ON24

ON24 is a platform for running webinars and virtual events online. At its simplest, it is how a company hosts a live or on-demand web presentation — a product launch, a training session, a thought-leadership talk — for an audience that joins from anywhere. But ON24's identity goes beyond broadcasting video. It is built with interactive engagement tools baked into the event: question boxes, polls, downloadable resources, related-content widgets, and networking features that keep an audience doing things rather than passively watching. Around the live experience it wraps registration, event management, and analytics, and it supports live, simulive (a recording played on a schedule as if live), and fully on-demand formats. The result is less a video stream and more a structured, measurable digital event environment aimed squarely at business audiences.

What makes ON24 distinctive is its focus on data and demand generation, not just attendance. Every interaction an attendee has — the questions they ask, the polls they answer, the resources they download, how long they stay — becomes engagement data. For B2B marketers, that data is the point: it reveals who is interested and how interested, and it flows into marketing-automation and CRM systems so sales can follow up on the warmest prospects. ON24 is therefore positioned as a demand-generation and first-party-data engine dressed as a webinar tool. A recorded talk that no one measures is content; an ON24 event that scores engagement and hands qualified signals to sales is a pipeline activity. That orientation is why it is popular with enterprise B2B marketing teams.

It helps to distinguish ON24 from two neighbors it is often confused with. A meeting tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams is built for conversations — calls and collaborative meetings — and while it can host a webinar, it is not organized around structured audience engagement, rich registration, or deep marketing analytics. ON24, by contrast, is purpose-built for the produced, measurable event and the marketing workflow around it. The other neighbor is the broader virtual-events and engagement category, where competitors such as Goldcast, Zoom's webinar product, and other event platforms compete. Against those, ON24's emphasis is its long-standing, deep engagement analytics and its tight fit with B2B demand generation, so its differentiator is less the video and more the data and the sales handoff.

Being fair about the trade-offs keeps expectations realistic. ON24's strength — a data-rich, engagement-focused event platform wired into marketing systems — is exactly what a B2B team running webinars for pipeline wants, and it is overkill for a team that simply needs a quick video call or an informal community hangout. Newer competitors sometimes push harder on modern production polish or price, so the choice depends on what you value: proven engagement analytics and demand-gen integration, or a different balance of cost, look, and features. The honest summary is that ON24 is specialized for the measurable B2B event and the follow-up it enables, which is a real advantage when that is your goal and unnecessary weight when it is not.

Using ON24 well means treating a webinar as a demand-generation event, not a broadcast you forget once it ends. Design the experience to invite interaction — plan polls and questions, offer relevant resources to download, and give people reasons to engage, because engagement is both better for the audience and the signal your marketing depends on. Wire ON24 into your marketing-automation and CRM systems before the event so registration and engagement data flow automatically, and agree with sales on how to act on the strongest signals quickly, while interest is fresh. Use the simulive and on-demand formats to extend a single production's life, and follow up with content and outreach tailored to what each attendee actually did during the event.

The failure modes are common and avoidable. Teams run a passive, talking-head webinar with no interaction, then have little engagement data and wonder why the platform did not deliver pipeline. Others fail to integrate ON24 with their CRM, so the valuable signals sit unused. Some obsess over attendance numbers while ignoring engagement quality, and many neglect the follow-up entirely, letting warm prospects cool. The discipline is to use ON24 for what it is built to do: run interactive, well-produced events, capture the engagement they generate, pass qualified signals into the systems where sales works, and follow up promptly and specifically. Do that, and the webinar becomes a measurable demand activity; skip it, and even a good talk is just a video no one acted on.

ON24, founded in 1998, is a webinar and virtual-events platform focused on interactive digital experiences and engagement data for B2B marketing.

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