Is Luma or Zoom Webinars cheaper?

Luma starts at $0 (Free, with a 5 percent platform fee on paid tickets); $59 per month for Plus billed annually (free plan available). Zoom Webinars starts at From about $66.67 per licence per month billed annually (300-attendee capacity), plus a paid Zoom Workplace licence (free trial).

Luma vs Zoom Webinars

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 assessment

Luma compared with Zoom Webinars

Luma's Zoom integration means these two are commonly paired rather than compared. Zoom Webinars provides the room, the presenter controls, the recording, and the attendee capacity you pay for by tier. Luma provides the event page, the ticketing, the SMS and WhatsApp reminders, and the attendance tracking that reports back from Zoom. Buying Luma does not remove the need for Zoom; buying Zoom does not give you Luma's registration experience or its persistent calendar audience.

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.

Choose Zoom Webinars if

Organizations that already run on Zoom and need a large, reliable, compliance-approved broadcast channel: all-hands meetings, customer town halls, investor updates, regulated-industry events, and any webinar where audience familiarity and IT approval matter more than registration-funnel optimization.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Luma	Zoom Webinars
Category	Webinars	Webinars
Starting price	$0 (Free, with a 5 percent platform fee on paid tickets); $59 per month for Plus billed annually (free plan available)	From about $66.67 per licence per month billed annually (300-attendee capacity), plus a paid Zoom Workplace licence (free trial)
Pricing model	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.	Per-licence monthly add-on to a paid Zoom Workplace subscription, priced by the attendee capacity band you select. Three product lines: Webinars, Webinars Plus, and Events.
Free plan	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.	No
Free trial	Not applicable; the free plan is permanent and fully functional	Zoom offers trial access through its sales and self-serve flows; no fixed published trial length for the Webinars add-on
Best for	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.	Organizations that already run on Zoom and need a large, reliable, compliance-approved broadcast channel: all-hands meetings, customer town halls, investor updates, regulated-industry events, and any webinar where audience familiarity and IT approval matter more than registration-funnel optimization.
Setup time	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.	Minutes if you already run Zoom: add the licence, schedule a webinar, enable registration. Days if you do not, because you are deploying Zoom Workplace first, which involves identity integration, policy configuration, and client rollout.
Learning curve	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.	Very low for hosts who already use Zoom, since the scheduling interface is a superset of the meeting one. The genuinely new concepts are the panellist and attendee distinction, the practice session, and, on Webinars Plus, Production Studio scene control, which needs a rehearsal.
Platforms	Web application, Mobile web event pages, iOS and Android apps for guests and hosts, Embeddable calendars and register buttons	Zoom desktop client on Windows, macOS, and Linux, Zoom mobile apps on iOS and Android, Browser join (with functional limitations compared with the client), RTMP output to external destinations
Compliance	GDPR handling for guest data, PCI handled by Stripe for ticketing, No public SOC 2 report advertised on standard plans	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA-eligible configurations, FedRAMP authorization, GDPR, CCPA
Founded	2020	2011
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States	San Jose, California, United States
Ownership	Venture-backed	Publicly traded (NASDAQ: ZM)

Strengths and limitations

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.

Zoom Webinars

Strengths

Universal audience familiarity, which is worth real conversion percentage points in a category where attendee attrition is the dominant problem.
The compliance posture is unmatched here: SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA-eligible configurations, FedRAMP authorization, SSO, and regional data routing controls.
Scale that no other vendor in this batch approaches, advertised up to 100,000 attendees with infrastructure that genuinely holds.
Overage billing rather than hard lockouts on some configurations, which means an unexpectedly popular session costs money rather than turning away registrants.

Limitations

Requires a paid Zoom Workplace licence underneath, so the real cost is always two subscriptions and comparisons quoting the add-on alone understate it.
Registration pages and reminder-email tooling are functional but basic; a dedicated webinar platform will out-convert them noticeably.
The join flow frequently pushes attendees toward the desktop client rather than keeping them in the browser, which is precisely the friction Livestorm and Demio remove.
No evergreen automation engine: simulive schedules a recording but there is no interaction library, conditional logic, or just-in-time session start.

Pricing compared

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.

Zoom Webinars

Per-licence monthly add-on to a paid Zoom Workplace subscription, priced by the attendee capacity band you select. Three product lines: Webinars, Webinars Plus, and Events.

Zoom Workplace Pro (prerequisite)About $14.16
WebinarsFrom about $66.67 (annual) at 300 attendees; around $83.33 annual or $95 monthly at 500
Webinars PlusFrom about $99
Zoom EventsFrom about $149

Zoom Webinars is expensive for what a marketer gets and reasonable for what an enterprise gets, and both statements are true at once. A 500-attendee capability at roughly 97 dollars a month all-in (Workplace plus Webinars, billed annually) buys you scale, reliability, isolated recording tracks, breakout rooms, SSO, SOC 2, FedRAMP, and an audience that already knows how to attend. Compared with Contrast at around 69 dollars for 250 registrants with better email and HubSpot depth, or Demio at around 164 dollars for a 500-attendee room with far better marketing tooling, Zoom is mid-priced and weakest exactly where marketers care most. The prerequisite licence and the per-host structure make it worse value for small teams with several presenters. Buy it for infrastructure, compliance, and audience familiarity. Do not buy it expecting a demand-generation platform, because that is the one thing it conspicuously is not.

Editorial verdict on each

Luma

Momentum

Luma 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 profile

Zoom Webinars

Zoom Webinars wins on the things that are hard to buy and loses on the things that are easy to buy. Nobody else in this category can offer FedRAMP, HIPAA-eligible configurations, SAML SSO, regional data routing, 100,000-attendee scale, and an audience that needs no instruction on how to attend. Buy it if you already run Zoom, if the compliance review is real, or if the event is genuinely large, and accept that the registration and email tooling is a checkbox rather than a competitive feature. Do not buy it as your demand-generation platform: it needs a paid Workplace licence underneath, it prices per host, and Contrast, Demio, or Livestorm will out-convert it on registration and out-integrate it on CRM at a fraction of the all-in cost.

Read the full Zoom Webinars profile

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