Hopin Review: A Virtual Event Solution Review | Remo

Virtual conferences or events have been a growing trend over the past few years thanks in part to the global pandemic, but also to the unquestionable benefits “virtual” has to offer. Benefits such as a global attendee pool, lower costs, and even the environmental wins. Nonetheless, even with all the benefits, running and planning online events can be challenging for some, especially new organizers. Why? – well, there’s so many things you can do! It becomes difficult to choose what will be best for you, for your attendees, for your sponsors, and the list goes on. 

One of the most important decisions to make as an event organizer is which virtual event platform to go with. You’re looking for an online software that will be engaging for your attendees, easy for you to use, and fits your budget. With so many options out there, this can be a bit difficult. That’s where we come in. 

In this article, we’ll be reviewing one of the top virtual event platforms – RingCentral (previously known as Hopin). We’ll be taking a look at what makes this platform good, what are some of its limitations, and a quick look at its pricing. We’ll also introduce a RingCentral/Hopin alternative, Remo for you to compare against. So, let’s get started!

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What is Hopin?

Hopin is a comprehensive and all-in-one virtual event management platform. While it can be used for multiple event types, It’s best known for hosting large-scale one-off virtual conferences or summits. Hopin was a rapidly growing virtual event platform throughout 2021, quickly attracting the attention of customers and investors alike.

In 2023, Hopin, sold its events platform to RingCentral, a large communications solution. Originally focused on communication and collaboration products, RingCentral wanted to expand their offering to include virtual events. So, in 2023 they jumped into the industry by acquiring the popular events giant at the time, Hopin. Since then, Hopin’s event’s platform has been fully absorbed and rebranded as RingCentral’s virtual events platform. Whilst Hopin chose to focus on other ventures like live streaming and video hosting.

After the acquisition, RingCentral still continues to support event organizers with hosting events online, but is part of a much larger ecosystem, where virtual events are merely one cog or pillar, rather than an exclusive focus. But, if you’re a large enterprise already using RingCentral’s other functionality, it may be easier for you to leverage this new functionality.

Getting back to their actual virtual event platform, with RingCentral, organizers have access to a variety of tools and features, from a virtual stage to integrations. It also contains all the engagement features you’d expect, like polls, 1-1 breakout rooms, and virtual booths to name a few. However, there may be a few missing when it comes to creating authentic networking opportunities or customization options, but we’ll cover that more in the sections below. 

Hopin’s Pros and Cons

With an introduction to Hopin/RingCentral’s virtual event platform done, let’s move onto some of their pros and cons. 

Hopin/RingCentral Pros

• Easy to use and a Clean User Interface: RingCentral offers a simple and clean interface that is equally as aesthetically pleasing. This makes registering, interacting, and networking easy and comfortable for guests, so they can focus solely on enjoying their event experience. However, it should be noted that while their events platform is relatively easy to navigate for guests, some past customers noted a steep learning curve when it came to setting up events on the organizer side.
• Ability To Converse 1:1: Like most virtual event platforms, RingCentral shows everyone a list of participants currently at the event. This way, attendees can see others who are present and message directly if they’d like to chat. However, RingCentral goes a step further by supplementing this with 1-1 breakout rooms, so attendees can also be matched together for networking.
• In-Event Lead Capture and Conversion Tools: As you know, many large events have sponsors they need to promote in-event. With RingCentral, this becomes much easier, thanks to their banner ads and push notifications. Event organizers can set these up in advance of their events to properly promote sponsors to attendees. For additional value, like on Remo, organizers can also track who engaged with these ads to give sponsors back a list of prospective leads they can then target or do with as they please.

Hopin/RingCentral Cons

• Acquisition: With RingCentral’s acquisition of Hopin, there is uncertainty over how important or how much of a focus virtual events are within RingCentral’s wider strategy. Compared to other platforms, like Remo, whose sole focus is on virtual and hybrid events, RingCentral has a multitude of other product offerings to focus and invest in.
• Attendee Analytics: One of the many benefits of virtual events is the ease of tracking and collecting post-event data, so this is a standard feature amongst top virtual event platforms. However, RingCentral’s analytics is comparatively weaker to other virtual platforms, as they only offer basic data on attendees. Most organizers want more specific data on engagement levels or specific session attendance, to improve their future events.
  
  Remo, for example, offers  comprehensive post-event analytics, covering metrics on attendance, engagement, and even demographics. More than that, Remo also offers real-time analytics (in addition to post-event), so you can even collect information and data during the live event and make adjustments based on feedback to improve not only future events but even your current one.
• Customer Support: From Hopin reviews, past customers mentioned their lack of live customer support as a major weakness of the platform. At the end of day, like with other platforms, users can encounter technical issues. While this is often unavoidable, the virtual platform you select should have a way to handle these issues promptly and easily.
  
  For example, Remo offers 24/5 chat and email support, so even during live events you can receive timely support should you or your guests face an issue. RingCentral, on the other hand, does not offer the same live support, meaning organizers often had to wait for long periods of time to resolve any type of issue. 
• Limited Customization Options: While the RingCentral virtual event platform is comprehensive, it does lack the option to customize it. Basic customization options like changing colors are also not available on the platform. This means essentially every event or conference held on RingCentral looks similar, making it all the more difficult to make yours memorable. Not to mention, your and your sponsor’s branding is also diluted as well.
  
  In comparison, Remo is known for its customization capabilities. Beyond just simple things like adding a logo or changing colors, Remo lets you customize the actual digital venue as well,  so you can host your event practically anywhere you want. To top it off, Remo even offers a white label add-on, complete with a custom subdomain, so you can really make your events your own.

• Overwhelming to Some New Users: As we mentioned above, RingCentral’s interface for guests is relatively intuitive, but the same can’t be said for event organizers. Their event setup process, while comprehensive, can be overwhelming for most, especially for new organizers. Since Hopin was growing so fast, they were adding new features very quickly as well. This was good in a sense for customers, but it also meant far more time to learn and relearn the platform to make good use of it.
  
  In comparison, Remo offers a far simpler process for organizers. By splitting its features into Basic and Advanced, it’s up to you to decide how simple or complex you want your event to be. Basic events can be set up in a matter of minutes, while advanced events can take longer depending on how much you want to customize. Even if you’re new though, all Remo’s advanced (and basic) functionality come with detailed help articles and the dedicated support team, so you’re never alone!

• Registration Process: Many past customers also mentioned RingCentral’s  registration system was unnecessarily complex. Specifically, customers had noted the registration process for ticketing involved multiple steps of authentication which led to multiple users dropping off mid-way through registration. Coupled with reported bugs and a faulty overall process, the registration process was noted as a major weakness for RingCentrals’ virtual events platform.
  
  Considering registration is a core part of the event experience, the top virtual event and ticketing platforms, like Remo, make registration customizable for organizers but simple for attendees. As event organizers you can decide whether the event is open to all or select few, whether the event has free tickets, paid tickets, or no tickets at all, if you’d like additional registration questions or not, and even what methods of sign in guests should use!

Hopin Key Features

Speaking of all the features Hopin added to their virtual event platform – let’s take a look now at 5 of their best features:

1. RingCentral Studio/Backstage (powered by StreamYard)

Hopin/RingCentral’s acquisition of StreamYard brought forth one of their best features – RingCentral Backstage. With this feature, event organizers can create professional stage experiences for their guests through studio-level video production. Event organizers can invite up to 10 participants (including themselves) into this “backstage” area. From there, they can control who gets moved onto the main stage, in what layout, and add pre-created video overlays. It is important to note that RingCentral's backstage area serves as the “backend” of the main stage, so in order to see any live polls or Q&A, you would also need to open the “front end” of the main stage in another tab simultaneously.

While this functionality looks very impressive, it can also be complex to manage within a live event, especially if this is your first time. Some platforms opt for a simpler route to handling live presentations so even though it doesn’t give the same level of control, it’s far easier and quicker to get started. Like Remo for example, within their Presentation Mode (equivalent to RingCentral’s Main Stage), everything is in a single interface, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between your backstage and main stage. While Remo doesn’t have overlays, organizers still have control over who is on or offstage, they can even bring guests up spontaneously if they wish to. Not to mention, even though Remo doesn’t have the same “built-in” functionality for those studio-like presentations, they do allow use of virtual cameras, so you can easily use tools like OBS or ManyCam to achieve the same result.

2. Virtual Experience

RingCentral/Hopin’s offers a seamless virtual venue that allows users to navigate between different “segments” of the event as they please:

• Main Stage: This is like “Stage A” of a physical event where all the major keynote speeches or presentations take place. There’s only one of these, so there’s no simultaneous presentations possible.
• Expo Hall: This is where attendees can explore any virtual booths the organizer has set up (these are usually for event sponsors)
• Sessions: These are like breakout rooms from Zoom - when you first enter you’re in the Main Session, and then the organizer randomly splits everyone into breakout groups.
• Networking: This is 1-1 networking only, so attendees can see a list of recommended connections (based on their profiles), or opt to join “Speed networking” which is a random match.

Event organizers can choose which of these segments they want to keep for their event and which they wish to disable. Attendees will only see enabled segments on the left-hand navigation bar in-event and can simply click on a segment to join that area of the event.

As a comparison, an alternative virtual event platform, Remo, provides less segments, but still offers the same capabilities as RingCentral:

• Conversation Mode: This is like the networking or sessions segment of RingCentral, except on Remo, attendees can meet and strike up conversations more naturally thanks to Remo’s virtual table concept. In a Remo event, there will be a series of virtual tables, each functions as a private audio-video conversation and attendees are free to move between them as they please. Organizers can pick the table sizes they’d like, so they even have control over sizes of group conversations (you can even mix n match if you wish to!). Each table can also act as a virtual booth or sponsored tables as an alternative to RingCentral’s Expo Hall
• Presentation Mode: This is more like the Main Stage of RingCentral. With Presentation mode, you can speak to all attendees in the event space at once, just like a regular webinar, but with some better interactive capabilities.

One of the great things about Remo that differs from RingCentral is the organizer has all the control. With RingCentral, attendees are free to select the segment they’re interested in viewing at any given point during the event. On the other hand, with Remo, it’s up to the organizer to decide which mode attendees are in - presentation or conversation mode. In one click, organizers can seamlessly transition between the two modes, so they’re either networking in smaller groups or participating in the main presentation.

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3. Event Marketing

Event Marketing is a huge part of organizing virtual events. After all, it’s what makes sure your event has attendees that are enjoying themselves. Most virtual event platforms recognize this and have built strong event marketing capabilities within their platform, like RingCentral. For example, RingCentral allows you to customize your event landing page with speaker info, agendas, and more.

But, what makes RingCentral’s event marketing capabilities so key? Well, they’ve integrated AI into this core part of the event planning process. With their AI-powered event marketing, organizers can draft up landing page copy, agendas, and even post-event clips much faster. With all the time saved, it frees up resources you can invest into other parts of your event planning as well.

Like RingCentral, other platforms are also starting to integrate AI into areas of their virtual platforms as well. For example, Remo also offers some AI-powered event marketing capabilities, such as suggesting event names, customizing event descriptions, and even drafting social media copy. In Remo’s case, most of these AI-powered tools are actually offered for free on the website, so you don’t necessarily need a Remo subscription to get a taste of how it works. Check out the Event Name and Description Generator here!

4. Promoting Sponsors

Sponsorships are an integral part of running any event, whether in person or virtually. If you do have sponsors, it’s an organizers responsibility to ensure they get value out of sponsoring your event by promoting them where you can. In most cases, that means they want to enhance brand awareness, improve their recognition, and above all get new leads. 

RingCentral offers some pretty robust functionality to help with this goal. For example, their Banner Ads and Push Notifications allow you to send out sponsor-related information at specific times during the event. Not to mention, they’re right in front of your attendees’ face for maximum visibility. They also have a dedicated expo hall where each sponsor can claim a virtual booth to display their products/services to attendees to help enhance their visibility. However, given the expo hall is a dedicated segment of the event, there’s no guarantee that attendees will visit it on their own, so extra care should be taken to make sure your attendees visit it if you’ve got your sponsors set up there.

Giving visibility to your sponsors during an event is great, but the best virtual event platforms will take sponsorship opportunities to another level. For example, on Remo, beyond just making sponsors visible through in-app banners or pop-ups, they allow attendees to directly interact with sponsors representatives. In Remo, you can dedicate specific tables to your sponsors by naming it after them, adding their logo, placing an interactive banner and most importantly having a sponsor representative stay at that table. Attendees who are interested in that sponsor can then have a genuine conversation in real-time, an excellent way to promote the attendee-sponsor relationship. Best of all, with Remo you can also track which attendees were interested in a sponsor’s offering to give your sponsors a list of prospective leads they can nurture post-event.

5. Networking

RingCentral prides itself on its networking segment, which facilitates one-on-one interactions and conversations between attendees. Within this segment, there are 2 ways attendees can network with one another - by either directly reaching out to a specific attendee and starting a video call, or by using their automated matchmaking feature. Directly reaching out means if you happen to know another attendee that is present, you can chat with them directly and invite them to a private video call if you wish too. RingCentral also provides a list of recommended connections based on your and other attendees’ profiles. Their automated matchmaking feature is a great way to replicate speed networking or a speed dating type of use case. During this, attendees who have opted for this at the time are paired off randomly for short conversations (between 30 seconds to 3 minutes) before it moves on automatically.

Remo, on the other hand, creates a more authentic and visual way of networking by letting attendees navigate themselves, similar to an in-person event. On Remo, guests can move between different tables (breakout rooms) freely on a visual floor plan. This free movement also allows attendees to form genuine connections without a sense of pressure. So, while RingCentral is just a plain list of attendees you select from, Remo simulates the in-person networking experience much more authentically. If you’re looking for a little more control though, organizers do also have the option to start an automated shuffle. With a shuffle, all attendees are automatically moved around the space so they can meet new people and start new conversations.

Hopin Pricing

Now that we’ve covered some of the pros, cons and key features RingCentral offers, let’s discuss one of the most important factors - pricing. After the acquisition, RingCentral did change up the pricing structure from Hopin and removed their free plan option. RingCentral now offers a single plan for their virtual events platform that just varies in terms of number of attendees:

• For up to 100 attendees per event: $750/year
• For up to 500 attendees per event: $4990/year
• For up to 1000 attendees per event: $9490/year
• For 2000+ attendees per event: You have to contact RingCentral for a quote

A few things to note when looking at their pricing – they only offer yearly contracts on through their pricing page, so once you sign up you’re essentially locked into the plan for a year. They also do seem to offer their features to all plans, but be sure to look through their pricing in detail to make sure there aren’t any hidden charges or add-ons (like a ticketing fee) to make use of the specific functionality you’re looking for. They also do offer different pricing depending on which product you’re going for within the RingCentral ecosystem. For example, their virtual events platform seems to be priced differently to their webinar platform.

In comparison, Remo’s pricing plans are structured quite similarly, they also use the number of attendees as a major factor for the price. However, it opts for a lot more flexibility, specifically in terms of subscription type. Remo offers 3 types of plans:

• Starter Plan: This is most similar to a subscription, so it’s best suited for frequent or recurring events. Unlike RingCentral, Remo offers the option to subscribe annually or quarterly for added flexibility though.
• One-Time Plan: Sometimes all you need is one event, so having to pay for an annual plan just to host the 1 or 2 events doesn’t seem all that worth it. Hence, Remo offers the one-time plan options which is a plan specific to hosting just the one event (with some rehearsals included as well).
• Enterprise: This is mostly for enterprise-level customers or those looking for advanced customization options like custom SSO.

Remo’s pricing also comes with add-ons you can attach to your plan to boost functionality like white labeling or more event organizers.

Another core difference is unlike RingCentral, Remo does require potential customers to book a demo with the team first. This demo is all about getting to understand your event needs more to see if Remo is the best fit for you and then discuss pricing options that match your budget as well.

Final Verdict

It is vital to have the right virtual event platform for your event to be successful. Having the required tools and features will help you bring your event vision to life. With RingCentral’s virtual conference platform, you’ll have a tool that can help you run a successful large-scale conference or summit with ease. However, it does lack when it comes to customer support, customization options, and giving your guests a fantastic experience they’ll never forget.

That’s where other virtual event platforms, like Remo, stand out. With Remo, you’re looking at gaining a partner whose sole focus is to help you give your guests a memorable experience (in a good way!). With its unique floor plan concept and wide range of interactive features, Remo is all about bringing the in-person experience into the digital world. So, if you’re looking for an affordable, customizable, and immersive virtual event platform, look no further than Remo.

Remo: Hopin’s Better Alternative

There are many good virtual event platforms out there that can help you host and run a standard online event. But, there’s only a few event platforms that will help you create an online experience that authentically replicates in-person events and captivates your audience. The best news – Remo is one of them, and it’s not going to cost you tens of thousands a month.

What makes that so? Great question! Let’s quickly take a look at 3 core features of Remo’s Virtual Event Platform:

• Interactive and Engaging Environment

Remo is highly advanced when it comes to creating an immersive and interactive environment. The online platform can empower users to connect, collaborate, and communicate with anyone just like you would at an in-person event. Features like virtual tables and free attendee movement let guests connect with each other organically, making room for more meaningful conversations.

Whilst RingCentral offers standard interactive tools, like polls or Q&A, Remo goes further with a larger set of innovative engagement tools. For example, Remo’s Presentation Mode lets hosts bring guests onto the main stage unplanned for live interaction with speakers vs. just sending a chat message. Remo’s also got real-time sound effects, like laughter, applause, or even a drumroll to fully immerse an audience and speaker in a presentation. Not to mention, Remo’s one-of-a-kind shuffle feature that randomly mixes attendees across virtual tables for spontaneous new connections  in a single click.

• Fun and Dynamic

Let’s face it – conference calls, virtual meetings, or even online meetups can be boring, especially if it’s the same rigid black boxes on a screen each time. Remo brings a novel approach to virtual events with their fun and dynamic floor plan concept. A Remo floor plan is like your virtual event venue, it’s what attendees use to move between virtual tables (breakout rooms). 

As an organizer, you have the ultimate choice over what floor plan or setting to use. Remo comes loaded with over 80 default floor plans to choose from. Or, you can even create a customized floor plan specific to your event; From beach bars to cafe’s near the Eiffel tower, the possibilities are endless. You can fill your custom floor plan with your brand colors, familiar landmarks, or just a bespoke setting to set the vibe for your event. If you’re not a designer, we’ve even got a list of floor plan designers you can reach out to who are ready to bring your concept to the virtual page.

• Top Notch Customer Support

A deal breaker when it comes to any product or service is efficient and quick customer support, especially when you’re dealing with live events. Don’t get us wrong - most virtual event platforms today will offer some degree of support, it’s more about the quality of support you receive (is it timely? What channels do they offer? etc). Nothing is more annoying than having to pause planning your event while you wait over 72 hours to get an answer to a simple question about what a feature does.

So, at Remo, we take customer support extremely seriously. Unlike other platforms, we have a dedicated and experienced support team who offer live chat and email 24/5, so you know you can always get in contact with someone. We also offer in-event support options, so you can even have a dedicated Remo expert present at your event ready to troubleshoot with anyone facing an issue (if there are).

There you have it - a detailed review of the Hopin/RingCentral Virtual Event Platform! In this review, we’ve discussed its strengths, like its clean interface and studio-level presentation production, as well as its weaknesses, such as limited customization options and poor customer support. We’ve also introduced an alternative virtual event platform, Remo, that offers the ability to replicate in-person events online with immersive spaces and interactive features.

Ready to explore Remo’s Virtual Event Platform? Take a look today!