Livestorm 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
Both sides assessedLivestorm compared with StreamYard
StreamYard is a production studio for broadcasting to social platforms with brand overlays, custom layouts, and a free tier; Livestorm is a webinar platform with registration, reminders, and CRM sync. They solve adjacent problems and plenty of teams run both. If your goal is a polished public live show on YouTube and LinkedIn, use StreamYard. If your goal is a gated session that produces named leads in a CRM, use Livestorm.
StreamYard compared with Livestorm
These are complements more often than rivals and many teams run both. Livestorm handles registration, reminder emails, engagement tracking, and CRM sync for gated sessions; StreamYard produces the polished public broadcast. Livestorm can even simulcast to YouTube and LinkedIn itself, which covers the basic case. Add StreamYard when the visual production of the public stream matters enough to justify a second tool.
Choose Livestorm if
European and EU-data-conscious marketing teams running a steady program of live webinars, product demos, and customer onboarding sessions, especially those with high registration volume and typical no-show rates, who want attendees to join in a browser with zero friction and would rather pay for people who turned up than for a seat licence.
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 | Livestorm | StreamYard |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Webinars | Webinars |
| Starting price | Pro at approximately 2.50 euros per attendee credit; third-party trackers report an entry block around 105 euros per month (free trial) | $0 (Free), then $35.99 per month billed annually (Core) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Attendee-credit consumption model. One credit is consumed per unique participant per session across a rolling twelve-month period. Team members are not counted, and no-shows consume nothing. | 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 | A trial is available on request through the signup flow; Livestorm does not publish a fixed trial length on the pricing page | No fixed-length trial; the permanent free plan is the evaluation path |
| Best for | European and EU-data-conscious marketing teams running a steady program of live webinars, product demos, and customer onboarding sessions, especially those with high registration volume and typical no-show rates, who want attendees to join in a browser with zero friction and would rather pay for people who turned up than for a seat licence. | 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 for a first event. Create the event, choose the format, restyle the registration page, edit the reminder emails, and connect your CRM. There is no software rollout and nothing for attendees to prepare, so the usual pre-launch IT work simply does not exist. | 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 for the basic live event. The parts that take practice are the automated event mode, the role and permission model in a larger workspace, and the analytics export, which is powerful but not self-explanatory. | 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 | Web browser (attendees and presenters, desktop and mobile), iFrame embed on your own site, RTMP simulcast to YouTube, LinkedIn, X, and custom endpoints | Web browser (hosts and guests, desktop), Mobile viewing on the destination platforms, Custom RTMP output to any compatible endpoint |
| Compliance | ISO 27001, GDPR | GDPR |
| Founded | 2016 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Paris, France (fully remote team) | Milan, Italy (as part of Bending Spoons); originally founded in the United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Owned by Bending Spoons following an April 2024 acquisition |
Strengths and limitations
Livestorm
Strengths
- Genuinely zero-install for both attendees and presenters, which lifts attendance rates and removes the most common day-of-event support ticket.
- Attendee-credit billing means no-shows are free, which is a real saving in a category where more than half of registrants routinely fail to attend.
- Unlimited team members at no additional cost, so a large marketing organization does not pay per host.
- Live, on-demand, and automated formats are all first-class rather than one of them being a token feature.
Limitations
- The pricing page publishes no flat monthly number and no free plan, so building a budget requires a conversation or a configuration exercise rather than reading a table.
- Running out of attendee credits blocks new joiners mid-session rather than billing you for the overage, which is an unusually harsh failure mode.
- Replay and on-demand views consume credits, which quietly makes evergreen content more expensive than it looks.
- Production control is thin compared with a studio tool: no scene composition, no multi-camera switching, no high-bitrate local recording.
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
Livestorm
Attendee-credit consumption model. One credit is consumed per unique participant per session across a rolling twelve-month period. Team members are not counted, and no-shows consume nothing.
- ProAbout 2.50 euros per attendee credit
- EnterpriseCustom quote
Livestorm is good value when your no-show rate is high and your attendance is uneven, and poor value when it is neither. Paying only for people who turned up is genuinely fairer than a seat licence with a fixed room cap, and the unlimited team members clause means a twenty-person marketing org pays the same as a solo operator for the same audience. The catch is forecasting. A quote-free per-credit model turns your webinar bill into a variable cost that rises exactly when a campaign works, and the hard block when credits run out during a live session is a worse failure mode than an overage invoice. If you can predict your annual attendee volume within twenty percent, buy the credits and the economics beat Demio or Zoom at similar volume. If you cannot, a capped per-seat platform will be less stressful even if it is nominally more expensive.
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
Livestorm
Category LeaderLivestorm is the best browser-first webinar platform for a marketing team that treats webinars as a lead channel rather than a big meeting, and the attendee-credit model is the fairest billing structure in the category for anyone whose no-show rate is typical. Zero-install attendance is not a marketing line; it measurably changes how many registrants become attendees. Buy it if you run a steady program with volatile attendance, have many occasional hosts, and want EU hosting with ISO 27001 behind it. Think twice if you need a fixed, forecastable monthly cost, because credits that run out block joiners mid-session, or if your strategy is really an evergreen funnel, in which case a dedicated automation tool will do more for less.
Read the full Livestorm 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 profileLivestorm 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.