# Crowdcast

> Crowdcast is a browser-based live webinar and virtual event platform aimed at creators, educators, and communities, combining a no-download event room with built-in Stripe ticketing, multi-session events, live chat and Q and A with timestamps, polls, screen and slide sharing, RTMP ingest from OBS or Ecamm, multistreaming to YouTube and Facebook, and instant replay pages; it is priced in monthly tiers that bundle live-attendee capacity and streaming hours, with per-attendee and per-hour overage rather than a hard cut-off.

- Category: Webinars & Virtual Events (https://saastracker.org/categories/webinars-events)
- Website: https://www.crowdcast.io
- Starting price: $49 per month (Lite); annual billing saves 30 percent
- Free plan: No
- Free trial: 14 days with all features and integrations, limited to 60-minute sessions and 10 live attendees
- Founded: 2015, HQ: Oakland, California, United States, Ownership: Privately held, founder-led
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/crowdcast

## Overview

Crowdcast has been running live events in the browser since 2015 and has hosted more than ten million attendees, but it never became a corporate webinar tool and it never tried to. Its centre of gravity is creators, authors, educators, and community organizers: the people running a paid workshop series, a book launch, an office-hours call for a membership, or a recurring community show. The product reflects that audience. The room is designed to look like a place people gather rather than a broadcast a vendor is aiming at leads, and ticketing is built in rather than bolted on.

Two structural choices separate it from the rest of this category. First, ticketing is native: connect Stripe and sell tickets to your event directly, with Crowdcast taking a transaction fee that falls from five percent on the entry plan to two percent on Business. No competitor in the mainstream webinar tier does this properly, which is why Crowdcast keeps showing up in the same shortlist as Luma and Eventbrite even though it is a live streaming platform rather than a ticketing platform.

Second, and more importantly for anyone who has been burned by a webinar tool, Crowdcast does not slam the door when you exceed your plan. Every tier bundles a live-attendee number and a monthly streaming-hours allowance, and going over costs 15 cents per additional live attendee and 20 dollars per additional five hours. Demio and WebinarJam hard-lock the room, Livestorm blocks joiners mid-session, and GoTo Webinar refuses entry past the cap. Crowdcast bills you instead. For a small business whose attendance is unpredictable, that difference is worth more than any feature on the comparison chart.

The tradeoff is scale and vendor weight. Crowdcast raised only a small seed round in 2015 and has run as a small independent company out of Oakland ever since. That has kept it focused and kept the product genuinely pleasant, but it also means no SOC 2 marketing, no enterprise procurement motion, no SSO, and a top published tier of 1,000 live attendees with 40 hours a month. If you are a compliance-gated enterprise buyer, this is not your platform. If you are a creator or a small business selling access to live sessions, it is one of the few tools that understands what you are actually doing.

## How it works

1. You create an event and choose whether it is free or ticketed. Ticketed events connect to your Stripe account, so payment goes to you directly and Crowdcast takes its transaction percentage rather than holding your money.

2. Crowdcast generates a registration page for the event. Multi-session events let one registration cover a whole series, which is the right shape for a five-week workshop or a recurring community call, and followers of your channel are notified when you schedule something new.

3. Before going live, hosts and guests gather in the Gallery, a green room where you can check audio and video and get ready without the audience watching. At showtime you go live into the stage, which supports custom backgrounds, logos, overlays, slide sharing, and video playback, or you can push a professional feed in over RTMP from OBS, Wirecast, or Ecamm Live.

4. During the session the audience uses live chat, Q and A with upvoting, polls, and reactions in the same browser tab with nothing installed. Questions are timestamped against the recording, which is a small feature with an outsized effect: after the event, a viewer can jump straight to the answer to a specific question.

5. The recording is available as an instant replay immediately after the event, on the same page attendees already have. Analytics cover registration, attendance, watch time, chat and Q and A activity, and ticket revenue, and export to CSV or push out through Zapier into whatever email or CRM system runs your follow-up.

## 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.

## Not the right fit for

- Enterprise buyers with procurement checklists; there is no SSO, no published SOC 2 report, no data residency choice, and no enterprise sales motion, so a security review will stall.
- Marketing teams that need deep CRM sync; Crowdcast pushes data through Zapier and CSV rather than through native Salesforce or Marketo objects, so attendance-driven lead scoring means building the plumbing yourself.
- Anyone whose primary goal is an evergreen sales funnel; there is no just-in-time scheduling, no chat simulator, and no timed offer boxes, so EverWebinar or eWebinar will out-convert it by a wide margin.
- Events above a thousand live attendees; the published ceiling stops there, and organizations running multi-thousand-person conferences with tracks and expo halls are outside what this product is built to do.
- Teams that need long sessions on a cheap plan; Lite caps a single session at two hours and the whole month at ten, which is a genuine constraint for anyone running a full-day workshop.

## Features

### The live room

Browser-based for everyone, with real production options underneath.

- **No-download attendance**: Attendees join in a browser tab with nothing to install, which matters enormously when your audience is the general public rather than an IT-managed workforce.
- **Customisable stage**: Backgrounds, logos, and branding that adapt to what is on screen, so a workshop looks like your workshop rather than a vendor's template.
- **Gallery green room**: Hosts and guests gather off-air to check audio and video before going live, which is the single most useful pre-flight feature a live platform can have.
- **Slide and screen sharing**: Present a deck or share a screen from within the browser session without a separate application.
- **Video playback into the session**: Play pre-recorded video clips into the live room, so a demo or a testimonial reel does not depend on your bandwidth holding.
- **Multiple hosts and guests on stage**: Bring co-hosts and guests into the broadcast and move audience members up to the stage during the session.
- **RTMP ingest**: Push a feed in from OBS, Wirecast, or Ecamm Live when you want full production control, which is how the more polished Crowdcast shows are made.

### Ticketing and monetization

The feature that puts Crowdcast in a category of its own among webinar tools.

- **Native Stripe ticketing**: Sell tickets to an event directly from the registration page with your own Stripe account, so revenue lands with you rather than sitting in a vendor's balance.
- **Transaction fee that falls with plan**: Crowdcast takes five percent of ticket revenue on Lite and Pro, dropping to two percent on Business, which is one of the more concrete reasons to upgrade.
- **Free and paid events in one account**: Run free community sessions and paid workshops from the same channel without maintaining two systems.
- **Patreon integration**: Gate events to Patreon supporters, which is a niche capability that no conventional webinar platform offers and that a large slice of the creator market needs.
- **Multi-session ticketing**: One purchase covers a series of sessions, which is exactly how a paid multi-week course should be sold rather than as five separate transactions.

### Audience engagement

Community-shaped rather than lead-capture-shaped.

- **Live chat**: Persistent chat in the room that carries over onto the replay page, so the conversation outlives the session.
- **Q and A with timestamps**: Questions are recorded against the point in the video where they were answered, so a replay viewer can jump straight to the answer they care about.
- **Question upvoting**: The audience surfaces the questions it most wants answered rather than the host guessing from a flat queue.
- **Live polls**: Run polls during the session with results shown to the room and captured in the event analytics.
- **Channel followers**: People can follow your Crowdcast channel and be notified of new events, which builds a reusable audience rather than a per-event registration list.
- **Call to action**: Push a link or offer into the room during the session to drive attendees somewhere specific while attention is high.

### Recording, replay, and distribution

Replay is immediate and lives where the audience already is.

- **Instant replay**: The recording is available on the event page the moment the session ends, on the same link attendees already have, with the chat and Q and A intact.
- **HD recording and Studio storage**: Recordings are stored in the Crowdcast Studio, with storage allocated per plan from 1 GB on Lite to 10 GB on Business.
- **Multistreaming**: Broadcast simultaneously to YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and Twitch. Lite includes none, Pro includes one destination, Business includes three.
- **Downloadable recordings**: Pull the recording down for editing or hosting elsewhere rather than being locked into the platform's player.
- **Replay-page engagement**: Replay viewers can still chat and ask questions on the event page, so an event keeps generating conversation after it has ended.

### Data, integrations, and administration

Adequate for a small team, thin for a marketing operations function.

- **Event analytics**: Registration, attendance, watch time, chat and Q and A activity, and ticket revenue per event.
- **CSV export**: Full registrant and attendee export for handoff into your email platform or CRM.
- **Zapier**: The main integration path, connecting registrations and attendance to email tools, CRMs, and spreadsheets. There are no deep native CRM objects.
- **Team seats**: One seat on Lite, two on Pro, four on Business, so a co-hosted show or a small production team is accounted for without buying extra subscriptions.
- **Stripe connection**: Direct Stripe integration for ticketing means payouts follow your existing Stripe schedule and reconciliation.

## Use cases

- **Educator selling a five-week live workshop**: Forty people pay for a course delivered as five live sessions, and juggling a webinar tool, a checkout, and a replay host has been three separate problems. Outcome: A multi-session event sells one ticket covering all five dates through Stripe, each session records to an instant replay on the same page, and the transaction fee is the only variable cost.
- **Author running a book launch livestream**: Attendance could be eighty people or eight hundred depending on whether a newsletter mention lands, and a hard room cap would mean turning readers away on the one night that matters. Outcome: Overage billing at 15 cents per extra live attendee means an unexpectedly big night costs money instead of costing readers, and multistreaming pushes the launch to YouTube for people who never registered.
- **Membership community running weekly office hours**: Members expect a recurring call, and access should be tied to their Patreon support rather than managed by hand each week. Outcome: Patreon gating handles access automatically, channel followers get notified of each new session, and the timestamped Q and A archive becomes a searchable resource for members who missed the call.
- **Small consultancy running paid public masterclasses**: The firm wants to sell seats to a monthly masterclass and keep the recordings as an evergreen asset, without paying for enterprise webinar software. Outcome: Pro at 89 dollars a month covers 250 live attendees, 20 hours, and one multistream destination, tickets sell through Stripe at a two-to-five percent fee, and replays stay available on the event page.

## Pricing

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 per month. 100 live attendees included; 10 streaming hours per month; 2-hour maximum session length; 1 team seat and 1 GB Studio storage; 5 percent ticket transaction fee. No multistreaming, and the two-hour session cap rules out full-day workshops. Fine for a recurring hour-long community call.
- **Pro**: $89 per month. 250 live attendees included; 20 streaming hours per month; 4-hour maximum session length; 2 team seats and 5 GB Studio storage; 1 multistream destination. The tier most working creators land on. Still a 5 percent ticket fee.
- **Business**: $195 per month. 1,000 live attendees included; 40 streaming hours per month; 6-hour maximum session length; 4 team seats and 10 GB Studio storage; 3 multistream destinations and a 2 percent ticket fee. The drop from a 5 percent to a 2 percent ticket fee can pay for the upgrade on its own if you sell meaningful ticket volume.

Add-ons:

- Additional live attendees ($0.15 per attendee): Charged as overage rather than blocking entry, which is the structural advantage over most of this category.
- Additional streaming hours ($20 per additional 5 hours): Applies when you exceed the monthly hours bundled with your plan.

Billing notes:

- Annual billing saves 30 percent across all three tiers, which is a steeper discount than most competitors offer.
- Exceeding your live-attendee allowance costs 15 cents per extra attendee rather than locking people out. Demio and WebinarJam hard-lock the room, Livestorm blocks joiners mid-session, and GoTo Webinar refuses entry at the cap. Crowdcast is the one that bills you instead, which is the single most useful thing about its pricing model.
- Streaming hours are metered monthly and shared across all events, so a plan is really a monthly airtime budget rather than an unlimited room.
- Maximum session length is capped per tier at two, four, and six hours, which is separate from and stricter than the monthly hours allowance.
- Ticket transaction fees are five percent on Lite and Pro and two percent on Business, on top of Stripe's own processing charge. On 10,000 dollars of ticket sales, moving from Pro to Business saves 300 dollars a month in fees against a 106-dollar price increase.
- Studio storage is allocated per plan from 1 GB to 10 GB, so a heavy recording archive eventually needs downloading and hosting elsewhere.

Value assessment: 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.

## 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.
- RTMP ingest means you can escalate from a browser broadcast to a full OBS or Ecamm production without changing platforms.
- Patreon gating and channel followers make it a genuine community tool rather than a lead-capture funnel with a chat panel.
- Small independent vendor with a decade of continuous operation and a clear, unchanged focus, which shows in how coherent the product is.

## 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.
- The published ceiling is 1,000 live attendees, so genuinely large events need a different platform.
- No evergreen or automated webinar mode at all, so a recorded session cannot be scheduled to replay as a live-feeling event.
- Studio storage is small, from 1 GB to 10 GB, meaning a long-running channel will be downloading and archiving recordings elsewhere fairly soon.

## Comparisons

- **Crowdcast vs 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.
- **Crowdcast vs Livestorm**: Both are browser-based and both refuse to make attendees install anything. Livestorm is the more polished B2B tool with better CRM integration and a billing model based on actual attendance. Crowdcast is the creator tool with native ticketing, Patreon gating, and overage rather than a lock-out. A marketing team should take Livestorm; a person selling seats to their own live workshop should take Crowdcast.
- **Crowdcast vs 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.
- **Crowdcast vs 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.
- **Crowdcast vs Eventbrite**: Eventbrite is a ticketing marketplace with genuine discovery: people browse it and find events they did not know about. Crowdcast is a streaming platform that happens to sell tickets, with no marketplace at all. Eventbrite takes 3.7 percent plus 1.79 dollars per ticket and charges nothing to publish free events; Crowdcast charges a monthly subscription plus two to five percent. If discovery and physical events matter, Eventbrite. If the event is online and the room quality matters, Crowdcast.

## Implementation

- 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.
- 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.
- Onboarding: Entirely self-serve through the 14-day trial, which runs all features but caps sessions at 60 minutes and 10 live attendees. No sales call is required at any tier.
- Migration: Registrant lists import by CSV and Zapier can push signups in from your existing forms. Recordings from other platforms cannot be brought into the Crowdcast Studio as native events, so a back catalogue stays where it is. Leaving is straightforward because recordings download and attendee data exports, but the event pages, chat archives, and timestamped Q and A do not travel.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Browser-based for hosts and attendees on desktop and mobile, RTMP ingest from OBS, Wirecast, and Ecamm Live
- API: No broadly documented public REST API; integration runs through Zapier, CSV export, and the Stripe connection.
- Compliance: GDPR handling for registrant data, PCI handled by Stripe for ticketing, No public SOC 2 report advertised
- Data residency: Not offered as a selectable option; the company states it operates from the United States.
- SSO: Not available on any published plan.
- Security notes: Encryption in transit and Stripe-managed payment handling, so card data never sits with Crowdcast. There is no published trust centre or independent audit report, which is a real limitation for regulated buyers and a non-issue for the creator audience the product is aimed at.

## Support

- Channels: Email support, Live chat, Knowledge base
- Documentation: A practical help centre covering event setup, ticketing, Stripe connection, RTMP ingest, multistreaming, and Studio storage.
- Community: An active creator and educator user base with substantial third-party material on running paid workshops and community events; no large official forum.

## Company

- Founded: 2015
- Founders: Sai Hossain
- Headquarters: Oakland, California, United States
- Ownership: Privately held, founder-led
- Employees: Small team; headcount not disclosed
- Funding: Minimal outside capital. Crowdcast raised a small seed round of roughly 120,000 dollars in 2015 from investors including Arena Ventures and Hack VC, and has operated as an independent business since.

Funding history:

- Seed (2015): ~$120K. Small early round from Arena Ventures, Hack VC, and others; no significant subsequent funding disclosed.

Timeline:

- 2015: Founded in Oakland by Sai Hossain as a browser-based live event platform aimed at creators rather than corporate marketing departments.
- 2017: Native Stripe ticketing and multi-session events arrive, making paid workshop series a first-class use case rather than a workaround.
- 2020: Usage surges through the shift to remote events as educators, authors, and communities move live programming online.
- 2021: RTMP ingest and multistreaming expand the production ceiling, letting hosts push OBS and Ecamm feeds into a Crowdcast room and out to YouTube and Facebook.
- 2023: The Studio, custom stage branding, and the Gallery green room modernise the hosting experience; cumulative attendance passes ten million.
- 2026: Pricing sits at three tiers with bundled attendees and streaming hours, metered overage at 15 cents per attendee and 20 dollars per five hours, and ticket fees of five percent falling to two percent on Business.

## Integrations

Stripe (native ticketing), Patreon (supporter-gated events), YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and Twitch (multistreaming), OBS, Wirecast, and Ecamm Live via RTMP, Zapier, CSV import and export of registrants and attendees, Email platforms via Zapier, Embeddable event pages

## FAQ

### What is Crowdcast?

Crowdcast is a browser-based live webinar and virtual event platform aimed at creators, educators, and communities. It combines a no-download event room with native Stripe ticketing, live chat, Q and A with timestamps, polls, slide and screen sharing, RTMP ingest from OBS, multistreaming to YouTube and Facebook, and an instant replay page. It has hosted more than ten million attendees since 2015.

### How much does Crowdcast cost?

Three tiers billed monthly, with 30 percent off for annual billing. Lite is 49 dollars for 100 live attendees, 10 streaming hours, and 2-hour sessions. Pro is 89 dollars for 250 attendees, 20 hours, 4-hour sessions, and one multistream destination. Business is 195 dollars for 1,000 attendees, 40 hours, 6-hour sessions, three multistreams, and a reduced ticket fee. A 14-day trial runs all features at 10 attendees and 60 minutes.

### What happens if more people show up than my plan includes?

You get billed, not locked out. Extra live attendees cost 15 cents each and extra streaming time costs 20 dollars per additional five hours. This is the single most important structural difference between Crowdcast and the rest of the category: Demio and WebinarJam hard-lock the room, Livestorm blocks joiners mid-session, and GoTo Webinar refuses entry at the cap. If your attendance is unpredictable, that failure mode is worth more than most features.

### What does a 500-registrant webinar cost on Crowdcast?

Registration is not capped, only concurrent live attendance is. At a typical 40 percent show rate, 500 registrants produce roughly 200 live attendees, which fits inside Pro at 89 dollars a month. If all 500 turned up on Pro, the extra 250 attendees would cost 37.50 dollars in overage, for about 127 dollars total rather than a locked door. On Business at 195 dollars, all 500 fit inside the included allowance with no overage at all.

### Do attendees have to install anything?

No. Crowdcast runs entirely in a browser tab for both hosts and attendees, on desktop and mobile. That is essential for its audience, because creators are inviting the general public rather than an IT-managed workforce, and any download requirement would visibly cut attendance.

### Can I sell tickets to a Crowdcast event?

Yes, and this is one of its main differentiators. Connect your own Stripe account and sell tickets directly from the event page, including one ticket covering a multi-session series. Crowdcast takes five percent of ticket revenue on Lite and Pro and two percent on Business, on top of Stripe's processing fee. Payment goes to your Stripe balance, not to Crowdcast. Patreon gating is also supported for supporter-only events.

### Does Crowdcast handle recording and replay?

Recording is automatic and the replay appears instantly on the same event page attendees already have, with the chat and the timestamped Q and A preserved. Replay viewers can still comment and ask questions. Recordings are stored in the Studio with 1 GB on Lite, 5 GB on Pro, and 10 GB on Business, and can be downloaded for editing or hosting elsewhere when the allowance runs out.

### Can Crowdcast simulcast to YouTube and LinkedIn?

It multistreams to YouTube Live, Facebook Live, and Twitch. Lite includes no multistream destinations, Pro includes one, and Business includes three. LinkedIn is not among the advertised destinations, so if simulcasting to LinkedIn specifically is a requirement, Restream or StreamYard cover a broader destination list.

### Does Crowdcast integrate with a CRM?

Only lightly. There are no native Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo objects. Registration and attendance data reaches other systems through Zapier or CSV export, which is enough for a creator pushing signups into an email list and not enough for a marketing operations team that wants attendance-driven lead scoring. That gap is the clearest reason a B2B team would choose Livestorm or GoTo Webinar instead.

### Can Crowdcast run automated or evergreen webinars?

No. Crowdcast is a live event platform. Recordings become replay pages, but there is no mode that schedules a recording to play as a live-feeling event and no just-in-time registration path. If an evergreen funnel is what you need, EverWebinar, eWebinar, or the automated tiers of Demio, ClickMeeting, and EasyWebinar are the right tools.

## Editorial verdict

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.

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Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology