Microsoft Teams Meeting, Webinars or Live Events - Confused ??

[Dexterous365]

Have you ever been in a situation where you are confused what solution to use for your upcoming virtual event ? 

I was in a similar situation last week, where we had to choose the right solution to cater to all our requirements, and honestly it was hard considering Microsoft Teams has lot of features to choose from.

Below table helped me take a decision, hope this helps you as well. Note this is not the full list of features, refer to official document for details information.

	Teams Meetings	Webinars	Teams Live Events
Limit	up to 1000	up to 1000	up to 10,000 ( Temporary 20,000 )
View-Only	Yes	No	NA
Registration	No	Yes	No
Q&A	No	No	Yes
Recording	Yes	Yes	Yes
Chat	Yes (up to 1000)	Yes	Only for Event Group
Custom Production	No	No	Yes
Raise Hand	Yes	Yes	No
Reaction	Yes	Yes	No
Participant List	Yes	Yes	No ( Only for Event Group )
Attendance	Yes	Yes	Yes
Closed Caption	Yes	Yes	Yes
Mute audio\video	Yes	Yes	Only for Event Group
External speaker	Yes	Yes	Yes
Lobby	Yes	Yes	Only for Event Group
Breakout rooms	Upto 300	Upto 300	No
Polls	Yes	Yes	No
2 -way communication	Yes	Yes	Only for Event Group
Gallery view	Yes	Yes	No
Together Mode	Yes	Yes	No
Spotlight \ pin	Yes	Yes	No

To summarize, Webinar has all the feature of a regular Teams meeting additionally it provides registration capability. The only place where it falls short is view-only mode. 

Live Event is for Broadcast where attendee are only consuming the video feed with interaction through QnA only. Custom Production tools and RTMP could be used to create layout for broadcast.

Resources for reference :
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/view-only-meeting-experience 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/schedule-a-webinar-0719a9bd-07a0-47fd-8415-6c576860f36a 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/05/11/introducing-webinars-in-microsoft-team...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-analytics-and-reports/meeting-attendance-repor...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-events/what-are-teams-live-events

[#2]

Thanks for sharing, but the Tech Community Ideas space where you originally posted is specifically for ideas for the Microsoft Tech Community website, not about individual products.

I'm moving your post to the Microsoft Teams space. Please post about Microsoft Teams there in the future.

[#3]

I think that it can generally simplified
Is everyone considered a peer and can talk?
Is this mostly a few to many meeting where you have leaders and listeners?
Is this a broadcast to many people where more than a single video source is used?