Is Crowdcast or Restream cheaper?

Crowdcast starts at $49 per month (Lite); annual billing saves 30 percent (14 days trial). Restream starts at $0 (Free, two destinations with branding); $19 per month for Standard (free plan available).

Crowdcast vs Restream

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 assessed

Crowdcast compared with Restream

Restream is a multistreaming and studio product built to push one broadcast to eight destinations at once, with webinars available as a paid add-on. Crowdcast is a webinar and event platform with multistreaming available as a plan feature. Buy Restream if the destinations are the point and the audience is public; buy Crowdcast if registration, ticketing, and a contained audience are the point and simulcast is a bonus.

Restream compared with Crowdcast

Crowdcast is an event platform with registration, ticketing, timestamped Q and A, and an instant replay page, that also multistreams to a few destinations. Restream is a multistreaming platform that can gate an event for an extra 99 dollars a month. If you are gathering a registered or paying audience, Crowdcast is the right shape and considerably cheaper for that job. If the broadcast is public and reach across platforms is the goal, Restream wins clearly.

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 Restream if

Marketing teams, podcasters, churches, educators, and small businesses whose live content is public and needs to be on LinkedIn and YouTube simultaneously, plus anyone who wants a polished browser-based studio with guests and overlays without learning OBS.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Crowdcast	Restream
Category	Webinars	Webinars
Starting price	$49 per month (Lite); annual billing saves 30 percent (14 days trial)	$0 (Free, two destinations with branding); $19 per month for Standard (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.	Subscription tiers priced primarily on the number of simultaneous destinations, with Clips and Webinars sold as separate monthly add-ons whose price depends on your base tier.
Free plan	No	Stream to two channels simultaneously, with Restream branding on the output.
Free trial	14 days with all features and integrations, limited to 60-minute sessions and 10 live attendees	No fixed-length trial; the permanent free plan is the evaluation path
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.	Marketing teams, podcasters, churches, educators, and small businesses whose live content is public and needs to be on LinkedIn and YouTube simultaneously, plus anyone who wants a polished browser-based studio with guests and overlays without learning OBS.
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.	Twenty minutes to a first multistream. Connecting destinations is an OAuth click each, and Studio needs no configuration to produce a watchable broadcast. Building branded overlays and a repeatable show format is the part worth an afternoon.
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.	Low in Studio, moderate if you bring your own encoder. Anyone who has run a video call can produce a decent Restream broadcast on the first attempt. OBS or vMix ingest follows normal streaming conventions and is well documented.
Platforms	Browser-based for hosts and attendees on desktop and mobile, RTMP ingest from OBS, Wirecast, and Ecamm Live	Browser-based Restream Studio for hosts and guests, Encoder ingest from OBS, Streamlabs, vMix, and hardware encoders, iOS and Android apps, Embeddable website player (Business and above)
Compliance	GDPR handling for registrant data, PCI handled by Stripe for ticketing, No public SOC 2 report advertised	GDPR, Standard SaaS security controls, Encrypted RTMPS ingest on paid plans
Founded	2015	2015
Headquarters	Oakland, California, United States	Austin, Texas, United States
Ownership	Privately held, founder-led	Venture-backed, independent

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.

Restream

Strengths

Best-in-class multistreaming, with more than thirty destinations, custom RTMP, guest channels, and per-destination health monitoring in one place.
Unified cross-platform chat is the standout feature: merging comments from every destination into one moderated window changes how a public live show actually runs.
Restream Studio is good enough that most businesses never need OBS, and guests join by link with nothing installed.
A genuinely usable free plan at two destinations, plus a self-serve paid ladder from 19 dollars, so evaluation costs nothing and commitment is gradual.

Limitations

Webinars are an add-on rather than a feature, and the resulting cost of a 500-attendee gated room, 538 dollars a month, is well above dedicated platforms with far deeper webinar functionality.
No evergreen or automated webinar mode, no just-in-time scheduling, and no scheduled replay of a recording as a live event.
Registration, reminders, and lead data are thin compared with any real webinar platform; there is no behavioural email sequencing and no native CRM object sync.
The jump from Professional at 49 dollars to Business at 239 dollars is very steep for what is largely three extra destinations, two seats, and the website player.

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.

Restream

Subscription tiers priced primarily on the number of simultaneous destinations, with Clips and Webinars sold as separate monthly add-ons whose price depends on your base tier.

Free$0
Standard$19
Professional$49
Business$239
EnterpriseCustom

Priced as a multistreaming and production tool, Restream is very good value. Professional at 49 dollars a month for five destinations, 1080p output, 4K recording, dual horizontal and vertical streaming, and a browser studio your guests can join by link is difficult to beat, and the free plan is a real evaluation path rather than a demo. Priced as a webinar platform it is poor value: 148 dollars a month gets you a hundred gated attendees on Professional plus the add-on, which Demio, ClickMeeting, or Zoho Webinar beat outright with far more registration, reminder, and reporting capability. The correct way to read the Webinars add-on is as a convenience for a company that already lives in Restream and occasionally needs a gated version of the same production, not as a reason to choose Restream over a dedicated tool.

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 profile

Restream

Restream is the best answer in this category to a question most webinar tools do not ask: how do I get one live production onto every platform my audience uses, and then talk to all of them in one chat window? The browser studio is capable enough to replace OBS for most businesses, guests join by link, dual vertical output and automatic clipping match how short-form distribution actually works, and there is no attendee cap because the destination platforms carry the audience. Professional at 49 dollars a month is genuinely strong value. Just do not buy it as a webinar platform. The Webinars add-on is a 99 or 299 dollar monthly convenience for teams already living in Restream, and at 538 dollars a month for a 500-seat gated room it loses badly to GoTo Webinar, Demio, or ClickMeeting on both price and capability. Buy Restream for public broadcast and reach; buy a webinar tool for registration, reminders, and leads.

Read the full Restream profile

Crowdcast profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Restream last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.