Crowdcast vs StreamYard
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
Editorial assessmentCrowdcast compared with StreamYard
StreamYard is a streaming studio: better production controls, better multistreaming, and built for pushing branded video out to social platforms. Crowdcast is an event room: registration, ticketing, a contained audience, timestamped Q and A, and a replay page that keeps the conversation. If your output is a public livestream you want everywhere at once, StreamYard. If you are gathering a specific audience for a session, especially a paid one, Crowdcast.
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 StreamYard if
Creators, podcasters, and marketing teams running a recurring public live show on YouTube and LinkedIn who want it to look produced, need guests to join by link with nothing installed, and value multi-destination reach over gated lead capture.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Crowdcast | StreamYard |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Webinars | Webinars |
| Starting price | $49 per month (Lite); annual billing saves 30 percent (14 days trial) | $0 (Free), then $35.99 per month billed annually (Core) (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 per-user subscription. Feature gates are on output quality, destination count, participant count, storage, and webinar capacity. Team use requires a separate Business plan. |
| Free plan | No | Six on-screen participants, standard definition output, limited streaming destinations, two hours of local recording per month, limited storage, and a StreamYard logo on every broadcast. |
| 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. | Creators, podcasters, and marketing teams running a recurring public live show on YouTube and LinkedIn who want it to look produced, need guests to join by link with nothing installed, and value multi-destination reach over gated lead capture. |
| 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 first broadcast. Connect a destination, set your brand colors and logo, invite a guest by link, and go live. There is nothing to install and no encoder to configure, which is the entire reason the product exists. |
| 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 for basic streaming and moderate for polished production. Composing layouts live, managing a backstage green room, and running chat promotion while presenting takes a few shows to feel natural. Budget one rehearsal broadcast before anything public. |
| Platforms | Browser-based for hosts and attendees on desktop and mobile, RTMP ingest from OBS, Wirecast, and Ecamm Live | Web browser (hosts and guests, desktop), Mobile viewing on the destination platforms, Custom RTMP output to any compatible endpoint |
| Compliance | GDPR handling for registrant data, PCI handled by Stripe for ticketing, No public SOC 2 report advertised | GDPR |
| Founded | 2015 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Oakland, California, United States | Milan, Italy (as part of Bending Spoons); originally founded in the United States |
| Ownership | Privately held, founder-led | Owned by Bending Spoons following an April 2024 acquisition |
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.
StreamYard
Strengths
- The best browser-based production studio available: layouts, brand overlays, banners, and on-screen chat promotion that make a stream look genuinely produced with no software installed.
- Guests join by link with nothing to install, which is why external experts actually show up rather than cancelling over a technical prerequisite.
- Simultaneous multi-destination streaming with unified cross-platform chat in a single panel, which is one of the better implementations in any product.
- A permanent free tier that is usable for learning the tool and for internal broadcasts where a vendor logo does not matter.
Limitations
- Core and Advanced are individual-use licences, so a team's actual entry price is the Business plan at a reported 299 dollars a month, which is a much bigger step than the published tiers suggest.
- The on-air webinar mode caps at 100 viewers until Business, making StreamYard poor value for any gated webinar of meaningful size.
- Registration, reminder emails, and CRM sync are thin compared with Demio, Livestorm, or Contrast; this is a studio with a webinar feature, not a webinar platform.
- No evergreen automation: pre-recorded streams are scheduled broadcasts, with no timed interactions, conditional logic, or just-in-time sessions.
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.
StreamYard
Freemium per-user subscription. Feature gates are on output quality, destination count, participant count, storage, and webinar capacity. Team use requires a separate Business plan.
- Free$0
- Core$44.99 monthly or $35.99 billed annually
- Advanced$88.99 monthly or $68.99 billed annually
- BusinessReported at around $299 per month
For an individual creator, StreamYard at 35.99 dollars a month billed annually is excellent value and the best browser studio available at any price. Unlimited streaming and recording, 1080p, three destinations, brand overlays, and unified chat for less than a Demio seat is a strong offer, and the free tier lets you learn the tool before paying. The value proposition inverts sharply for teams and for webinars. The individual-use licensing on Core and Advanced means a two-person team's real price is the Business plan at a reported 299 dollars a month, and the on-air webinar mode caps at 100 viewers until you reach that same tier. Judged as a production studio for one person, it is a bargain. Judged as a webinar platform for a company, it is expensive for what it does, and a dedicated webinar tool at half the price will serve you better.
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 profileStreamYard
StreamYard is the best browser live studio there is and, for one person running a public show, a genuine bargain at 35.99 dollars a month annually. Layouts, brand overlays, link-join guests, multi-destination streaming, and unified chat make a laptop broadcast look produced with no software and no learning cliff. Buy it if your output is a public stream on YouTube and LinkedIn and you care how it looks. Do not buy it as your webinar platform: the on-air webinar mode caps at 100 viewers until the Business tier, registration and CRM tooling is thin, and the individual-use licensing on Core and Advanced means a two-person team's real price is a reported 299 dollars a month rather than the 69 they were reading.
Read the full StreamYard profileCrowdcast profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; StreamYard last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.