(Photo : Chris Montgomery / Unsplash)

Traditional meeting setup is slowly being overshadowed over time. Thus, there's no surprise that hybrid event platforms are appearing out of nowhere to help you conduct events and conferences most interactively. Regardless, not all platforms will fit your criteria but our top 5 best might.

What is a hybrid virtual meeting?

First off, what is a hybrid virtual meeting? As the term implies, hybrid virtual meeting refers to the concept of bringing together in-person and remote participants. In this setup, remote participants meet via a virtual meeting platform while in-person participants gather in an exclusive meeting room.

Now, hybrid event platforms came right after the pandemic made some changes in the office landscape. How you conduct business operations is one example. Because of that, more offices are leaning towards both remote and on-site workforce. While most prefer only either of the two, some prefer to do it the hybrid way.

What is the best platform for virtual events?

As business and technology constantly evolve, event professionals can quickly become overwhelmed with the choices. There are approximately hundreds of hybrid event platforms to choose from, but how do you determine which is best?

There is no need to search up the whole internet because that would be impossible to do. To help you out, we looked for the top 5 best virtual event platforms based on their features, advantages, and a few setbacks, too.

#1 InEvent

InEvent is a hybrid conference platform that offers revolutionary features to make your events immersive and fun. With this, you have a single location for managing hybrid events, marketing them, and monetizing them. It is the leading hybrid event platform, tried and trusted by thousands of customers.

(Photo : Screenshot from InEvent Official Website)

Amidst its myriad of features, it has a mobile application that helps you manage both virtual and in-person events. But that's not all, you can also oversee registration & participant check-ins, networking between virtual and in-person attendees, live navigation & engagement, as well as post-event analytics & reporting.

The virtual lobby is designed to present a professional image with its sleek appearance and user-friendly interface. Plus, a couple of white-label and customization features can promote event branding and bring it to life. You can use the communications manager and email system to communicate with your team, and the backend is easy to use for admins.

To bring your business in this virtual event software, you can integrate it with business analytics, CRM, marketing tools, payment systems, social media, APIs, and more. But the major cons of this hybrid conference platform is that it's not suitable for one-time and audio-only events.

Key Features & Pros

• Intuitive and user-friendly interface

• Customization options for branding purposes

• Communication features for event admins

• Participant management for both virtual and in-person meetings

• Several integrations

• 24/7 customer support

#2 Hopin

Hopin is a hybrid event platform that has gained rapid traction since its establishment in 2019. To make your conferences and virtual meetings more immersive, it acquired other brands in the process. With only a few years in the industry, it already has a growing client list all over the world.

(Photo : Screenshot from hopin Official Website)

The key reason it is one of the top event hybrid platforms is its simplicity and easy-to-use interface that allows anyone, even without experience, to open an account and create an event in minutes. It can accommodate all types of events and provides high video quality.

During the meeting, you'll find main tabs on the left-hand side of the page while the middle is occupied with a video screen. Then, the righthand side includes a collapsible chat pane. You will also see a "Time Left" which refers to the length of the meeting. It is accompanied by a calendar icon to let you see a rundown of what's coming next.

Also in the course of the ongoing meetings, you can be paired with a random attendee for a 1:1 chat room for a set number of minutes. Once the time expires, your fleeting human conversation is cut short and you're immediately transferred to the next attendee. However, in some cases, both audio and video quality reduces during these meetings.

On the other hand, the hybrid event platform has a few setbacks. First, it has limited white-label and on-demand capabilities. Then, it is also not fully compatible across devices and browsers.

Key Features & Pros

• Intuitive and user-friendly interface

• Suitable for beginners

• Offers high definition videos

• Ideal networking and breakout rooms

• Interactive features during the meeting

#3 Eventdex

Eventdex hybrid event platform is aimed at driving seamless event experiences by providing a one-stop solution for all key aspects of your meetings and conferences. In just a few clicks, you can already start conducting online registration to get things started.

(Photo : Screenshot from Eventdex Official Website)

In addition, with Eventdex, you're not limited to hybrid events too. You can build your website, offer a mobile app, set up a poster walk, and provide matchmaking solutions for onsite registration. What's more, you can manage all these on your smartphone.

Not just that, smart matchmaking technology enables virtual speed networking so you can join breakout rooms in a breeze. It also offers website builders that can be customized in HTML. Then, comprehensive analytics is run via AI to minimize human errors as well as provide insightful data.

Overall, it's one of the best hybrid event platforms. However, your video and audio quality is dependent on your location which heavily relies on the strength of your connectivity. but the strength of your connectivity, therefore affecting your video and audio quality, is dependent on your location.

Key Features & Pros

• Intuitive and user-friendly interface

• One-stop solution for all hybrid events

• Provides online registration and onsite matchmaking solutions

• Accessible on different devices, especially on smartphones

• Offers website builder and poster walk

#4 Hubilo

While Hubilo had hosted mainly physical conferences before the pandemic, Hubilo changed its strategy and began offering virtual meetings solutions. So far, it has been one of the best hybrid event platforms for delivering interactive experiences and business results.

For starters, Hubilo's mobile application replicates the desktop app perfectly, so it makes a great hybrid solution for managing meetings, networking, and more. It includes features to uphold audience engagement, networking, and agenda options in breakout rooms, lounges, and more.

The overall sessions with Hubilo comprise immersive attributes such as Q&A, live polls, keynotes, panel discussions, and more. But besides offering active participant interaction, it also optimizes your hybrid events with a customizable event to replicate your branding.

More than that, Hubilo provides in-house customer support to customers at all stages of event planning, including onboarding, speaker onboarding, exhibitor onboarding, and post-event engagement.

On the other hand, some customers experience laggy video streaming on its native platform. Plus, the available themes are also limited and so, not helpful for those who wish to automate their virtual hybrid events right away.

Key Features & Pros

• Simple and easy-to-use interface

• Provides audience engagement and networking features

• Agenda options in breakout rooms

• Custom branding

• Attendee experience

• Available in both mobile app and desktop

#5 expertshare

expertshare is one of the best hybrid event platforms that provide a one-stop solution for live streaming, e-learning, and online conferences. With it, you can set up conferences and collaborations in one place.

(Photo : expertshare)

expertshare is founded by highly experienced Swiss event professionals with technical skills and a keen understanding of what it takes to produce successful events. It offers a new kind of innovation, agility, and forward-thinking service.

Using its hybrid events platform, your attendees can join any of your events wherever they are from any device they own. To make everything as immersive as possible, you can add polls, Q&As, live social feeds, 3D environment, and access powerful control panels to engage them from beginning to end.

Just based on the extensive expertise behind expertshare, you can gain every feature you need from virtual hybrid events and more.

Key Features

• Immersive features: One noticeable competitive edge from expertshare is that they're the only hybrid event platform that offers a 3D experience. Or, you can also use your background for a customized experience with a custom panoramic view.

• Call Features: expertshare provides two ways to communicate with your team members through group calls or one-to-one calls.

• Relationship Management: Engage your audience and build a connection through a myriad of specifications like Live Voting, Comments & Discussions, 'Ask the Speaker' feature, and Video Call options so participants can call each other. To add, you can also allow them to screen share so it's not just exclusive to you. All these features also apply to the many ways of engaging with your Sponsors and Exhibitors.

• Unlimited Attendees: You can invite as many participants as you wish in your hybrid events with expertshare's unlimited capacity of attendees.

• Custom Branding & Libraries: Build an event that is visually appealing and on-brand, then share access to key resources all in one place. You can also archive videos, and play them later at a later time.

• Two Factor Authentication: Guarantee a secured hybrid event with two-factor authentication to optimize event security.

• Analytics & Reporting: Gain access to user analytics and reporting to obtain comprehensive insight into your events for future reference.

• Support: As long as your attendees need a custom language, expertshare's integrated multi-language support is your answer. But that's not all. The hybrid event platform also provides onsite support to make your events run smoothly from beginning to end.

Moreover, expertshare is not just your typical virtual event platform for conferences because it also combines e-learning on top of its virtual events. With that, you can create a platform for engaging educational courses and automatically issue certificates to users as they complete the courses.

(Photo : expertshare)

Pros

• Offers 3D modeling integration

• Provides a data architecture for regulated enterprises

• Guaranteed data privacy and event security

• Offers interactive attendee options & networking

• Has a multi-language and multi-time zone functionality

• Only hybrid virtual event platform that combines E-Learning with virtual events

Cons

• No freemium version but you can request a free demo

Virtual events are about to change both the corporate and academic industries as we know them. But you can keep up with expertshare. Think you're up for an interactive hybrid event? Sign up now and request a free demo to see the entire operation yourself!

What is the best virtual event platform to choose?

There are so many hybrid event platforms available on the market that selecting the right one can be confusing. To help you choose wisely, we compiled this list of hybrid event platforms. But based on our review, you can manage different hybrid events depending on which type you are hosting.

For both business and educational purposes, we highly recommend expertshare. To optimize your hybrid events, we suggest InEvent and Hubilo. Meanwhile, you can also try out other choices depending on your preferences.