Livestorm

What Is Livestorm?

Livestorm is a fully browser-based webinar and virtual events platform founded in Lyon in 2016 by Gilles Bertaux, Vincent Garreau, and Robin Lambert — hosts and attendees join from a URL in their browser, with no download, plugin, or app installation required on any device. The platform was built on the premise that software-download friction is unnecessary: every time a webinar attendee is asked to install something, some percentage leave before the session starts.

The company raised $60M in total funding (including a Series B), employs roughly 100 people across four continents, and serves marketing, sales, HR, and customer success teams that need to run webinars and virtual events at scale. In December 2024, the company moved its registered office from Paris to Lyon (16 rue Cuvier, 69006 Lyon), where it now operates under Livestorm SAS, SIREN 820 434 439.

Two things define Livestorm's positioning relative to US competitors. First, the browser-based architecture: Zoom requires a desktop client for hosts; Livestorm does not. Second, the EU data residency story: all Livestorm data is hosted on OVH and Scaleway, two European cloud providers explicitly outside US CLOUD Act jurisdiction. For European businesses where data sovereignty is a procurement requirement, Livestorm clears a bar that Zoom, GoToWebinar, and Demio cannot match from a jurisdictional standpoint.

Livestorm holds ISO 27001 certification — a formal information security management standard that competitor webinar platforms rarely achieve. Combined with GDPR-by-design architecture and EU hosting, it has the strongest compliance credentials in the webinar software category.

How Browser-Based Architecture Changes the Webinar Experience

The no-download requirement is more than a convenience feature — it changes the funnel economics of webinar marketing. When a company promotes a webinar through email or LinkedIn, the conversion rate from registration to attendance depends partly on how much friction exists at the join step. Software-based platforms introduce a download and install step that blocks mobile users on managed devices, confuses non-technical attendees, and adds a failure point that increases support volume.

Livestorm eliminates this entire layer. Click the join link, browser opens, session starts. The experience works identically on desktop, tablet, and mobile. For marketing teams measuring webinar attendance rates, this frictionless entry point is a real conversion driver.

The trade-off is browser-based video performance. For high-quality video production where hosts use hardware encoders or professional broadcasting setups, browser-based video typically carries more compression artefacts than native desktop clients. For standard marketing webinars with screen sharing and talking-head video, the quality difference is imperceptible to most attendees.

Key Features

Three Session Modes

Livestorm supports three distinct ways to deliver content. Live webinars run in real time with a human host — the standard format for product demos, expert panels, and Q&A sessions. Automated webinars (sometimes called evergreen webinars) play a pre-recorded session on a defined schedule; attendees register for a time slot and experience the session as if it were live, while the host is not required to be present. On-demand replays make recorded sessions available for asynchronous viewing at any time after the original broadcast.

This flexibility matters for marketing teams. A single live webinar can become an automated webinar running weekly to new registrants, and then an on-demand library asset — all without re-recording content. The ability to run all three modes from a single platform reduces the tool sprawl that teams using separate webinar, automation, and video hosting platforms typically accumulate.

CRM Integration with Real-Time Sync

Livestorm's HubSpot and Salesforce integrations go beyond post-event CSV exports. Registration data, attendance status, session duration, and engagement scores (based on poll responses, questions asked, chat activity) sync to CRM contact records in real time during the session. When a sales team follows up after a webinar, the CRM already reflects which leads attended, for how long, and what they engaged with. This eliminates the data preparation step that typically delays post-webinar outreach by hours or days.

The platform also integrates with Marketo, Pipedrive, Intercom, Slack, Zapier, and Google Analytics — 100+ tools in total. Slack notifications can fire when attendees join, ask questions, or answer polls, surfacing real-time session activity to remote teams.

Engagement Tools

Within sessions, Livestorm provides polls, Q&A moderation, live chat, and hand-raise. Polls can be launched mid-session with results displayed to attendees immediately. Q&A allows hosts to review and approve or dismiss submitted questions before answering publicly. Chat provides continuous audience participation. These engagement tools are standard in modern webinar software, but Livestorm's implementation is clean — they do not interrupt the video interface or require mode-switching between presentation and interaction.

Built-in email automation handles the full communication lifecycle: confirmation emails on registration, reminder emails at custom intervals before the session, replay delivery after the session ends. Teams do not need to connect a separate email platform for standard webinar communication — though the Mailchimp, HubSpot, and other email tool integrations cover more complex nurture sequences.

Analytics and Reporting

Livestorm's analytics dashboard provides per-session metrics: registrant count, attendance rate, average viewing duration, engagement score breakdown (poll participation, Q&A volume, chat activity), and geographic attendee distribution. The engagement score aggregates multiple participation signals into a single numeric value per contact, making it easy to surface the most engaged leads for sales follow-up.

Session recordings are available immediately after live sessions end. Automated transcripts (in multiple languages) assist teams that share session summaries or use recordings for content repurposing.

Pricing

Livestorm uses a contact-based pricing model. The Pro plan starts at €105/month for 1,000 active contacts, scaling to €825/month for 9,000 contacts. "Active contacts" means unique individuals who registered for or attended any event in the billing period — contacts who registered but did not attend still count.

The free plan is available but restrictive: sessions are capped at 20 minutes, and each session can have at most 10 registrants. This is sufficient for testing the interface but not for any meaningful webinar programme.

Business and Enterprise plans are custom-priced for organisations with 10,000+ active contacts, specialised support requirements, or high-attendee-count events (1,000+ per session). Enterprise pricing includes custom SLAs, SSO, and dedicated customer success.

The contact-based model rewards consistent use. A team running monthly webinars to a stable audience of 500 contacts pays the same each month regardless of how many sessions they run. A team with highly variable attendance may find the model less predictable than per-event or per-host-seat pricing.

EU Compliance and Privacy

Livestorm is a French SAS company (SIREN 820 434 439), directly subject to GDPR as an EU-incorporated entity. All infrastructure runs on OVH and Scaleway — both EU-based cloud providers under EU jurisdiction and explicitly exempt from the US CLOUD Act that applies to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud regardless of data centre location.

ISO 27001 certification provides formal third-party validation of Livestorm's information security management processes. This certification is uncommon among webinar platforms and addresses procurement requirements that many enterprise buyers mandate from SaaS suppliers.

GDPR consent controls are built into the registration form builder — hosts can configure required consent checkboxes with specific consent purposes before attendees can complete registration. A Data Processing Agreement (DPA) is available for all customers, covering Article 28 controller/processor obligations.

For EU companies evaluating webinar platforms against a GDPR checklist, Livestorm provides a cleaner answer on every item — jurisdiction, hosting location, certification, DPA availability — than any major US-headquartered competitor.

Who It's Best For

If your webinar audience includes non-technical users on managed devices who cannot install software, the browser-based architecture eliminates the most common join friction and improves attendance rates.

If EU data residency is a procurement requirement or a customer-facing data protection commitment, Livestorm's French domicile, OVH/Scaleway hosting, and ISO 27001 certification satisfy the standard enterprise checklist.

If your marketing team runs HubSpot or Salesforce and wants real-time post-webinar lead intelligence without manual data exports, Livestorm's CRM sync is operationally superior to most competitors.

If you run large-scale events with thousands of live attendees, the Enterprise tier covers this use case, though purpose-built virtual event platforms like Hopin or Run the World may offer richer interactive features for conference-style events.

If you need breakout room functionality for interactive training sessions or workshops, Livestorm's current feature set does not support this — Zoom or Teams are better suited to that format.

The Verdict

Livestorm built a technically coherent product around a clear insight: the best webinar experience is the one that requires the least setup from attendees. Browser-based delivery, real-time CRM sync, and EU-native hosting combine into a compelling package for European marketing teams. The pricing is not cheap — €105/month for 1,000 contacts is a meaningful commitment for small organisations — and the free plan is too restrictive for meaningful evaluation without upgrading. But for any European company where GDPR compliance and data sovereignty are genuine requirements rather than checkbox exercises, Livestorm is the natural starting point for webinar infrastructure evaluation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Livestorm require attendees to download anything?

No. Livestorm is fully browser-based — attendees click a join link and enter the session directly in their browser without downloading software, installing plugins, or creating accounts. This applies to desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile browsers. Hosts also operate from the browser, though the Livestorm Studio desktop app is available for hosts who want additional screen sharing and hardware camera control.

Is Livestorm GDPR compliant with EU data hosting?

Yes. Livestorm SAS is a French company under EU jurisdiction, and all data is hosted exclusively on OVH and Scaleway — EU cloud providers outside US CLOUD Act jurisdiction. The platform is ISO 27001 certified, includes GDPR consent controls in registration forms, and provides a Data Processing Agreement for all customers. This is the strongest GDPR compliance position of any major webinar platform.

What is the difference between Livestorm Pro and Business plans?

The Pro plan (from €105/month) covers up to 9,000 active contacts across all sessions in the billing period, with sessions up to 4 hours and standard customer support. The Business plan is for organisations with 10,000+ active contacts and adds VIP support, Livestorm Learning, and overage flexibility. Both include the full feature set; the difference is contact volume capacity and support tier.

How does Livestorm compare to Zoom Webinars?

Livestorm is browser-based (no download), EU-hosted, and ISO 27001 certified — clear advantages for European organisations with GDPR requirements. Zoom Webinars supports much larger attendee counts at lower per-seat cost for high-volume events and benefits from a larger global user base familiar with the interface. Livestorm's real-time HubSpot and Salesforce sync is more sophisticated for B2B marketing teams. For EU data residency and no-download attendance, Livestorm; for maximum attendee scale, Zoom.

Can Livestorm run automated webinars without a host present?

Yes. Automated webinars play pre-recorded content on a defined schedule. Attendees register and join at the scheduled time and experience the session as if it were live — with polls, Q&A, and engagement tools active — but no live host is required. This allows marketing teams to run a single recording as a recurring event without presenter availability constraints. Combined with on-demand replay, a single piece of content can run as live, automated, and on-demand from one platform.