Livestorm Free Trial Review
Hosting live events can be a hassle, not to mention quite expensive! That’s why we wanted to go over the best
From renting a venue, and registering attendees, to organizing the event, it takes a lot of time and effort to set everything up.
On top of all that, you have a significant risk of having no one show up to your event. If you don’t get a good turnout, you’re stuck with all these expenses for nothing.
However, this is where the beauty of video conferencing platforms comes in.
Not only can you host hundreds of people online, but you can save money/time and also grow your business and sales with live presentations.
Livestorm is one such platform that can help. So I will be going over the stuff I liked and didn’t like and whether it’s worth getting any of the paid plans.
More importantly in my Livestorm Free Trial article, I will go over how you can get a LIFETIME free plan for Livestorm.
How To Get Started With a Free Account
You can sign up for the Livestorm free trial here:
You don’t even need to fill in your credit card details to take advantage of the Livestorm free trial. All you have to do is fill in your info and answer some questions to get started.
Once that is done, you will need to verify your email and log in to your account.
You will see the main dashboard and you’re ready to go!
What is Livestorm?
Livestorm was founded in 2016 with the goal of connecting employees with their companies via online conference calls. However, it has since then grown to connect audiences of up to hundreds of people with presenters around the world.
With employees from 15 different countries and nationalities, all working remotely, the Livestorm team actually practices what they preach.
While it’s not the largest video engagement platform out there, Livestorm offers some advantages over other video conference/live webinar software
Advantages of Livestorm
Based on my free trial experience and other people who are active users of Livestorm, here are some of the advantages:
- Easy to use, user friendly
- A lot of possible Integration and compatibility
- Sales-driven webinar platform with automation
Disadvantages of Livestorm
However, there are some things to be mindful of if you choose to use Livestorm. Which are:
- A bit pricey as a live webinar platform for sales and marketing
- The free plan is very limited
Pricing Tiers
Besides free and pro plans, Livestorm does not actually have any set pricing for Business and Enterprise plans which is a bit strange, but depending on integration options and features you need, I suppose the pricing can vary.
If you drag the number of “active contacts” you need per month, you can get a ballpark of which plan is suitable for your needs.
Free plan
The free plan is a bit limited in my opinion. Although the 30 active contacts limit resets every month, you can’t do much with the free plan unless you host the same 30 people every month for conference calls and webinars.
If you plan to have a bigger audience and a lot more attendees, then you will need to sign up for a paid plan for sure.
In addition, 20 minutes per webinar session is not enough at all! For a live webinar, you at least need 40 minutes to have a meaningful discussion and presentation.
If I have quick team meetings or briefings, I suppose 20 minutes is okay, but in most cases, it won’t be enough.
Free plan features:
- Up to 30 active contacts/month
- Up to 20 minutes/session
- Up to 30 live attendees
- Unlimited team members
Pro Plan
The pro plan is $88/month(if paid annually) up to $110/month (if paid monthly) for 100 active contacts/participants. You can increase the number of active contacts from 100 to 500 within the Pro Plan but bear in mind the increasing cost. At 500 contacts, you’re expected to pay $410/month (if paid annually) up to $550/month (if paid monthly)
While 100 active contacts can be sufficient, it might not be enough for frequent webinars and conference calls with different participants, in which case you will have to increase the active contacts limit.
4 hours per session is more than enough, so there shouldn’t be any problems.
Pro plan features:
- 100 to 500 active contacts/month
- Up to 4 hours/session
- 100 to 500 live attendees
- Unlimited team members
- Standard support
Business Plan
The jump between Business Plan and Pro Plan is huge!
You get an unlimited number of contacts and up to 3,000 live webinar attendees. However, the Business Plan can cost you up to $1000 dollars or so every month.
Business plan features:
- Unlimited active contacts
- Up to 4 hours/session
- Up to 3,000 live attendees
- Unlimited team members
- VIP support
- Business onboarding & training
- Flexible Extra active contacts
Enterprise Plan
With the Enterprise Plan, you get 12 hours per live session, which seems like overkill, but it also comes with custom integrations and other additional features.
Enterprise plan features:
- Unlimited active contacts
- Up to 12 hours/session
- Up to 3,000 live attendees
- Unlimited team members
- VIP support & SLA
- Enterprise onboarding & training
- Dedicated CSM
- Enterprise & custom integrations
- Multiple workspaces & unified billing
- SAML SSO
- Flexible Extra active contacts
Review of All The Features in Free Account
Now let’s get into the most important part, the Livestorm free account review.
In general, you definitely need the premium features and it’s worth it to get the upgrade. You can’t do much with Livestorm free trial besides testing out how the platform works, but here are the details.
The Dashboard
The dashboard is clean and professional looking. There isn’t much clutter and it’s easy to navigate through the software.
Live Event Registration Pages
First and foremost I tried creating registration pages for the live events, and it’s pretty simple.
There should be a blue button on the top right-hand corner “Add new event”. Once you click that, you just need to fill in the details which are pretty self-explanatory.
Afterward, you can customize the registration pages and the info for your virtual events.
One of the features I really liked was the ability to change the design of landing pages for events and was really surprised it’s included in the free webinar plan.
You simply need to install a plugin (kind of like WordPress) and you can customize the design, layout, etc for the landing/registration page.
Automated Webinars
In addition, you can set up automated webinars for sales and business purposes.
You can choose between pre-recorded videos or actual live videos and utilize the various automation tools to make your life a bit easier.
It does save a lot of time and cuts down the hassle of emailing reminders to your attendees, directing viewers to a landing page for your product/service offer, and more.
For someone who is very busy, having multiple live webinars can be draining and take a lot of time, so a pre-recorded/uploaded video can function as an automated “live” webinar for sales purposes.
Attendees will still be able to engage via the messenger chat, ask questions, etc as long as you have people managing the chat and answering questions.
When it comes to hosting webinars, you can have as many webinars as you want as long as you don’t go over the active contacts limit and session time limit for your plan.
With the Livestorm free trial, I don’t see much use for all these automation features, unfortunately, since 20 minutes is not nearly enough at all to hold a proper live presentation and convert viewers into customers effectively. You’ll be out of time and “active contacts” limit before you know it.
If you do get the paid plan however with a decent active contacts limit, then you can keep churning “live” webinars with pre-recorded videos and grow your business with the automated features included in Livestorm.
Instant Meetings
For a quick and easy meet-up online, you can use the Instant Meetings function. Yes, the Livestorm free plan has this and it’s quite easy to set up.
Just open a meeting room and share the link with your team or the person you need to chat with. While the Live Webinars feature has a 20-minute per session limit, there doesn’t seem to be any time limit for Instant Meetings luckily.
The person with the link can just enter his or her name and join the chat without having to install software, create an account, or any of the other hassles associated with similar webinar hosting platforms like Google, Facebook, etc.
Compared to Zoom, Google Hangouts, and other platforms I’ve used, the Instant Meetings function in Livestorm is actually pretty decent.
Contacts Database
If you want to do more with your contacts with tracking, taking notes, adding tasks, reminders, and whatnot, you can export the contacts into an Excel, CSV, or ODS file and import them to a better CRM system.
There isn’t much you can do with the native CRM/contact section in Livestorm besides just browsing around and looking at some basic contact info.
Integrations
There are so many integrations you can do with Livestorm. For example, with Hubspot integration, for any live webinar attendees and participants, you can automatically duplicate the contact in the Hubspot CRM and set up other workflow automation.
Or you can hook up your live webinars to Paddle, payment gateways, analytics, etc. There is also the ability to integrate Zapier, so you can do all sorts of things.
Final Thoughts and Bottom-Line
If you plan on using Livestorm free trial indefinitely, then I would say the Instant Meetings feature is the highlight.
You can have video calls with people without the 20-minute restriction imposed on Live Webinars. The video conferencing is quite clean, minimal, and user-friendly. It’s better than Google Hangouts, Facebook, and other free platforms that I’ve used.
Otherwise, if you plan to use Livestorm for other purposes such as marketing, sales, and business growth, you can’t do much without paying up. Even though you get 30 active contacts per month and unlimited events with the free plan, the 20-minute limit on the webinars really limits what you can do with the software.
For companies really looking to expand their business, Livestorm can definitely be worth it, given the automation tools and various integrations available on the platform.
But the pricing packages for Livestorm cost can be quite high ranging from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars for serious users. You will need to negotiate with their sales team
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is the free plan trial?
Livestorm free trial doesn’t have an expiration date. You can keep using it as long as you don’t go over the monthly limit.
What’s considered active contact?
An active contact is an external registrant or a team member who registers for one of your live events. Every month the active contact limit is reset to 0.
What is the event duration limit on the free plan?
You only get 20 minutes per live session, so it’s only useful for quick team briefings and presentations.
Can you have unlimited free webinars?
Yes, you can have unlimited webinars in theory as long as you don’t go over the active contacts limit.
Is there a money-back guarantee?
They don’t specifically state any money-back guarantees, so it’s safe to assume they don’t offer that. Because some plans can take time to set up and customize, it’s probably that way.