Planned vs. RingCentral Events

Planned is well suited when you are stuck for ideas and require creative collaboration from a network of unique vendors.

Hopin is very suitable for large events involving 100+ people where there are only a couple of people speaking. You can have a bunch of features such as networking and all in all, is quite a professional experience to use. For smaller groups, It takes too much effort to set up and isn't worth using over Google Meet or Zoom.

Incentivized

• Hands-on oversight of execution of a virtual event and client success management
• Connecting event industry professionals with companies in need of their services
• Highlighting services that an event industry professional or company offers

Incentivized

• Awesome for managing several sets of panelists
• Very easy to manage event attendees
• Love the chat functionality during the events, enabling the audience to connect with each other
• Hugely simple for anyone with little tech knowledge to design and run an event
• Cost effective for the volume of events we run, where we need scale and quality
• Live streaming an event is also very well catered for
• Branding across the platform is simple to implement

Incentivized

• The platform can use some tweaking (i.e.: when reserving hotels, adding guest rooms, including meeting rooms - instead of just spaces, which can be confusing when searching).

• The biggest hangup we've encountered is from guest speakers who need to join us on either tablets or smartphones. Hopin doesn't play well with mobile devices for onscreen guests.
• I'd like to see the broadcasts in vendor booths be recordable in the way broadcasts in the sessions or on the stage are.

Incentivized

We most likely will, but with such a high annual renewal rate, we are forced to look at alternative solutions yearly when that license fee comes due

Incentivized

I'm a pretty tech-savvy person but I still feel that Hopin was pretty user-friendly even for those of you who are less tech-savvy. Great thing is, you can play around and test the platform with the free version which allows you to get familiar with it before committing to the paid. I learned most of it on the free version which then made me more confident when deciding to use the paid version. Not only did it help me on the setup side, but it also proved to me that this was what we needed to do what we needed to do.

Incentivized

For the most part you're able to get a response from a support person within a few minutes, but there was a stretch when Hopin was reshuffling its staff that it sometimes took 24-48 hours, which is too long. However, as long as the staff remains stable - which seems likely - then its Support team is usually quite responsive.

Incentivized

Planned is the only event planning software company we have worked with, and plan to work with. The team behind the platform is constantly innovating to enhance features and the overall experience for both vendors and users.

We were with a company before Hopin - we explored elsewhere due to cost. Pros were design and custom look. We moved to Hopin, it was innovative at the time, although the design wasn't strong the features were. The majority now have the same features. So we did leave Hopin for another platform again because we wanted a custom look, and we were preparing for hybrid. Hopin wasn't ready. We soon realised other platforms we came across are complex, difficult to use. We left and came back to Hopin.

Incentivized

• We were able to get repeat business from a new client brought to us by Planned
• We were able to learn more about what types of virtual event services we'd like to grow as a business, as a result of working with Planned
• We have not seen a financial ROI for our business yet because we have only worked with one client on the platform and it has been costly for us to accommodate this client

Incentivized

• Without Hopin, it would have been impossible to host an event at the scale and user interface that we did, with the staff limitations we have. Hopin enabled us to execute a very high standard with limited resources. For example, before Hopin, we could only attract about 100-200 attendees. With Hopin, we 3x our registrations and attendees.
• The data collected from their system on attendees allows us to more accurately speak to our target market based on their tracked habits during the event.

Incentivized