When to use Zoom Meetings vs. Zoom Webinars

Thinking of hosting a virtual meet-up but not sure if you should use Zoom Meetings or Zoom Webinars? Both solutions can support a variety of engaging and interactive online events, but there are a few key differences that can help you decide when to use Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars.

Zoom Meetings is ideal for connecting a smaller group of people for two-way discussions and collaboration, with plan options supporting up to 1,000 participants. A centerpiece of Zoom Workplace — our open collaboration platform with AI Companion — Zoom Meetings is best for everyday meet-ups, group collaboration, team meetings, sales demos, online learning and training, and office hours. Meetings can be scheduled or spontaneous, and allow all participants to easily interact with each other and the host, with video and audio controls. While meetings can be recorded and shared, they are typically not reposted for public viewing.

Zoom Webinars is best for presenting to a large audience of up to 1 million attendees and 1,000 panelists. Webinar hosts can control more of the experience — audience members do not have the ability to connect their audio or video (unless promoted by a host/panelist) making the focus on the presenter or panelists. The audience joins to listen and learn; they can ask questions during the event using the Q&A box and interact with other audience members or panelists via chat if the host chooses to enable it. Zoom Webinars provides high-quality video webcasting for large internal and external events, such as company all-hands, city council meetings, product announcements, customer conferences, and concerts.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the features of each solution so you can better understand which one is right for your next online event.

Built into Zoom Workplace, Zoom Meetings is designed to be highly collaborative, allowing participants to share and annotate content, turn their video on or off, brainstorm on whiteboards, and contribute to the conversation. Due to the collaborative nature of virtual meetings, they are best for events where you know all the participants attending. Zoom Workplace Basic and Pro plans can host meetings with up to 100 attendees; you can increase your capacity to 1,000 participants with a Large Meetings add-on.

Here are the key features you can leverage in Zoom Meetings: 

• AI Companion: Your AI assistant on the Zoom Workplace platform, AI Companion* has the capability to generate meeting summaries to help you save time on note-taking. AI Companion can also respond to questions about the meeting discussion in real-time — like “Was my name mentioned?” or “What are the action items so far?”
• Waiting rooms: In addition to requiring a passcode, the host can enable a waiting room to screen participants so only those invited to the event can join.
• Registration: Zoom Meetings users on paid Zoom Workplace plans have the option to schedule their meetings and require that participants register, with the ability to customize your registration page to capture your desired fields.
• Screen sharing: The meeting host can share their desktop, screen, or content and permit attendees to do the same. Zoom’s multi-share feature allows multiple participants to share their screens and documents, whiteboards, and notes simultaneously. When sharing your screen you can also share your computer sound, which is great for playing music and videos.
• Document collaboration: Participants can select documents, streamline document access permissions, and co-edit right in meetings with documents from supported third-party apps. 
• Whiteboarding: You have the option to share an existing whiteboard or brainstorm in a new whiteboard where participants can ideate and annotate. Just like a physical whiteboard in the classroom, you can draw, type, and put stickers on virtual whiteboards. The meeting host can allow participants to co-annotate, meaning they can also contribute to the shared content.
• Breakout rooms: The breakout rooms feature allows you to divide your meeting into as many as 100 separate sessions, creating individual spaces for close collaboration and small-group discussion.
• Reactions: Meeting participants can react during a meeting with an emoji to communicate without interrupting the meeting. The emoji will appear either as floating emojis on the participant’s background or in the corner of the participant’s video. 
• Chat: In-meeting chat lets you chat directly with participants one-on-one or send messages to everyone in the meeting. The meeting host can choose who the participants can chat with or disable chat entirely. Hosts can also turn on continuous meeting chat, which helps users continue chat conversations after or between meetings. 
• Polling: For Zoom Meetings users on a paid Zoom Workplace plan, you can set up and launch up to 25 polls in a single meeting. Launch single-choice or multiple-choice polls to engage with your meeting attendees. 
• Streaming: Zoom Meetings users on paid plans have the ability to stream to YouTube, Facebook Live, or a custom streaming service to expand their audience reach.
• Spotlight speakers: The host or co-host can spotlight up to nine video participants as the primary active speakers, and participants will only see these speakers. This feature is often used to spotlight a keynote speaker or presenter. The host or co-host can also rearrange the order of the gallery view for attendees.
• Multi-speaker view: Multi-speaker view automatically adapts the video layout to highlight active speakers and help attendees follow the discussion more easily. 
• Post-meeting survey: You can set up a survey that will be sent to participants after the meeting. You can create the survey yourself or have your attendees be redirected to a third-party survey solution. 

Check out the latest Zoom Meetings innovations in this brief video. 

Available as an add-on to your paid Zoom Workplace plan, Zoom Webinars allows you to connect and engage with audiences across the globe. You can choose from different plan tiers depending on the size of the audience you’re expecting, up to 100,000 listen-only participants and 1,000 panelists with video and audio. Zoom Webinars provides the same great video and audio quality and reliability of Zoom Meetings for a seamless experience.

Here are key features that will make your online events engaging and impactful when using Zoom Webinars:

• Registration: When scheduling your webinar, you can require registration. Like Zoom Meetings, you can customize your registration page to capture your desired fields. 
• Branding: Customize your webinar registration page with a color scheme, title, banner, logo, and speaker information.
• Source tracking URLs: Within Zoom Webinars, you can create unique links that allow you to see which channels are generating more registrations if you share the webinar registration link on multiple sites. For example, you can share a registration link on Facebook and another on LinkedIn and see how each is performing.
• Q&A: The Q&A feature allows attendees to submit questions during the webinar. The host, co-hosts, and panelists can answer questions as they are submitted or in a dedicated Q&A following the presentation. Additionally, if the host enables it, attendees can answer and upvote other attendees’ questions. After your webinar, you can download the Q&A report and review the questions that were submitted. For example, to provide a more targeted post-webinar follow-up experience, you can review what questions and topics an attendee asked about to inform your follow-up materials.
• Whiteboarding: Access is limited to the panelists when using the whiteboard tool to add/drag notes and annotate. 
• Breakout rooms: Just as you can create breakout rooms in meetings, this feature enables hosts to divide webinar attendees into as many as 200 separate breakout rooms for small-group presentations or discussions featuring different topics. Hosts can split attendees into groups automatically or manually, or they can allow attendees to select a breakout room and enter. Once in a breakout room, attendees have the same audio, video, and screenshare controls as in a Zoom meeting. When the breakout room closes, attendees return to the webinar with view/listen-only settings. 
• Reactions: Emojis in webinars allow attendees to react to the webinar panelists, providing them with the ability to engage even though they do not have video or audio capabilities.
• Chat: Chat capabilities allow the host to send messages just to panelists during the webinar, or to audience members and panelists. As the host, you also have the ability to turn the chat on and off for attendees throughout the event and control whether attendees can speak to each other, panelists, or the host.
• Polling: You can set up and launch up to 50 polls in a single webinar. Launch single-choice or multiple-choice polls to engage with your event attendees. 
• PayPal and EventBrite integrations: These integrations are great for charging for your speaking sessions or online classes. The PayPal integration allows you to charge a registration fee for your webinars, and the EventBrite integration enables you to sell tickets, manage registrations for your webinars (and meetings), and automatically sync participant information. Check out the Zoom App Marketplace to see our other integrations for webinars.
• Post-webinar survey: When scheduling your webinar, you can set up a survey that will appear post-event. You can create the survey yourself or have your attendees be redirected to a third-party survey solution. This feature is great for gaining feedback on how your event went, how your content was received, and so on. 
• Analytics and reporting: Capture insightful data on your event, such as the number of registrations, attendees, Q&A responses, polls, reactions, and surveys.
• Attendee view management: As the host, you can select the view that attendees see, whether it’s the full panel gallery, the active speaker, or “Follow the host,” an option that seamlessly changes attendees’ view depending on how your own view changes. 
• Streaming: With Zoom Webinars, you also have the ability to reach an even wider audience by streaming to YouTube, Facebook Live, or a custom streaming platform.

Still have webinar questions? Check out our frequently asked questions or getting-started guide to learn about how to set up Zoom Webinars, popular webinar features, roles, and more.

To recap, Zoom Webinars is best for presenting polished content to a large audience, whereas Zoom Meetings is ideal for small-to-large team discussions and collaboration.

Zoom Webinars is an optional add-on used to host virtual presentations and broadcast them to a view-and-listen-only audience. This helps reduce the risk of disruptions and is a safer choice for large audiences who join mostly to listen and learn. 

Zoom Webinars is also part of Zoom Events, our robust events platform, which enables you to host engaging hybrid and virtual events, from multi-session retreats to large-scale, multi-day global conferences. Check out our comprehensive guide for hybrid and virtual event hosts for more tips.

*AI Companion is included at no additional cost with the paid services in Zoom accounts. May not be available for all regions or industry verticals.