Our pick for a recurring series · Verified 18 August 2026
Circle — live sessions, recordings, registration and the audience in one place
Professional $89/mo · Business $199/mo · 14-day trial, no card
If your webinar is a standing seminar series, a journal club, a methods course or a cohort programme, the recording archive and the audience are the assets, and splitting them across a broadcast tool plus a mailing list plus a shared drive is what actually costs you. Circle runs live sessions inside the same platform that holds the space, the members, the course, the recordings and the payments, from $89/month on Professional with a 2% transaction fee, or $199/month on Business at 1%. Courses are included on every paid tier, members are unlimited, and there is a 14-day trial that needs no card plus a 30-day money-back guarantee — so you can run next month’s session on it before you commit a budget line. Verified 18 August 2026.
Start a Circle trial Opens on the vendor’s site · CASRAI referral link
One-off broadcast to thousands? Read this first → — Circle is not a 5,000-seat broadcast tool. For a congress plenary or a large public launch, buy a dedicated webinar vendor — we say which does what below.
Editorial disclosure: CASRAI has commercial referral arrangements with some of the vendors named on this page, and may earn a commission if you subscribe to them. We name them here regardless of whether a link is present. We only recommend tools our editorial team has independently researched. Read our full disclosure policy.
In summary
- Circle: Professional $89/mo (2% transaction fee, 3 admins, 10 moderators), Business $199/mo (1%), Circle Plus custom (0.5%). Courses and unlimited members on every paid tier. 14-day trial, no card; 30-day money-back guarantee. Verified 18 August 2026.
- Buy Circle for a recurring seminar, cohort or membership programme where the recordings and the audience should live together. Buy a dedicated webinar vendor for one-off large-scale broadcasts.
- If credit depends on attendance, the only specification that matters is whether the platform exports per-attendee join and leave timestamps — not a yes/no attendance flag.
- Ask who owns the recording, how long it is retained, and in what format you can export it. Archive terms are where webinar contracts quietly differ.
- Institutional SSO is almost always an enterprise-tier item. Confirm it before you price the tier you were planning to buy, not after.
Which platform for which session
Our recommendation by scenario · prices verified 18 August 2026
| Dimension | What to buy | Why it wins there | The thing that bites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly seminar series, 30–300 attendees | Circle Professional — $89/mo | Sessions, recordings, registration and the standing audience in one platform | 2% transaction fee if you charge for attendance |
| Cohort course with live teaching | Circle Professional or Business | Courses included on every paid tier, so teaching and community share a login | Professional caps you at 3 admins and 20 automations |
| Accredited CME session, credit by attendance | A dedicated webinar platform for CME | Per-attendee join and leave timestamps, exportable for the accreditor | Confirm the export is duration data, not an attended flag |
| One-off broadcast, 1,000+ registrants | Zoom Webinars, GoTo Webinar or Livestorm | Attendee-band licensing built for large audiences and external speakers | Cost steps up sharply between attendee bands |
| Sponsored or industry-funded webinar | ON24 or a marketing-grade equivalent | Engagement scoring and CRM integration are the point of the purchase | Sponsor lead capture needs its own consent and disclosure |
| Anything your IT department must approve | Whichever vendor’s enterprise tier carries SAML | Institutional SSO removes the account-creation drop-off entirely | SSO is rarely on the tier you costed |
We publish prices only where we have read them off the vendor’s own pricing page, which is why Circle carries figures here and the broadcast vendors do not. All five sell in attendee bands and quote differently by region and contract length — take the number from their page on the day you buy.
The five webinar platforms you are about to google, and what each is actually for
Search “best webinar software” and you will get the same five names in a different order. They are not interchangeable, and the differences are structural rather than cosmetic.
Zoom Webinars is the path of least resistance because your institution almost certainly already has Zoom Meetings, and your speakers already know the controls. It is a licence add-on rather than a separate product, sold in attendee bands, and the practical consequence is that procurement is short and speaker training is nil. Its reporting is competent rather than rich, and the webinar add-on is a different licence from the meetings one your department may already hold — that is the assumption that most often blows a budget.
GoTo Webinar is the long-standing corporate default and shows it: reliable, unglamorous, strong on scheduled recurring events and practice sessions, with reporting that has been designed for people who have to prove what happened afterwards. It is the safest choice when the requirement is “this must not fall over and I need a clean report”.
Livestorm is browser-first, which matters more in academic settings than vendors realise — no download means no NHS trust or ministry laptop blocking the installer twenty minutes before a session. Registration pages and email sequences are handled natively and it is comfortable at the mid-size end.
Demio is built around the marketing webinar: clean registration, automated and on-demand replays, and a deliberately simple interface. If your session is a lead-generating event rather than a teaching one, it removes a lot of friction.
ON24 sits at the enterprise end and is a different category of purchase — engagement scoring, resource-rich consoles, deep CRM integration, and pricing to match. Institutions buy it for industry-funded and sponsored programmes where proving engagement to a funder is the deliverable.
We do not quote prices for any of the five. All of them sell in attendee bands, quote differently by region, contract length and bundle, and change terms without notice. Our policy is that we publish a figure only when we have read it off the vendor’s own pricing page — so take these numbers from source on the day you buy, and ask specifically what happens when registrations exceed your band.
Attendance duration tracking is the specification that decides CME
This is the single requirement that catches accredited buyers, and it catches them after the contract is signed. If you are awarding continuing medical education credit, continuing professional development points, or any form of certified attendance, you are not asking whether the platform tracks attendance. Every webinar platform tracks attendance. You are asking whether it exports, per named attendee, the timestamps at which they joined and left — and whether it does so across multiple join events when someone drops out and rejoins.
The failure mode is specific. A platform reports that Dr Okonjo attended. Your accreditor requires evidence that she was present for at least 45 of the 60 minutes. She joined late, dropped when her connection failed, and rejoined — three sessions in the log, one row in the summary report. If the export gives you a boolean rather than durations, you are reconciling that by hand for every attendee, for every session, and your evidence file is a spreadsheet you built yourself.
Ask the vendor these questions before you buy, and ask for a sample export rather than a feature-page assurance:
- Does the attendance export contain join and leave timestamps for every connection, or a single total?
- Is total time in session calculated for attendees who rejoin, and can we see the components?
- Can polls, quizzes or knowledge checks be exported alongside attendance as engagement evidence?
- Are the reports retained on the platform, and for how long — accreditors commonly expect several years of retrievable records?
- Does the export identify attendees by an institutional identifier we control, or only by whatever email they typed into the registration form?
That last point is the quiet one. Webinar software with attendance tracking is only useful for credit if the identity in the log matches the identity in your learner record. Free-text registration produces three variants of the same person, and reconciliation is manual. Institutional SSO fixes it, which is the next section.
Who owns the recording, and where the archive lives in five years
For a one-off broadcast, the recording is a by-product. For a seminar series, the recording archive is the asset — it is what makes the programme worth joining in year three, it is what late-career members search, and it is what you would have to rebuild if you changed vendor.
Three contract terms decide whether you actually control it. Storage and retention: cloud recording allowances are usually capped, and the cap is often generous enough to feel irrelevant until the fortieth session. Find out what happens when it fills — whether older recordings are deleted, archived, or billed as overage. Export format and bulk retrieval: being able to download one recording is not the same as being able to retrieve two hundred with their metadata, chapters, captions and chat logs. Ask what a full export looks like. Licence terms: read the clause covering what the vendor may do with content hosted on the platform, particularly around machine learning and product improvement, because that clause matters when your speakers are presenting unpublished data.
Two adjacent obligations arrive with the archive whether or not you planned for them. Speaker consent needs to cover the recording, the retention period and any onward use — a verbal “is it alright if we record this?” is not a licence to publish an academic’s talk for five years. And an archive that is publicly reachable will be assessed against accessibility law in most jurisdictions, which in practice means captions, and auto-captions on technical material are usually not good enough without a correction pass.
This is the strongest argument for the consolidated approach. When the recording lives in the same platform as the community that watched it, the archive is searchable by the people it was made for, new members find the back catalogue on their first visit, and you are not maintaining a shared drive that nobody has permission to reorganise.
Institutional SSO, data protection and the review you did not budget time for
Every academic webinar purchase meets the same three gates, and the order in which you meet them determines whether you run the session on schedule.
Single sign-on. SAML or federated access through your identity provider is close to universally an enterprise or top-tier feature across webinar platforms. Buyers cost the mid-tier, get sign-off, and then discover SSO sits two tiers up. Confirm it in writing before you build the business case. It is worth the money where you can get it: SSO removes the registration drop-off, and it makes the attendance log carry an identifier your student record or learner management system already recognises.
Data protection. You will need a data processing agreement, a list of sub-processors, and a defensible answer on where recordings and attendee data are stored. For UK and EU institutions handling health-related sessions, data residency is not a preference — it is a question your information governance team will ask on the form, and a blank answer stops the purchase.
Accessibility. Public-sector and publicly funded bodies in most jurisdictions must be able to evidence accessibility. Ask for the vendor’s accessibility conformance report, check live captioning, and check whether the recorded playback interface is navigable by keyboard and screen reader — the live console and the replay player are frequently not the same standard.
The scheduling reality: an institutional security and data protection review is measured in weeks, not days. If your session is in ten days, the deliverable question is which platform you can buy on a departmental card without a review, and that is a legitimate reason to run the first cycle on a self-serve platform while procurement works on the strategic one.
When Circle is the right purchase, and when it plainly is not
Circle is a community and content platform that runs live sessions. It is not a broadcast tool, and we would rather say so here than have you find out on the day.
Buy it when the series is the product. A monthly methods seminar, a journal club, a doctoral training programme, a core facility’s user group, a research network’s webinar strand. In every one of those cases the same people come back, the recordings accumulate into something valuable, and there is discussion between sessions that a broadcast tool has nowhere to put. Circle holds the space, the members, the courses, the recordings, the events and the payments together — which is why the alternative to buying it is usually buying three things.
The commercial case is straightforward. Professional is $89/month with a 2% transaction fee, three admins, ten moderators and twenty automations. Business is $199/month at 1% with five admins, fifteen moderators and unlimited automations. Circle Plus is custom-priced at 0.5% with unlimited seats and an optional branded app. Courses, unlimited members and Circle AI credits are included on every paid tier. A single mid-range broadcast licence plus separate course hosting typically costs more than that combination, and produces two audiences instead of one.
Do not buy Circle if your requirement is a one-off broadcast to several thousand registrants, if your accreditor demands per-attendee join and leave timestamps as the primary evidence of credit, if you need a practice-mode green room with staged speaker promotion for a formal plenary, or if institutional SSO is a hard procurement condition rather than a preference. Those are dedicated-webinar-vendor requirements, and a community platform is the wrong tool for them. Many institutions end up running both: a broadcast licence for the annual congress, and Circle for the standing programme that runs the other fifty weeks.
The reason to trial rather than deliberate: the 14-day trial takes no card, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. Run one real session on it — the actual seminar you already have booked — and you will know more than another week of feature comparison will tell you.
Run next month’s seminar on it before you commit the budget line
Professional is $89/month, the 14-day trial needs no card, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. Set up the space, invite the twenty people who never miss a session, and run the one you already have in the diary. If the recordings and the audience belong together, you will know inside a fortnight.
From $89/mo · 14-day free trial
Start a Circle trial Opens on the vendor’s site · CASRAI referral link
Frequently asked questions
What is the best platform for webinar series at a university or research institute?
It depends on whether the series is recurring. For a standing seminar, journal club or cohort programme where the recordings and the audience are the long-term asset, Circle is our pick — Professional at $89/month puts live sessions, the archive, courses, registration and payments in one platform, with a 14-day trial that needs no card. For a one-off broadcast to a thousand or more registrants, buy a dedicated webinar vendor such as Zoom Webinars, GoTo Webinar or Livestorm at the right attendee band. Verified 18 August 2026.
Which webinar platform for CME actually satisfies an accreditor?
Any of the dedicated vendors can, provided you verify one thing before purchase: that the attendance export gives per-attendee join and leave timestamps for every connection, not a single attended flag or a rounded total. Ask for a sample export file rather than trusting the feature page, check that rejoining attendees are handled correctly, and confirm how long the platform retains reports — accreditors commonly expect several years of retrievable records. If the export is thin, you will reconcile credit by hand for every session.
How much does Circle cost, and can we try it before committing?
Professional is $89/month with a 2% transaction fee, three admins and ten moderators. Business is $199/month at 1% with five admins, fifteen moderators and unlimited automations. Circle Plus is custom-priced at 0.5%. Courses, unlimited members and Circle AI credits are on every paid tier. There is a 14-day trial with no card required and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so the sensible move is to run one real session on it rather than deliberate. Verified 18 August 2026.
Should we just use Zoom Webinars, since we already have Zoom?
For a one-off large broadcast, very often yes — procurement is short, your speakers already know the controls, and there is no new tool to train anyone on. Two caveats. The webinar add-on is a separate licence from the meetings one your department holds, sold in attendee bands, so check what you actually have before assuming it is free. And it gives you a broadcast, not a home: the recordings end up on a drive, the attendees end up on a mailing list, and nothing accumulates between sessions. That is precisely the gap a recurring programme feels by month four.
What should we ask about recordings before signing anything?
Three things. What the storage allowance is and what happens when it fills — deletion, archiving or overage billing. What a bulk export actually produces, including captions, chat logs and metadata rather than just the video files. And what the licence permits the vendor to do with hosted content, which matters when speakers present unpublished data. Separately, make sure speaker consent covers the retention period and any onward publication, and budget for caption correction if the archive will be public.
Does webinar software with attendance tracking need institutional SSO?
Not technically, but it is the difference between a usable log and a reconciliation job. Free-text registration produces several variants of the same person, so the identity in your attendance export does not match the identity in your learner record. SSO through your identity provider fixes that and removes registration drop-off at the same time. The catch is that SAML is almost always an enterprise-tier feature, so confirm which tier carries it before you cost the purchase.
We have a session in ten days. What do we do?
Split the decision. Buy whatever you can put on a departmental card and run this session without a security review — that is a legitimate use of a self-serve webinar platform, and an institutional data protection review takes weeks rather than days. Then use the session to answer the strategic question: if the same people will come back next month and you want the recording to live where they are, start a Circle trial in parallel and build the space while the first session is still fresh. The trial takes no card and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, so nothing about running both is expensive.
