EventBuilder's Virtual Events and Webinar Tips & Tricks

You Don't Need 2 Event Platforms. You Need ONE, and the Right People

Written by Karen Mares (she/her) | July 2, 2025

If your organization already pays for Microsoft 365, you likely already have Microsoft Teams. Are you also paying for Zoom, Webex, or another virtual event platform, just to run your webinars and events? Paying twice for the same core functionality is probably eating up your IT budget and causing big administrative migraines.

Let us help you make it right—beat the tech bloat and optimize your event stack with ONE solution that offers strategic, streamlined, scalable, and fully supported virtual events. Set your IT budget free!

A Quick Look Back...

Back in 2020, Zoom surged as the go-to for external webinars and meetings. It was quick, simple, and easy—just share a link and go. Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams had limited external access, and by the time that changed, most users were already locked into other tools.

Fast forward to today: Microsoft Teams has transformed. With major investment and a constantly evolving feature set, it’s now a powerful, fully capable platform for both internal and external virtual events—often overlooked but hard to beat.

Think Teams can’t handle high-volume webinars or external training programs? Think again. Teams now delivers:

  • Polished Webinars with built-in registration, moderation, and reporting.
  • Interactive Meeting Features such as polls, breakout rooms, and Together Mode.
  • Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance already embedded in your Microsoft 365 environment.
  • Scalable Live Events that reach thousands.
  • Seamless Integration Opportunities with powerful tools like EventBuilder for advanced control, analytics, and customization.
  • AI with Microsoft CoPilot, keeping transcripts, data, and insights secure and centralized.

Teams is a serious contender and an underrated powerhouse in the virtual events space. It's capable of hosting everything from internal town halls to professional, large-scale webinars and high-volume virtual programs. The myth that Teams isn’t “webinar ready” is outdated. If you’re still paying for Zoom “just in case,” it’s time to rethink—especially when your CFO is scrutinizing every software dollar.

The Hidden Costs of Redundant Platforms

It's easy to look at your Zoom subscription and think, "what's a few licenses?" But the true cost of keeping multiple virtual event platforms on your roster goes deeper than monthly fees.

Here's what platform duplication is really costing you:

  • Direct License Costs - You're paying extra for webinar functionality you already have through Microsoft 365.
  • Training Time - Your staff needs to learn, practice, and support multiple tools that perform the same actions.
  • IT/Admin Overload - Managing licenses, users, and separate security policies and procedures across systems eats up valuable internal resources.
  • Workflow Friction - Switching between Teams for collaboration and another platform for webinars disrupts focus and flow. 
  • Multiple Third-Party Add-Ons - Vetting, configuring, implementing, and troubleshooting multiple vendors and add-on programs in an effort to piece together the additional features you need. 
  • Tech and Event Management Support - Accessing the tech support you need for troubleshooting, as well as live event presenter/attendee assistance that soaks up valuable time and effort.
  • Integration Complexity - Trying to weave registration, consistent branding, content, event assets, reporting, and analytics from two different systems? That's more tools, more steps, more potential privacy and security vulnerabilities and compliance headaches, more coordination, more stress.

Ask yourself: do you have time (or budget) for inefficiencies right now? 

The Juggling Act In Action: Wasted Time, Effort, Resources = Wasted Money

Imagine your organization is all-in with Microsoft 365 and Teams for your internal, everyday business tech. You have Word, Excel, CoPilot, SharePoint, OneDrive—the works. Your events personnel do all their coordinating, planning, content creation (such as your PowerPoint slide deck), file sharing, communication, meetings, chats, decisions, and event organization within your secure Microsoft 365 tenant. 

Enter: Your OTHER events platform. Now, you're taking significant amount of work you accomplished in Microsoft 365 and transferring all of your organizational efforts, data, content, files, and event resources to a different platform for the actual event delivery. That means you're setting up everything again on your parallel platform including: event creation, registration, transferring and staging content, managing registration, configuring and implementing a completely separate security and privacy policy, ensuring consistent accessibility options, training staff on the other platform, conducting tech and presentation rehearsals, providing event management, moderation, and technical support during the live event. Post-event, you're creating separate surveys, event data exports, reporting, event recording management and storage, etc. You're then importing everything created on your parallel platform BACK into your Microsoft 365 tenant for post-event meetings, follow-up strategy sessions, transcripts, event data, as well as additional workflows, segmentation, and content for lead nurturing. You're also deciding how and where you want to host your event recording, adding an additional layer of complexity. If you want to make the webinar on-demand, you're maintaining the recording and extracting additional event data on repeat.

Does this sound efficient, cost saving, or even manageable? Do you need a vacation just reading this?

What Do You REALLY Need From a Virtual Event Platform?

We're not saying Microsoft Teams is the right fit for every event right out of the box. What we are saying is this: if you're already using Teams, it's worth taking a closer look before renewing another year of Zoom or Webex licenses.

Start by asking yourself:

  1. What kinds of virtual events do we host regularly? (Internal meetings, client webinars, partner trainings, etc.)
  2. What features are truly essential for these events? (Custom registration, engagement tracking, branding, audience segmentation, role-based access, etc.)
  3. How many of those needs does Microsoft Teams already meet? 
  4. Where, specifically, does Teams fall short, and can those gaps be filled with an enhancement, not a whole separate platform?
  5. What are the internal staffing resources available, and are they stretched thin for event management and support?

Beware the Add-On Trap

Let's say you're running Zoom for your event. You have the mid-tier Zoom licenses, but to truly deliver, you need additional tools to round out the functionality of your Zoom platform. Here's what you would pay:

Zoom Events: $149.90/user/month

You also need:

  • Registration & Approval Workflows: $100/mo.
  • Meeting Intelligence: $75/mo.
  • Polling, Q&A, and Feedback Tools: $50/mo.
  • Content Delivery and On-Demand Video / Recording Access: $59/mo. (Starter Plan)

That's at least four different third party vendors cobbled together into Zoom to make it work the way you need it to. You're juggling multiple add-ons, vetting privacy, security, and regulatory compliance from each vendor, providing troubleshooting and support, managing each separate app throughout the lifecycle of your event, PLUS paying extra for every individual add-on. You're also likely going it alone when it comes to event management and support. When viewed through this lens, you're paying much more to get a lot less. 

Don't Pay For Two Separate Platforms! Enhance What You Have

If Microsoft Teams gets you most of the way there, EventBuilder takes you across the finish line with a robust layer of webinar and virtual event-focused features built specifically for Teams users. With EventBuilder—you're looking at one unified and professionally managed experience integrated securely with Microsoft Teams. Instead of duplicating functionality, we'll enhance it by giving you:

  • Advanced registration and audience segmentation
  • Real-time polling, chat moderation, and Q&A
  • Detailed engagement and attendance analytics
  • Customized branded landing pages and user experience controls
  • Built-in accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)—inclusion by design
  • Enterprise-grade security and compliance, including MFA and role-based access
  • Recording and on-demand video hosting

The best part? We don't stop at software. We bring human-centered, experienced support and managed services from people truly care about your success.

The EventBuilder Difference: Experts Who Run Events For You

When you work with EventBuilder, you’re not just licensing a tool—you’re adding experienced event professionals to your team. Our producers and support staff are Microsoft Teams experts and trained in virtual/hybrid event execution, accessibility standards, security, compliance, and live issue resolution. We know what makes an event succeed—and we’re right there to run it with you.

Your internal team no longer has to:

  • Moderate chat while trying to monitor Q&A
  • Troubleshoot AV issues mid-webinar
  • Manually compile post-event reports from 4+ tools
  • Export and re-import attendee lists for every system
  • Worry about cross-platform data handling and privacy risks

We handle the tech, the security and compliance, the flow, and the audience experience—so your team can focus on content, strategy, and results.

Rethink Your Stack

This isn't just a cost-cutting pitch—it's a call to streamline operations and prioritize outcomes.

  • Reduce your IT overhead
  • Eliminate vendor sprawl
  • Minimize training and support burdens on internal teams
  • Strengthen security posture and data governance
  • Reinvest saved budget in higher-impact areas like content, training, or follow-up campaigns

And most importantly: deliver better virtual events with less chaos.

Yes. EventBuilder IS a Paid Add-On

However, it's not a completely separate system. We AREN'T asking you to adopt "yet another platform." We're offering you a smarter way forward:

  • One Trusted Platform - Microsoft Teams—already deployed and secured.
  • One Comprehensive Add-On - EventBuilder software for scalable and secure registration, segmentation, analytics, branding, and content delivery.
  • One Expert Team - Decades of combined experience with our expert team of Event Producers who specialize in running high-impact webinars and virtual events inside Teams. 

So, when you choose EventBuilder, you're not paying twice. You're REPLACING:

  • A bloated, redundant platform
  • Disconnected, pricey add-ons
  • Multiple security, privacy, and compliance policies
  • An overextended internal events team
  • A fragmented event experience

...with one unified environment, one experienced partner, and fewer administrative minefields.

Set Your Budget—and Your Team—Free!

EventBuilder isn't another platform. It's your off-ramp from platform spread and team burnout. Running two separate platforms costs you more than money: it costs you time, resources, and security. With us, you:

  • Say goodbye to redundancies, fragmented data, and disjointed experiences.
  • Deliver powerful, professional virtual events—right from Microsoft Teams.
  • Eliminate piecemeal add-ons from multiple third-party vendors in order to cobble together the functionality you actually need to deliver impactful events.
  • Take the heat off your internal team with experienced, professional events experts running your events from behind the scenes.
  • BONUS: Get friendly, world-class live support from event pros who care about you and your attendees. We'll never leave you hanging.

Reach out to schedule a personalized strategy session with one of our event pros—we'll talk about how we can help you ditch duplication and complication to run your best events from inside the Microsoft Teams environment you already know and trust. Complete the Teams experience with fewer headaches and smarter resource use with EventBuilder!

Disclaimer: This article was created with some help from AI, but thoroughly edited, revised, reviewed, and fact-checked by a living, breathing, coffee-drinking human writer.