Crowdcast vs Luma
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedCrowdcast compared with Luma
These two are complements more often than competitors. Luma is event hosting and ticketing with an excellent free tier and zero platform fee on Plus, but the session itself happens in Zoom or somewhere else. Crowdcast is the session, with ticketing attached. If you already run great events elsewhere and need registration and ticketing, Luma is cheaper and better at that job. If the live room is the product, Crowdcast covers both without a handoff.
Luma compared with Crowdcast
These solve adjacent halves of the same problem. Crowdcast is the live room with ticketing attached; Luma is the ticketing and audience layer with no room. If your virtual event is the product and you want a good browser session with chat, Q and A, and instant replay, Crowdcast. If you run in-person or hybrid events, or you are happy running the session in Zoom, Luma is better at registration, reminders, check-in, and building a recurring audience, and it is free.
Choose Crowdcast if
Creators, educators, coaches, authors, and community-led small businesses who run live workshops, classes, and recurring community sessions, especially those selling tickets to those sessions and those whose attendance varies enough that a hard room cap is a real business risk.
Choose Luma if
Community organizers, startups, coworking spaces, meetup and conference side-event hosts, and small businesses running a recurring programme of in-person or hybrid events, especially anyone who wants a persistent audience via a subscribable calendar and does not want to pay a platform fee on ticket revenue.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Crowdcast | Luma |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Webinars | Webinars |
| Starting price | $49 per month (Lite); annual billing saves 30 percent (14 days trial) | $0 (Free, with a 5 percent platform fee on paid tickets); $59 per month for Plus billed annually (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Monthly tiers bundling live-attendee capacity, streaming hours, team seats, and storage, plus a transaction fee on ticket sales and metered overage on attendees and hours. | Freemium. A complete free plan that takes a five percent platform fee on paid tickets, and a flat monthly Plus plan that removes the fee and raises limits. Send capacity is the metered dimension. |
| Free plan | No | Unlimited events and guests, 500 invites or newsletter sends per week, paid ticketing with a five percent platform fee, ticket types, coupons, group purchases, guest check-in, three calendar admins, and Zoom integration with attendance tracking. |
| Free trial | 14 days with all features and integrations, limited to 60-minute sessions and 10 live attendees | Not applicable; the free plan is permanent and fully functional |
| Best for | Creators, educators, coaches, authors, and community-led small businesses who run live workshops, classes, and recurring community sessions, especially those selling tickets to those sessions and those whose attendance varies enough that a hard room cap is a real business risk. | Community organizers, startups, coworking spaces, meetup and conference side-event hosts, and small businesses running a recurring programme of in-person or hybrid events, especially anyone who wants a persistent audience via a subscribable calendar and does not want to pay a platform fee on ticket revenue. |
| Setup time | Under an hour. Create a channel, schedule an event, connect Stripe if you are ticketing, and you are live. The Gallery makes the first dry run genuinely easy rather than an act of faith. | Fifteen minutes to a live public event page. Connecting Stripe for paid ticketing takes another ten. There is essentially no configuration burden, which is a large part of why the product spread the way it did. |
| Learning curve | Low. Crowdcast is one of the least intimidating live platforms to host on, and the audience side requires nothing beyond clicking a link. The only part with real depth is RTMP ingest from OBS, which is optional and follows standard streaming conventions. | Very low. Luma is one of the few tools in this category a non-technical organizer can use correctly on the first try without reading documentation. The only concepts worth learning are the calendar-versus-event distinction and the approval workflow. |
| Platforms | Browser-based for hosts and attendees on desktop and mobile, RTMP ingest from OBS, Wirecast, and Ecamm Live | Web application, Mobile web event pages, iOS and Android apps for guests and hosts, Embeddable calendars and register buttons |
| Compliance | GDPR handling for registrant data, PCI handled by Stripe for ticketing, No public SOC 2 report advertised | GDPR handling for guest data, PCI handled by Stripe for ticketing, No public SOC 2 report advertised on standard plans |
| Founded | 2015 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Oakland, California, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Ownership | Privately held, founder-led | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Crowdcast
Strengths
- Overage billing instead of a hard attendee cap, which is a structurally kinder failure mode than every mainstream competitor in this category and removes the worst risk in webinar planning.
- Native Stripe ticketing with a falling transaction fee, so paid workshops and classes work end to end without a second platform.
- Instant replay on the same event page attendees already have, with chat and timestamped Q and A intact, so the recording is genuinely useful rather than an orphaned video file.
- The Gallery green room is the best pre-flight experience in the category, and it prevents the most common category of live-event disaster.
Limitations
- Streaming hours are metered monthly, so a heavy month costs extra even if attendance is modest, and no competitor at this price meters airtime the same way.
- Maximum session length is capped at two hours on Lite, four on Pro, and six on Business, which rules out full-day events on anything but the top plan.
- No SSO, no published SOC 2 report, and no data residency options, which will end an enterprise security review before it starts.
- CRM integration is Zapier and CSV rather than native Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo objects, so attendance-driven lead scoring requires building the pipeline yourself.
Luma
Strengths
- The free plan is genuinely complete, with unlimited events and guests plus full paid ticketing, which no comparable platform offers.
- Luma Plus charges zero platform fee on ticket sales, which is a structurally better deal than Eventbrite's per-ticket percentage plus fixed fee for anyone selling regularly.
- The calendar model builds a persistent, subscribable audience across events rather than a fresh registration list each time, which compounds for anyone running a programme.
- Reminders reach guests by email, SMS, push, and WhatsApp, a broader channel mix than any conventional webinar tool, and it shows up directly in attendance rates.
Limitations
- There is no streaming room at all. Luma cannot host a webinar; a virtual event runs in Zoom or elsewhere, and Luma handles everything around it.
- No discovery marketplace, so unlike Eventbrite it will never bring you attendees you did not already reach.
- The five percent platform fee on the free plan is steep for a paid event, and combined with Stripe's processing it takes roughly eight percent off the top.
- No native CRM connectors; integration is API and Zapier on Plus, so marketing operations plumbing has to be built rather than configured.
Pricing compared
Crowdcast
Monthly tiers bundling live-attendee capacity, streaming hours, team seats, and storage, plus a transaction fee on ticket sales and metered overage on attendees and hours.
- Lite$49
- Pro$89
- Business$195
Crowdcast is not the cheapest webinar tool and it is not trying to be. Lite at 49 dollars for a hundred attendees and ten hours a month looks poor next to Demio Starter or Zoho Webinar until you account for what those tools do not include: native ticketing, overage instead of a locked door, an instant replay page that keeps its chat, and Patreon gating. For a creator selling access to live sessions, Crowdcast replaces a webinar tool plus a checkout plus a replay host, and the two percent ticket fee on Business is competitive with what a standalone ticketing platform would charge before you even count the streaming. For a B2B marketing team that will never sell a ticket, most of that value is dead weight and the money is better spent on Demio or Livestorm.
Luma
Freemium. A complete free plan that takes a five percent platform fee on paid tickets, and a flat monthly Plus plan that removes the fee and raises limits. Send capacity is the metered dimension.
- Free$0
- Plus$59
- EnterpriseCustom
Luma's free plan is the most generous serious offering in this whole category, and for a community organizer running free events it is simply the correct answer at zero cost. The moment money changes hands, the arithmetic sharpens: five percent of ticket revenue is a lot, and Plus at 59 dollars a month erases it, so any organizer clearing more than about 1,200 dollars a month in tickets should be on Plus and is losing money by staying free. Against Eventbrite's 3.7 percent plus 1.79 dollars per ticket, Luma Plus wins decisively at volume and on low-priced tickets, where Eventbrite's fixed 1.79 dollars is brutal. What you give up is discovery, since Eventbrite has a marketplace and Luma does not, and the streaming room, which Luma has never had. Judged as ticketing and event management, it is excellent value; judged as a webinar tool, it is not one.
Editorial verdict on each
Crowdcast
Crowdcast is a live event platform for people who sell access to their own sessions, and it is unusually well designed for that job. Native Stripe ticketing, Patreon gating, an instant replay page that keeps its chat and timestamped Q and A, the Gallery green room, and RTMP ingest for when you want real production add up to a coherent tool for creators, educators, and community-led businesses. Its best feature is not on any comparison chart: it bills you 15 cents per extra attendee instead of locking the door, which makes it the only mainstream option in this category where an unexpectedly successful event costs money rather than costing you the audience. The limits are equally clear: metered streaming hours, short session caps on the cheaper plans, a 1,000-attendee ceiling, no SSO or SOC 2, and CRM integration that stops at Zapier. Buy it if the live room is your product. Buy something else if the live room is your marketing.
Read the full Crowdcast profileLuma
MomentumLuma is the best event hosting and ticketing tool a small business can adopt in fifteen minutes, and the free plan is so complete that most organizers never need to pay. The calendar model, which builds a subscribable audience across a programme rather than a fresh list per event, is the quietly important idea, and reminders by SMS, push, and WhatsApp are why its events fill. The upgrade decision is arithmetic rather than taste: past roughly 1,200 dollars a month in ticket sales, the 59-dollar Plus plan is cheaper than the free one because it removes the five percent platform fee entirely. What you must not do is buy it expecting a webinar platform. Luma does not stream, record, or run a session; it gets people to one and tells you who showed up. Paired with Zoom, Livestorm, or Crowdcast it is close to ideal. On its own, for a virtual-first company that needs a room, it is only half the stack.
Read the full Luma profileCrowdcast profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Luma last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.