Zoom Events

Pros: Nothing, there is absolutely nothing to like about this convoluted mess. It is cobbled together, broken, unsupported and horrendous.

Cons: Let me count the ways... The interface to set up a conference is cumbersome and hard to use. The ticket buying process is a nightmare if you chose to have people authenticate first. The only other option was to leave it open for guest registration which allows them to share the link. My users are struggling with trying to even purchase a bloody ticket. Why they didn't just ask for the email, verify it's registered with zoom, and let them purchase a ticket is beyond me.

Having everything run via the desktop client seemed a good idea at first. After all, most people are familiar with Zoom now. But the process of switching between the web lobby and the desktop client is weird and funky.

Overall: My overall experience has been absolutely horrific. This is not a platform that is ready for prime time. I am too far along to change now, but I will never, ever again use this platform for our online convention. Their tech support is useless. Even if you select ZoomEvents, the techs cannot answer the most BASIC questions about the interface. This is really an utter nightmare.

Pros: I thought I was getting a reliable stable product which would support my multiple parallel session event with back end upload of presentation files and handouts, and recordings of individual sessions. It was DREADFUL.
I used Airtable and Miniextensions to do my backend paper submissions and reviews for a conference, and it was fantastic. I imagined that Zoom Events was the same but it was a disaster. So bad that most of our online clients asked for their money back.

Cons: Where to start? I couldn't upload my data file of sessions despite following the instructions. And I am a professor of technology enhanced learning. Five hours I tried, before asking my better and more qualified PhD/theoretical physicist partner for help. It still took him 4 hours to upload the data file. That should have been the clue. The workflows are dreadful with zero information in the failure feedback about what was going wrong. It went from bad to worse with people unable to login, unable to upload presentations, unable to see how to start their presentation, unable to see each other.

Overall: Horrendous. I had 250 people without half their first day of their conference before we swapped it out for another product to manage the shared video side of the conference.

Pros: It looked good on paper. It had a lot of promised features. They made it seem very clear and straightforward, like the Zoom you are used to but it's not.

Cons: It was horrible. There were so many problems. They started right from the beginning, and I should have known to run for the hills. But I tried to run an event using Zoom Events and nearly every user had trouble accessing the conference -- before, during and after the conference.

The system is so buggy. I can't believe this was released. Zoom must really be hurting to allow something this horrible on the market. There were so many problems, and the support was bad too. Nobody knew what was going on, and even high level support could not explain away the problems. The documentation is literally misleading. They tell you to access one way, but later you find out the only way to access that reliably works, is another way that is never even published. People were left clicking around in the dark, many people did eventually access, but nobody, including Zoom support, can explain how or why. What a complete waste. Another related issue with access is that there is no backup method for people to access the sessions in your conference if the inevitable problem occurs with zoom tickets. Looking for a session id and password? They are not available -- everyone has to login with zoom's ticketing system that is very buggy, with no workaround for users. Users were sent the wrong tickets sometimes, and when they received the correct one, it would not let them enter with it once it was clicked.

So Zoom Events is basically a useless product that makes your life worse. There were so many problems -- to say the most important in a few words would be that a product that just doesn’t work reliably, one that actively denies legitimate users access without workaround, documentation that is inaccurate and misleading, and sales & support that does not properly understand the product and its limitations.

Overall: Zoom Events is a complete failure; it is unreliable, often does not work, and making it work requires exceptional sacrifices. Sales, technical support, and written documentation are misleading about the product limitations.

Pros: Looks great for a conference and automates sending out e-mails to large groups of people. It also automatically creates all the meetings and webinars for you.

Cons: It was hard for some people to access the event due to going from the browser to the desktop. It would have been nice if the credentials were passed over.
People could easily get lost between sessions. It would have been nice to be able to transfer people to the next session.
Polling didn't work. It was impossible to add a poll to any sessions and even support couldn't help.
Q&A was shotty. Some of the panelists and attendees weren't able to see any questions and it ended up messing up one of our webinars where the focus was on Q&A.
Misleading advertisement. With Events, you get webinar 500, however; all of your sessions have to be Webinars, if you have one that's a meeting, you will also need a large meeting add-on otherwise your Event will be limited to 99 attendees / panelists. However; you also cannot have simultaneous sessions unless you have a business license (10 pro licenses) which at that time you are allowed 300 in a meeting I believe.
Very restrictive. Once you've created tickets, you are unable to change or add sessions although I believe you can still add speakers. This is even if you have yet to publish the event.
Donations through pledge are in U.S. dollars, but it would be nice if it did a conversion to your local currency or gave you the option so it's more transparent. Also, if you need to keep track of who's donating, this is not the way to do it. Many donations came in with no name attached and we had to get everyone to send us how much they donated in the end.
It says events can be multiple days, but that is not true. An Event can only be one day and if you want multiple days you have to make multiple events.
If it's not a paid event, you have to add everyone through a guest list, which isn't too bad since it can pull the list from an excel sheet. But this can be a pain mixed with a couple of the previous issues. If you have a multiday event, then you have to add the guests to each day. If you manually entered anyone, you have to remember to add them to each. Also, if you need to change something about one of the sessions or add a session, then you have to delete your tickets and then add then make the change before you re-add the tickets and populate the guest list again.
You are unable to download the recordings from the site and they are only available for a month after the recording / event.

Overall: It is great for quickly putting together an event that looks nice, but the actual functionality of the event is questionable. There is good potential, but at the moment, there's a lot of bugs and some options aren't well explained in how they end up limiting your event. I would recommend trying to get by with a single webinar or something else until the issues are fixed.