. Each step has a video tutorial made to set you up for success, understanding each set-up step along the way. If I want to practice a session live, I can set up a webinar instantly (called Right Now-takes 6 clicks and 30 seconds to set this up), and stream it through my YouTube Channel, or schedule a full campaign for a later date (takes about 10 minutes) and drive people to attend. I can set up one date, or multiple dates. It's very easy to follow the nine initial steps to (configuration, schedule, registration, notifications, integration, thank you, live, replay and finish) setting up your webinar. Once you have created a campaign, you can always clone them for future use.
• ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: You can inject a pre-recorded video seamlessly. Let's say you did an incredible sales pitch on one of your webinars, you can inject this into future webinars to ensure a perfect presentation.
• ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: Poll your customers BEFORE the webinar, on the registration page to find out what they are looking for, why they have signed up, to be sure the presenter covers each participant's needs.
• ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: Autoresponder reminders can come from Webinar Jam (this is what I have always done to keep it simple) or integrate it with the top systems (AWeber, Active Campaign, Infusionsoft, IContact, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Drip, Kartra, Zapier).
• ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: I can set up a replay for those who missed the event, or even a replica replay where I can go into the video, fix up my sales presentation, and add a new video for people to see. I can also see who watches the replay.
• ADMIN/USER STRENGTH: In the analytics page I can see the numbers of people who visited the webinar registration page (to get an idea of how popular my topic was/change headings or topics if it's low, keep presenting if there's a high number), registrants, people in the room when I go live, and numbers for those who watched the replays. I can connect my autoresponder to communicate with people who missed the webinar/replay vs those who attended and even can see when people dropped off so I know if they were engaged for the entire webinar.

Incentivized

• Mobile Friendly
• Calendar/Gantt views
• Complex/Custom Logic

• It would be helpful to have higher quality replays

Incentivized

• One of the biggest problems we have is that WebinarJam was sold to us as a lifetime license, and it was supposed to include broadcasting on Facebook. For reasons that were never clear, they stopped providing that functionality, which greatly reduced our use for the product.
• WebinarJam started out life as an innovative product, full of promise. Things changed within the organization, key staff and players changed, and it seems that key players just moved on to other projects. Users were required to pay for upgrades in order to get the best use out of the product.
• A big problem that was never really solved was the Lag/Delay between realtime and what the users were seeing and hearing.
• We really wanted to be able to administer Surveys to people during webinars and be able to store their responses and export them to a database. We were told there was no way to do that.

Incentivized

Making sure the permission settings for your camera, microphone or browser can sometimes be tricky. If we have a guest, we always have to double-check these. It's also not super intuitive that you need to "Get on Stage" from the webinar page.

Incentivized

The platform is really hard to use and they have a habit of pushing out updates without telling their users first. The last update completely reverted all of our customizations back to the default EverWebinar layout. I only found out about this after a lead kindly send an email to the firm letting us know that [our] registration confirmation page was showing lorem ipsum script. Customization is lacking as well

The Lightning Tools support team responds quickly, and team members are very friendly and helpful.

The customer service representatives are extremely attentive. They do an excellent job of trying to understand the scope of the issue and follow it through until it has been resolved. When I have provided them with recommendations for improvement they have taken them to heart and many times implemented them. I trust that if I ever have a problem they will be there to help

Incentivized

The support overall is good. In the early days, it wasn't the best but they have definitely stepped it up lately. If you have questions about the platform, issues, setup, etc, and don't mind waiting 24 hours to get a response then it's good. They may have faster response times now but when they updated to 4.0 it took a while as they were getting hammered with emails cause there were issues. It seems like they have worked out some of the kinks so I imagine their support can respond much faster now. There is no phone number to call so there is no way to get immediate help or answers which can be frustrating when you have issues right before or during your webinar

Incentivized

I haven't found another product to compare this one to. Only in SharePoint Online which has a similar App 'Highlight Webpart' ... it's far too complicated to set up and requires learning yet another language and exporting and importing via PowerShell to get any real results that would be useful.

I prefer WebinarJam due to its super-easy setup and great integration options. It works well with other tools like ClickFunnels, Hubspot and Mailchimp. From the tools we tried, this one seems to work the best for our company and clients!

Incentivized

• Policies easier to portray

• It's been great! It's the very bottom of the funnel for us so it helps accelerate leads and create opportunities.

Incentivized

• WebinarJam has allowed us to present to multiple audiences at our prospective customers, rather than just a few individuals which made it difficult to get to the next sales step. By engaging a larger audience, we were able to drive more attention to our product and made follow up with the customer much easier.

Incentivized