Member Avatar for rosario1990

Can anyone recommend a chat application i can use for a webinar i will be hosting? I want people to be able to chat live and ask questions during my webinar. thanks.

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Dani AI

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rosario1990 asked for a chat app to run live Q&A during a webinar. pointed out a social-feed approach and raised the idea of pairing a video stream with a separate chat widget. Both are valid starting points. The notes below give a short decision checklist, practical setups to evaluate, and moderation/troubleshooting tips that were not covered in the replies.

Decide before the event:

  • Chat style: open chat, moderated Q&A (questions only), or hybrid.
  • Scale: expected attendees and interaction rate (small, medium, large).
  • Access: anonymous, registration-only, or SSO (to reduce spam).
  • Integrations: slide control, polls, question upvoting, transcript export.

Typical setups to consider:

  • Small interactive sessions: an all-in-one webinar host with built-in chat and a Q&A mode for tidy question handling. See Zoom Webinars for an example of a platform with integrated Q&A.
  • Medium events that need structure: use a dedicated Q&A tool that supports upvoting and exports alongside the video stream. Examples include Slido.
  • Public, streamed events or multi-presenter shows: platforms that combine low-latency streaming with moderated chat or a comments feed (evaluate based on moderation tools and analytics). A live-stream-first platform to explore is Crowdcast.

Moderation and troubleshooting (practical):

  • Assign 1–2 moderators per ~100 attendees with a clear triage: accept, escalate, or mark answered.
  • Pin posting rules and session timing for answers; encourage single-question posts and upvotes.
  • Run a full tech rehearsal (desktop and mobile), verify chat export/archives, and enable profanity filters or registration gating if needed.
  • Have a fallback channel for questions (email, community forum, or a private messaging channel) in case the chat widget fails.

These choices trade off openness and engagement versus noise and moderation effort; match the tool to the event goals and audience size.

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Member Avatar for Dani

I've seen this done a lot with twitter at a lot of real world conferences I've been at. Simply come up with a twitter hashtag people should use to direct questions towards you. Other than that, perhaps Google Hangouts???

Member Avatar for MasterChat

A great way to do webinars is with Chatwing and Google Hangouts. Basically you use google hangout for the video side and then chatwing for the chat side. There are several advantages to using chatwing, 1 of the big ones is that chatwing has 10 different login methods you can choose to enable so if you are doing a business type webinar you may want to only allow users to login with linkedin. or if its about twitter then you can require only twitter login to chat. The nice thing is you can choose as many or as few as you want so its ususually a good idea to allow google login especially if you are using google hangouts.

There are a ton of other features you can customize within chatwing including the ability to upload your logo for the webinar plus add moderators access and control the chat from the chatwing mobile app.

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