We know that webinars + breakout rooms = SWEET STUFF! But it takes more than that for a webinar platform to be great for your next event. So let’s zoom through (pun intended) this list of best webinar platforms with breakout rooms.
First things first: What are webinar breakout rooms?
Webinars with breakout rooms are inspired by the smaller meetings that make room for spontaneous brainstorming, collaboration, and networking. Breakout sessions in a webinar are separate rooms in a virtual environment that facilitates smoother and more intimate interactions between team members or small groups.
Breakout rooms are more effective because humans are more comfortable to participate in smaller groups. Thus, they can be used to supplement a larger virtual meeting and make it more meaningful.
List of best platforms with webinar breakout rooms besides Zoom
First on the list is Airmeet—a virtual event platform with superior abilities to foster natural interactions in breakout rooms, social lounges, and life-like Fluid Spaces.
Airmeet realized that virtual events and webinars lacked human touch and interactions. So they fixed it. And breakout rooms in the platform are an added bonus.
1) Airmeet to create breakout rooms
Airmeet is one of the market’s best virtual event platforms. And G2 agrees with it!
It provides a variety of dynamic online engagement capabilities and lets you target the right audience. So, you can bring in committed speakers from all around the world. You can also host numerous sessions and do much more.
Perks of hosting a webinar on Airmeet include:
- The interactive stage for superior audience engagement
- Surveys, quizzes, reactions, screen-sharing, gamification, and live social media broadcasting
- And of course, breakout rooms other than Zoom breakout rooms
- A dedicated networking area like a social lounge to host webinars rich in interactions
- Fluid Space to humanize your networking sessions
- Speed-networking and match-making
- Full branding options for your webinars and virtual events
- In-depth analytics to measure performance and success
- Stable and glitch-free experience
Here are some features and benefits of Airmeet breakout rooms:
- Up to 30 participants are allowed in a virtual breakout room
- Option to preview rooms
- Attendees can choose to join breakout rooms as per their liking
- Customizable room layouts
- Broadcast announcements
- Timer for the breakout rooms (Max 120)
- Attendee and room matching with an uploadable CSV file (Send attendees to pre assigned rooms)
- Superior moderation and control for host and co-host
- Simple and intuitive UI
- A quick icebreaker for event attendees
- Perfect for quick split sessions and one-on-ones during training
- Increased session engagement by making the session interactive
Airmeet’s virtual breakout rooms vs Zoom webinar breakout rooms
Simply put, breakout rooms are virtual spaces for smaller team meetings and to network in smaller groups. Airmeet has three unique ways to do that.
- Fluid Space: An energizing lounge where you create your virtual avatars and move around on the screen with your arrow keys to connect with people like you move around in real-life to approach people and groups.
- Social Lounge: Stroll through the lounge, pull up a chair, and virtually join interesting conversations in cozy groups.
- Breakout Sessions: The feature allows organizers to create and host short networking or group video chat sessions within an ongoing live session. The attendees will be split into random groups or specifically assigned groups. The organizer can set the number of groups and the duration of the breakout sessions. Organizers and speakers can switch between multiple breakouts.
2) Google Meet to host virtual breakout rooms
Google Meet hosts virtual meetings in minutes and allows attendees to join with a click. This aspect makes it an excellent option for conducting online meetings with breakout rooms.
Google Meet offers advanced features to businesses, schools, and other groups. These include live captioning, screen-sharing, conducting polls and surveys, and setting up breakout rooms within webinars. Because of these, their virtual meetings can be more exciting and appealing to various audiences.
How to use webinar breakout rooms on Google Meet?
Organizers can use virtual rooms to group participants into smaller groups virtually. By doing so, they can conduct private briefings before, after, or during the virtual meeting.
Features of virtual breakout rooms on Google Meet
You may create and divide breakouts based on nicknames in Google Meet.
New Status Reports are also available to track attendees’ involvement in breakout sessions. You may also use the countdown timer to track how much time participants have in a session.
Besides these, Google Meet breakout rooms have the following features to offer:
- Gallery view: You can use the Tile or Tab format to see or automatically move all breakout rooms simultaneously.
- Easy use: You can assign breakouts on an ad hoc or pre-assigned basis, and distribute audio and video to all breakout rooms.
- Customize: You can change nicknames, and meeting codes.
Other Perks of Google Meet
- Great security and privacy compliance
- Up to 15 Gb of cloud space free for recordings
- Meeting transcripts available via a chrome extension
- Whiteboard with Google Jam boards
3) Zoom webinar breakout rooms
Zoom webinars with breakout rooms are also a good option to engage remote teams, businesses, and a virtual audience. What’s more? There’s a mobile app and a desktop version of their webinar software as well. However, it’s not the best platform on the list.
You may need to download zoom on your desktop for the best experience, which can be inconvenient. Some platforms in our list like Airmeet, Google Meet, and GoToTraining don’t need to be downloaded, which adds to their enhanced usability.
Handy features of Zoom webinar breakout rooms
- Zoom breakout rooms can split video conferences up to 50 different sessions.
- You can also let your presenters pick and enter breakout sessions.
- A host can create rooms on zoom within a meeting. Then, they can allow attendees to choose which room they want to join.
- You can pre assign breakout rooms
- You can switch between sessions at any time as a host or co-host.
- You can send a message to all available breakout rooms like a broadcast.
- Breakout attendees can invite the host to join by clicking the “Ask for Help” icon.
- When you’re ready, you can just click “Close rooms” to end your breakout sessions.
4) Virtual breakout sessions on Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a platform with chats and video conferencing features for teams. Virtual breakout rooms feature in Microsoft Teams can come in handy for businesses that already use this software for work.
Should you host Webinars with virtual breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams?
We’d recommend using Microsoft teams if it’s already deeply integrated within your tech stack. If not, you may choose a platform from this list that best suits your needs.
Like other platforms on the list, Microsoft Teams allows you to divide your team meeting into sub-meetings. Participants can join and hold conversations amongst themselves. Like Zoom breakout rooms, you can set up 50 breakout rooms for a single conference.
Here is the feature list of the platform:
- The meeting organizer can allow attendees to go to their breakout rooms anytime.
- Participants can pose questions without interfering with the breakout room conversations.
- The setting can recreate breakout rooms inside the same conference.
- Pre-assigned rooms
- Organizers can assign participants to breakout rooms with different configurations.
- The meeting organizer can create, delete and change a breakout room name as needed.
- Meeting organizers can attend any of the breakout sessions if available.
- Organizers can move attendees between breakout rooms.
Some other perks
- Filters available to adjust the appearance
- Up to 10GB of cloud space for recordings
- Meeting transcripts available with paid plans
5) Webex breakout rooms as an alternative to zoom webinars with a breakout room
While Zoom webinars are jack of all trades, Webex is built keeping hybrid and remote teams in mind. The use case of Webex is better suited for team collaboration. However, it can also be used for meetups and internal conferences.
Can you have breakout rooms in Webex?
Short answer – yes. Webex calls it breakout sessions for teams. This allows teams to split into smaller video conferencing sessions in a hybrid or fully virtual setup. Webex also supports whiteboards, a virtual assistant, and live multilingual translation.
Here are some features of Webex breakout rooms:
Webex has added some extra moderation options to their platform to ensure smooth sailing events:
- The hosts and co-hosts can set up, rearrange, and participate in breakout rooms anytime.
- Participants can join sessions automatically or manually (at their discretion).
- Hosts and co-hosts can split the participants and assign the participants to the room.
- Messages can be broadcasted to all breakout sessions at the same time.
- Participants can ask the host to join their breakout session if they need assistance.
- Hosts can set the breakout sessions to end automatically after a certain amount of time.
- Breakout rooms can also be recorded in Webex.
Some other perks of Webex breakout rooms:
- Stream to Facebook live
- 10GB of cloud space
Other webinars with breakout rooms
So earlier in the list, we mentioned famous webinar platforms like Airmeet, Zoom, Webex, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams that offer breakout rooms. However, there are some more platforms that offer this feature. So let’s begin with the list!
6) GoTo webinar breakout rooms
GoTo offers a suite of products for different use cases, such as for example, GoTo Webinars, GoTo Trainings, GoTo Meetings, and more. You can find breakout rooms in the GoTo pro plans for training purposes.
Besides breakout rooms in GoToTraining, you also get handy features like polls, Q&A, tests, and evaluation. There’s also a feature to manage training materials like videos, pdfs, and documents that come in handy during a training session.
It makes a great alternative for a zoom meeting with a breakout room for training purposes.
7) Remo Breakout Rooms
Unlike Zoom webinars, Remo breakout rooms focus more on creating humanized experiences with their virtual event platform. They claim that their feature suit works well for remote teams as well.
Here are some perks of Remo breakout rooms:
- Cloud-based
- Claims to foster interactions in a humanized manner
- Allows up to 20 participants to breakout rooms
- Allows you to connect and share virtual cards
- Allows you to schedule meetings
- Networking countdown timer
- Options to shuffle table
8) Brella for virtual breakout rooms
Brella offers a suite of features that allow you to host nice virtual meetings for networking purposes.
Brella offers a feature that allows you to create either closed or open virtual rooms during a webinar. These individual rooms can gather up to 200 attendees, which includes the moderators.
A feature to test these rooms beforehand ensures that the whole virtual event or your webinar goes smoothly, and participants get a frictionless experience.
9) Hopin virtual meetings with breakout rooms
Hopin is a virtual event platform that promotes a customizable experience for the event organizers. As a part of their feature suite, you can host multiple rooms and smaller sub-sessions depending upon the use case of your virtual event.
Unlike other webinars with breakout rooms, you can get more control over the look and feel of your event with a virtual event platform.
However, for virtual events, Airmeet offers a robust mobile app and a glitch-free experience. Other than that, features like in-house gamification, full brand customization, customizable lobby and a virtual reception, more sponsor tiers, sponsor booths, essential CRM integrations, and robust 24/7 support make Airmeet a top-rated virtual event platform on G2.
Are Zoom webinar breakout rooms any different from other platforms?
Zoom, like others, is just another virtual platform with the capabilities to host webinars with breakout rooms. Over the years, Zoom has become synonymous to the phrase “webinar breakout rooms.” However, many different platforms offer virtual rooms for every use case. In short, there are several alternatives to Zoom that you can explore.
What makes a great webinar platform with breakout rooms besides Zoom meetings?
“Zoom fatigue” was a trending topic in 2020 and 2021. So much so that folks at Harvard Business Review had to cover it. The reason for fatigue: back-to-back meetings with interactions that lacked a human touch.
Don’t get us wrong. Zoom Webinars are great, and the world quickly shifted to using Zoom webinars and their breakout rooms for several use cases. But there’s definitely some room for improvement.
So when you ask which virtual platforms with breakout rooms are best for your next event, we would say that a platform that comes with a breakout room feature but also offers features suited to foster more natural interactions.
Airmeet and some platforms like Remo do a great job at that.
The best webinar platform should be capable of keeping your audience connected and engaged. Some excellent features are polls and Q&A, leaderboard, and quizzes, to do that other than breakout rooms.
Moreover, your platform should offer a seamless hosting experience, both for you and your attendees. Outages and glitches offer a negative experience to your attendees, which negatively impacts your ROI. Platforms like Airmeet, Google Meet, and Teams are great for stability.
Added features like host, co-host management, and event moderation abilities make the deal even sweeter.
Final thoughts
There are multiple webinar platforms with breakout rooms to choose from. But the ones that work best for you would depend on your use case.
Generally, platforms that offer interactive elements and engagement-driven features work well as they keep your attendees gripped by the sessions.
Airmeet is one such platform that has features to humanize your webinars and virtual events and spark deep attendee engagement.
Others in the list, like GoTo webinar breakout rooms and Webex breakout rooms, work well in their niche.
Still, the best breakout room for you depends on your specific requirements. So, remember to review the information above to figure out which webinar platform is best for you and how to facilitate a breakout room, or talk to our expert here.
