The short version: you can host a perfectly good webinar with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet, and the tool you pick matters far less than your registration page, your reminder emails, and what you say for the first three minutes. Most people spend three weeks agonising over which platform has the fanciest polls and about three hours on the thing that drives attendance. Fix that order and you’re already ahead of most webinars I’ve sat through this year.
What “hosting a webinar” involves before you touch any software
Before you open Zoom or Teams, you need four things sorted: a topic tight enough to promise in one sentence, a registration page, a date at least two weeks out, and a plan for what happens after the webinar ends. Skip any of these and no video tool on earth will save you. I say this because I’ve watched clients pick a webinar platform, get the tech flawless, and then have 11 people show up because they only started promoting it four days before.
The word “webinar” itself confuses people more than you’d think, and if you want the background on where the term came from and why it still matters for how you frame your invite, I wrote about that in the origin of the word webinar. It’s not just trivia. How you describe the format in your subject line changes your open rate.
Hosting on Zoom: the default choice for most small businesses
Zoom is still what most people mean when they say “let’s do a webinar,” and for good reason. A Zoom Pro account costs £13.99 a month and gets you meetings for up to 100 people with no time limit. If you need proper webinar features (registration pages, a Q&A panel separate from chat, practice sessions before you go live), you need the Zoom Webinars add-on, which starts at roughly £62 a month for 500 attendees on top of a Pro or Business plan.
Here’s the actual step-by-step for setting one up:
- Go to zoom.us, sign into your account, and select “Webinars” from the left menu (this only shows up if you’ve bought the add-on)
- Click “Schedule a Webinar,” set your topic, date, and duration
- Turn on “Registration Required” so you capture names and emails before anyone can join
- Under “Q&A,” decide whether attendees can see other people’s questions or only submit them privately to you
- Assign a co-host or panelist if someone else is helping run chat or tech support during the session
- Send yourself a test registration link and click through the whole flow as if you were a stranger, because I promise you’ll spot at least one broken field
- Set your reminder emails to go out at one week, one day, and one hour before the start
If you’re new to Zoom’s webinar mode specifically and want the difference between a regular meeting and a proper webinar spelled out, I’ve covered what “webinar” means when you’re hosting on Zoom and I’ve also written a full click by click walkthrough of hosting a webinar on Zoom if you want every setting explained.
Hosting on Microsoft Teams
If your business already runs on Microsoft 365, Teams webinars are worth using before you pay for a separate tool. Teams webinars are included in Microsoft 365 Business Standard (£10.60 per user per month) and in most E3 and E5 enterprise plans, no extra add-on needed, which is the one genuine cost advantage Teams has over Zoom.
To set one up: open Teams, go to Calendar, click the dropdown next to “New meeting” and choose “Webinar.” You’ll get a registration form builder right there, with options to require approval for each registrant, which is useful if you’re running something for paying clients only and don’t want randoms signing up. Teams also lets you cap attendee numbers and export the registration list straight to Excel, which I find faster than Zoom’s CSV export when I’m handing a list to a sales team the same day.
The weak spot is the presenter view. Teams’ green room and rehearsal tools are less polished than Zoom’s, and if you’re running a webinar with multiple speakers who’ve never used Teams before, budget an extra 20 minutes for a proper tech rehearsal the day before. I’ve had co-presenters unable to find the “share screen” button live on air, and that dead air is worse than any tool cost you’re trying to save.
Hosting on Google Meet
Google Meet is the cheapest route if your audience is small and internal, or if you’re doing something closer to a live workshop than a marketing webinar. It’s included free with a personal Google account for meetings up to 60 minutes and 100 people, and Google Workspace Business Standard (£10.40 per user per month) extends that to 150 participants with recording and attendance tracking built in.
What Meet doesn’t have, and this catches people out, is a true webinar mode with a separate registration page and Q&A queue. You’re running a meeting, not a webinar, and everyone on the call can technically unmute and talk unless you lock that down manually in the settings each time. For anything public-facing with more than 30 or 40 people, I’d steer you toward Zoom or Teams instead and save Meet for internal training sessions.
A webinar I hosted that went sideways, and what it taught me
A few years back I ran a webinar for around 300 registrants on social media measurement, similar in shape to the one I later did for Simplilearn on measuring social media success. Everything was booked, the slides were ready, the Zoom webinar link had gone out three times. Ten minutes before we went live, my internet dropped. Not a slow connection, a full drop, router dead, nothing.
I ended up dialling into the webinar from my phone on 4G while my husband physically restarted the router in the next room, and for about six minutes I ran the entire session narrating slides I couldn’t see on a phone screen. Nobody in the chat even mentioned it. Attendees stayed. The recording afterwards, when I watched it back, sounded completely normal.
What that taught me is that your backup plan matters more than your primary setup. I now always have a phone with the Zoom app installed and logged in as a backup host, a mobile hotspot ready to go, and a co-host who has full permissions to take over instantly if I vanish. None of that is in most “how to host a webinar” guides, because most of them are written by people who’ve hosted three webinars, not three hundred.
The attendance number nobody puts in the promotional emails
Here’s the bit that gets glossed over. Whatever platform you use, expect somewhere between 35% and 45% of registrants to show up live. If 300 people register, plan your run of show for roughly 120 to 135 attendees, not 300. I’ve seen this ratio hold fairly steady across Zoom, Teams, and Meet webinars I’ve run or watched clients run over the last few years, and it doesn’t move much no matter how good your reminder emails are.
This matters because people obsess over which platform has the prettiest interface when the platform has almost no effect on that show-up rate. What moves the number is the specificity of your promise (a session called “5 Ways to Grow Your List” beats “Marketing Trends for 2026” every time), the day of the week (Tuesday and Wednesday consistently outperform Monday and Friday in my experience), and whether you send that one-hour-before reminder, which alone can lift attendance by several percentage points. Chase those three things before you chase a fourth video tool with slightly better polls.
Running it for an international or non-English audience
If part of your list is Spanish-speaking, or you’re running the same content across regions, don’t just auto-translate your invite and call it done. Small wording choices change how people read the invitation entirely, and I’ve written specifically about how to say webinar in Spanish and what works for international audiences, because a literal translation can sound stiff or overly formal depending on the region. Zoom, Teams, and Meet all support multiple language captions now, which is worth switching on if even 10 or 15 percent of your registrants list a non-English first language.
Choosing between them: a quick honest comparison
- Zoom – best all-rounder, strongest webinar-specific features, but the webinar add-on is a real extra cost on top of your base plan
- Microsoft Teams – best value if you’re already paying for Microsoft 365, decent registration tools, weaker rehearsal and presenter features
- Google Meet – cheapest and simplest, but not built for public webinars over roughly 40 attendees, better used for internal sessions
None of these choices will save a webinar with a weak topic or a badly written invite. And if the idea of setting up the whole registration-to-follow-up sequence feels like more than you want to build yourself, that’s the exact kind of practical setup work an AI implementation coach can build with you once, rather than you rebuilding it from scratch every quarter.
What happens after the webinar matters more than the webinar
Record every session, no exceptions, even internal ones. Send the recording out within 24 hours to everyone who registered, including the 60% who didn’t show up live, with a short note pointing to the one key takeaway. That single follow-up email regularly gets more clicks than the live event did, because people who registered but missed it are often more motivated buyers, not less. I’ve seen replay emails outperform the original invite’s click rate by a wide margin more than once, and it’s the single most skipped step in every “how to host a webinar” checklist I’ve read.
Frequently asked questions
Which video tool is best for a first-time webinar host?
Zoom, because its registration and Q&A features are built specifically for webinars rather than adapted from meeting software, and most attendees already know how to use it without instructions.
How many people usually show up compared to how many register?
Expect around 35% to 45% of registrants to attend live, regardless of which platform you use, so plan your content and any giveaways around your likely live audience, not your full registration list.
Do I need a paid plan to host a webinar?
You can run a basic session on a free Google Meet or Zoom account for small groups, but anything with proper registration pages, Q&A management, or over 100 attendees needs a paid plan or webinar add-on, typically £13 to £80 a month depending on the platform and audience size.
What’s the biggest mistake people make when hosting their first webinar?
Spending all their prep time on the software settings and almost none on the registration page copy, the reminder email sequence, or the follow-up, all of which affect attendance and results far more than which video tool you pick.
