Straight answer: yes, you can run a good webinar using Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, tools most businesses already pay for, and for the first 50 to 100 attendees you probably don’t need dedicated webinar software at all. What you need instead is a registration page, a run-of-show, and the discipline to mute people on time.
The question people are really asking
Nobody asks me this because they’re curious about software. They ask because someone in a marketing forum told them webinars need a “real platform” that costs £99 a month, and they’re trying to work out if that’s true before they spend money they don’t have to spend.
I ran my first 40 webinars entirely on Zoom’s standard Pro plan. No webinar add-on, no ON24, no WebinarJam. I only bought a proper webinar tool once I was regularly getting 300+ registrants and needed the reporting to stop being a spreadsheet nightmare. Before that point, the everyday tool did the job fine, and I was leaving money on the table by not running more of them, not by using the “wrong” software.
What Zoom, Google Meet and Teams each give you
These three are not identical, so it matters which one you already pay for.
- Zoom Pro (around £13.99/month per host) gives you up to 100 participants, unlimited meeting length, screen share, breakout rooms, cloud recording, and a waiting room. The free tier caps group calls at 40 minutes, which catches people out constantly, so if you’re on free Zoom, that 40-minute wall is the first thing to fix.
- Google Meet through a Google Workspace Business Standard plan (about £11/month per user) supports up to 150 participants, live captions, and recording to Drive. It’s cleaner and faster to join than Zoom for attendees who hate downloading apps, which matters more than people admit.
- Microsoft Teams on a Business Standard licence now includes a genuine Teams Webinars feature with registration pages, a green room, and attendee reporting, built in rather than bolted on, which is the one exception to “everyday tools aren’t built for this.”
None of these three ships with a native registration page for external, non-logged-in attendees the way a dedicated webinar platform does (Teams being the newest exception). That’s the one real gap, and it’s solvable in under an hour.
Step by step: running a proper webinar on Zoom with no extra software
This is the exact setup I used for years, and still use for smaller sessions:
- Step 1, build a free registration page in a form tool you already have (Google Forms, or your email platform’s landing page builder). Collect name, email, and one qualifying question.
- Step 2, set your Zoom meeting to “require registration” or, if using a simple link, send the same Zoom link only to people who filled in your form, via an automated email.
- Step 3, turn on the waiting room, so nobody joins before you’re ready, and set “mute participants on entry” as default. Forgetting this once, on a 220-person call, taught me that lesson permanently.
- Step 4, use “spotlight” on your own video so you’re the fixed image attendees see, not whoever’s cat walks across their camera.
- Step 5, record to the cloud automatically, then send the replay link within two hours while people still remember signing up.
- Step 6, use the chat panel as your Q and A tool. It’s not elegant, but it works, and most attendees never notice it isn’t a “proper” webinar Q and A widget.
That’s the whole build. No developer, no new subscription, roughly 45 minutes of setup the first time and 10 minutes every time after.
The part other guides skip
Here’s the uncomfortable bit nobody in the webinar software industry wants said out loud: most of the “engagement features” that dedicated platforms sell you, live polls, interactive handouts, virtual booths, animated attendee counters, do almost nothing for your actual conversion rate. I’ve run the same offer through a bare Zoom call and through a fully loaded webinar platform with all the bells on, and the show-up rate and the sales at the end moved less than 3 percent between them. What moved the needle was the subject line on my reminder email, the specificity of my promise in the registration page, and whether I delivered value in the first ten minutes instead of pitching immediately. The platform was never the bottleneck. It’s an easy thing to sell people because “you need better software” feels like a fixable problem, and “your content and your offer aren’t good enough yet” doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean the extra spend is never worth it. It means most people buy the upgrade before they’ve proven they need it, which is backwards.
When everyday tools aren’t enough
There’s a real ceiling, and you should know where it is before you hit it:
- Zoom Pro tops out at 100 attendees on a standard meeting; beyond that you need the Zoom Webinars add-on (from roughly £69/month) or a jump to Zoom’s webinar-specific tier.
- None of the everyday tools give you built-in automated evergreen replay funnels, so if your whole business model is “sell through automated webinar sequences,” a platform like WebinarJam or Demio earns its cost quickly.
- If you need registrants segmented by source, UTM-tracked, and fed straight into a CRM with no manual export, a dedicated platform saves real hours every week once volume goes up.
- If your brand is on the scale of Zoom itself, worth reading how they built recognition through their own Zoom marketing strategy, then production polish starts to matter more, because audience expectations are higher.
Under those thresholds, spending on extra software before you’ve run ten webinars on the free stuff is money spent solving a problem you don’t have yet.
The bit international audiences trip over
If you’re running sessions for a non-English-speaking or mixed-language audience, the tool matters less than your registration copy and your host script. I’ve had Israeli and Spanish-speaking clients ask about wording and terminology before they even chose a platform, which is worth sorting first, and I go into exactly what phrasing works in my piece on how to say webinar in Spanish for international audiences. Get that right, and Zoom or Meet will carry the session just fine in any language, since the interface itself is already localised.
What breaks first-time webinar hosts
It’s rarely the software. In fifteen years of running these, the things that go wrong are: forgetting to unmute yourself before you start talking (happens to everyone once), running over on your promised time so attendees drop off before the pitch, not testing screen share with the specific slide deck you’ll use that day, and sending the joining link so late that half your registrants never open the email. Fix those four things and you’ll outperform someone with a £300-a-month webinar platform and none of that discipline.
A simple way to decide
If you’re running fewer than four webinars a month, under 150 attendees each, and you don’t need automated evergreen funnels, stick with the video call tool you already pay for. If you’re past that, or your business model depends on webinars as the primary sales engine, that’s the point to look at dedicated software, or bring in outside help to build the whole funnel, which is the kind of setup work I cover with clients through hands-on implementation coaching when the whole marketing system, not just the call tool, needs rebuilding.
Frequently asked questions
Can you run a webinar on the free version of Zoom?
Yes, but the free tier cuts group calls off at 40 minutes, which is too short for most webinars, so most hosts move to Zoom Pro at around £13.99 a month once they’re running these regularly.
Do Google Meet or Teams have a proper registration page for webinars?
Google Meet does not include a built-in external registration page, so you need a separate form; Microsoft Teams now includes one natively through its Teams Webinars feature on Business Standard licences.
How many people can you have on a Zoom or Teams webinar without upgrading?
Zoom Pro supports up to 100 participants and Google Meet Business Standard supports up to 150, both without buying a dedicated webinar add-on.
Is dedicated webinar software worth the extra cost?
Only once you’re past roughly 100 to 150 attendees regularly, running automated evergreen webinar funnels, or need CRM-integrated registrant data at scale, below that threshold the extra features rarely move your conversion rate.
