GoTo Webinar

1. 1

   You schedule a webinar as a standard live event, a series, a recurring session, a simulated live event that plays a recording on a schedule, or an on-demand recording that starts when someone registers. GoTo generates a registration page with configurable fields, an approval mode if you want to vet registrants, and a confirmation email.

2. 2

   Automated reminder emails go out on a schedule you set before the session. This sequence is the main determinant of your show rate, and GoTo's version is functional rather than sophisticated: templated emails, no SMS, and no behavioural branching of the kind EverWebinar or Demio offer.

3. 3

   At session time, organizers and panelists run the event from a desktop application that gives full control over slides, screen sharing, webcams, and video. Attendees can join from a browser without installing anything, though the desktop app is still the better experience for presenters and remains the environment GoTo's presenter features are designed around.

4. 4

   During the session you run polls and surveys, distribute handouts, take questions in a moderated Q and A queue, watch the attention indicator for people who have switched tabs, and optionally simulcast the event out to a public audience. Everything is recorded to unlimited cloud storage.

5. 5

   Afterwards, the recording becomes a replay or an on-demand event, an included video editor trims it, and reports covering registration, attendance, engagement, poll answers, and survey responses push into Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and the rest of the connector list so lead follow-up runs in the systems you already own.

Per-organizer subscription across four tiers whose primary difference is the attendee ceiling. Feature differences between tiers are modest, so you are mostly buying room size.

Value assessment: GoTo Webinar is priced for audiences, not for teams. At 99 dollars a month for a 500-seat room with unlimited recording, marketing automation connectors, and a bundled meeting product, it is competitive with anything at that capacity and cheaper than Zoom Webinars once you climb past a few hundred attendees. At 49 dollars for a 250-seat room it is poor value for a small business that draws forty people, because there is no smaller, cheaper room to buy and no discount for using a fraction of it. The per-organizer model compounds this: three presenters who each need to host means three licences. Buy it when your audience is genuinely large and your marketing operations already run on Salesforce or Marketo; look elsewhere when your webinars are intimate or your team is multi-presenter.

Setup time

An hour for a first webinar. Scheduling, branding the registration page, and configuring the reminder sequence are straightforward. Wiring a CRM connector properly, especially Marketo or Salesforce field mapping, is a half-day job for someone who knows the target system.

Learning curve

Low for attendees, moderate for organizers. The desktop presenter console carries two decades of accumulated options and the first dry run will surface several settings you did not know existed. Run a practice session before your first real event; the platform supports practice mode specifically for this.

Onboarding

Self-serve purchase and setup on every tier, with no sales call required to buy. Documentation is extensive and there is a large body of third-party training material. Enterprise adds priority support and admin centre configuration help.

Migration notes

Registrant lists import by CSV and the API allows bulk registration from your own systems. Recordings from other platforms have to be uploaded manually if you want them in the GoTo library. Leaving is straightforward because attendee reports and recordings export cleanly, but registration pages, reminder templates, and CRM field mappings all have to be rebuilt in the destination.

Platforms

Windows and macOS desktop applications for organizers and panelistsBrowser-based attendance with no download requirediOS and Android apps for attendeesWeb administration and scheduling

API

Documented public REST API for creating and managing webinars, registrants, sessions, and reports, plus webhooks and OAuth authentication through the GoTo developer platform.

Compliance

SOC 2GDPRHIPAA-supporting configurations available through GoToISO 27001 within the GoTo platform

Data residency

GoTo operates regional data centres and offers data residency options within its enterprise platform.

SSO

SAML-based single sign-on through the GoTo admin centre.

Security notes

Encryption in transit, organizer authentication controls, registrant approval workflows, and central administration across the GoTo product family. GoTo publishes a trust and security portal and a public status page covering all its services.

Channels

24/7 support on paid plansPhone supportLive chatEmail and ticketingPriority support on Enterprise

Documentation

Extensive product documentation and a large help centre at support.goto.com covering organizer, panelist, and attendee workflows plus the developer API.

Community

An official GoTo community forum plus a very large body of third-party tutorials and agency expertise built up over two decades of market presence.

Founded

2003

Headquarters

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Ownership

Private equity owned (Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital, the private equity affiliate of Elliott Management)

Employees

Approximately 3,000 across the GoTo product family

Funding

Formerly public as LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM); taken private in a 4.3 billion dollar transaction by Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital that closed in August 2020.

GoTo Webinar is the safe, unexciting, operationally excellent choice for large conventional webinars. Unlimited recording on every tier, the deepest marketing automation connectors in the category, a real API, SSO, a bundled meeting product, and twenty years of running thousand-person sessions without incident are all genuine reasons to buy it. The costs are equally clear: a dated presenter console, a 250-attendee floor that forces small teams to overbuy, per-organizer licensing that punishes multi-presenter teams, email-only reminders, and a hard attendee cap that turns real registrants away when you underestimate a session. If your audiences are in the hundreds or thousands and your marketing operations run on Salesforce or Marketo, this is still the right answer. If your webinars draw forty people and you care how the room looks, Demio, Livestorm, or Zoho Webinar will serve you better for less.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.