First: do you need one?
If your event is one session, one audience, watch-only. You don't need an event platform. A well-produced stream into YouTube, LinkedIn or Teams will reach more people with less friction. Platforms earn their cost when you need registration, multiple sessions, structured interaction or sponsor visibility. Be honest about which of those you actually need before you start demos.
Features that matter
- Registration that exports clean data: custom fields, confirmation emails you control, a CSV that doesn't need repairing.
- An agenda that handles time zones and personal schedules.
- Reliable embedded streaming: test it on a corporate network; many block consumer video.
- Moderated Q&A with upvoting and a moderator view that's actually usable live.
- Polls whose results can be displayed into the show, not just inside the platform.
- Breakout rooms a producer can open, close and move people between.
- Per-session analytics: who watched what, for how long, exportable.
- Branding control beyond a logo upload: colours, fonts, layouts.
- A production back-end your crew can drive: speaker green rooms, source switching, screen-share management, or clean RTMP/SRT ingest for an external gallery.
- Captions and accessibility: keyboard navigation, screen-reader support, caption display controls.
- Single sign-on and access control for internal events.
- On-demand hosting after the event, with the same analytics.
Features that are usually fluff
3D lobbies and avatars (novelty wears off in minutes; accessibility suffers), gamification badges, AI matchmaking on events under a few hundred attendees, virtual exhibition halls nobody visits, and "metaverse" anything. If a demo spends its first ten minutes on these, ask to see the moderator's Q&A view instead.
Questions to ask any vendor
- What happens when a viewer's connection drops, does the player recover on its own?
- What's the real concurrency limit, with proof from a past event?
- Can we get every piece of attendee data out afterwards, in full?
- What does support look like during the live event, a human on a channel, or a ticket queue?
- Where is data stored and processed (see GDPR)?
- Can an external production gallery send you a broadcast feed, and at what latency?
Our position
We're platform-agnostic. We build bespoke event platforms when the brief demands it, and we'll happily run your show into Teams, Zoom or a third-party platform when that's the right answer. The platform is the venue. The show is what we're there for. The comparison guide puts the common options side by side.