TOP 10 Best Virtual Party Platforms to Engage Your Team in 2023

What is a virtual party platform?

Virtual event platform is an online tool that uses videoconferencing, screen sharing, streaming, chat, and several other supplementary features to conduct a virtual event with the greatest in-person effect for all.

Additional features of such party rooms may include polling sessions, virtual booths for smaller companies, gamification elements, and even karaoke!

This software industry is one of the fastest-growing market segments today, primarily thanks to the rapidly growing interest in it for both corporate and individual needs. If you are interested in organizing your very first virtual holiday party for colleagues, it would be reasonable to start with a market overview to scope out the most prominent players.

Why do you need online party platforms?

Solutions like Zoom or Google are not suitable for virtual parties. First, most often, these applications are related to day-to-day work processes. No matter how much effort you put in to please and entertain employees, subconsciously, everyone will think about their job.

Therefore, work topics will most likely trickle down into conversation, disturbing the party’s mood. Secondly, the toolkit is poor and too simple. These solutions are great for work meetings, but as far as a party goes, there’s not much you can do other than show content or talk.

While virtual platforms for events provide the following:

• A comprehensive set of tools

The professional virtual event platform allows you not only to chat but also create separate rooms in space, stream music, integrate games, visit virtual booths, and so on. Basically, a virtual event platform is a virtual event place for your metaverse to create.

• An immersive experience

Instead of just sitting in front of a laptop or phone screen, any participant can create their own avatar, a digital character. Using avatars, you can interact with other guests, visit different rooms and immerse yourself in the party’s atmosphere.

• High-quality data analysis

If you want each new party to be better than the previous one, you need to analyze the feedback from the audience deeply. A virtual event platform provides complete data analysis at the end of your event, making it easy to wrap things up. You can find out about the most popular and exciting activity, how many people leave the party until the end, and how quickly users can figure out the intricacies of the virtual event platform interface.

What is the best virtual party platform to choose in 2023

1. Party.Space

The name says it all. One thing that immediately catches your attention when you visit the site is that many IT companies are already using Party Space for their virtual celebrations. Among them are Epidemic Sound, Slack, and Grammarly. And who knows more about hosting quality virtual events than IT people themselves?

Party.Space is a metaverse-style virtual event platform. It helps remote teams and online communities to reconnect. Party.Space offers a variety of formats and designs.

Whether you’re looking to throw a Chinese New Year or St. Patrick’s day party, celebrate your company’s anniversary, or just team-building for a small project team — Party.Space has a dedicated room for any crazy idea you might have in mind. You can even create a corporate metaverse of your own using the best virtual party platform!

2. Hoppier

This party room is mainly for foodies. The emphasis is on ordering food from the food delivery vendor of your choice and then having a virtual lunch (brunch, dinner) together. There is also an option to add a post-event gift for participants. The virtual event platform goes perfectly for happy hour drinks or virtual guest catering.

The main advantage is that you, as an organizer, relieve yourself from the worries about logistics and delivery. The price starts at $ 5 per gift card, and, in addition, unspent money gets back to you.

Unfortunately, for a full-fledged party, only using Hoppier‍ isn’t enough. Therefore, you will at least need video conferencing software.

3. Mesh

The header of Mesh’s site says, “Everyone is bored of Zoom events”, and indeed, Mesh does not look like Zoom at all. Are you old enough to remember Super Mario and Prince of Persia? If so — welcome to Mesh, you’re gonna love it!

The design is a nostalgic one, which makes it super fun. Because of this old-school design, it is also relatively lightweight, making Mesh a comprehensive virtual event platform for collaboration when your team is scattered across the globe and some of your teammates might have an unstable internet connection. The next redeeming thing is the price. Like many other products from Microsoft, Mesh is free to try. However, for a fully immersive experience, you need a HoloLens, a VR device.

Note that Mesh originated as a tool for work. Therefore, most of its features are aimed at simplifying workflows, not at parties’ holding.

4. Weve

Weve is one of those online party platforms dedicated solely to games. Escape rooms, detective games, TV-style game shows, language, and other knowledge games, you name it.

This makes Weve the perfect fit for happy hours and onboarding ice-breakers. The price starts from $300, enough if you want to arrange a small event for 10 people.

As to virtual events for large groups, things might get a bit messy, especially with over 50 participants. Plus, the second concern for small businesses can be price. A party for 50 people with a full set of tools can cost more than $2 thousands.

5. Hopin

As one of the most serious and tech-equipped players in this segment of third-party virtual event hosting platforms, Hopin is a good fit when you’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of your business, for example. Or perhaps you’d like to host a relatively formal town hall meeting where you’ll be inviting business partners, affiliates, and so on.

Technically speaking, Hopin has a lot to offer: a hybrid event mode, custom API integrations, email campaigns, a real-time analytics dashboard, and more. That makes Hopin one of the best platforms for virtual conferences.

However, most of these cool features are not available under the free plan (and there is no publicly available info on the cost of their Enterprise plan). Plus, the free plan suits only a 2-hours event of up to 100 people. Ticketing, as one of the advantages of this virtual event platform, can bring one more shortcoming because the solution gets a commission of up to 15% per ticket.

6. Rume

Rume is exactly the opposite of Hopin. In it, you can play games (how about poker?) and chat with work buddies. That’s pretty much it. This could be a comfy party space for those who like games but are not so software-proficient.

However, this service has recently closed, and there is no hope yet for its restoration. Still, there are no comments or explanations from the company’s management.

7. Splash

Splash actually specializes in external marketing events and sales enablement. However, they have a solution for internal events too — happy hours for smaller teams and town halls for larger gatherings. Some convenient features of this best platform for virtual party include easy recurring event scheduling, automated feedback collection, and preset design templates. Basically, it is still Zoom but with some organizational extras.

Many users complain about UI design. It takes time to figure out how to adapt the virtual event platform to your needs. If some problem arises during the event, you may not be able to solve it in no time. Plus, Splash uses a subscription pricing model, so it’s unsuitable for a one-time event.

8. Toasty

At first glance, Toasty looks like Zoom built by and for designers (no wonder it even integrates with Figma). The interface of the virtual event platform is clean and pretty much self-explanatory.

Toasty is a good party room choice if you need polling (team voting on several issues) or if you plan to have a webinar-like corporate event that is also meant to be somewhat educational. One of the pros is a cost-effective pricing model that suits teams with regular monthly meetings.

There are two main problems identified. Firstly, few people have heard of such a virtual event platform and treat it with distrust, preferring Zoom. Secondly, the meeting participants are limited in their actions, while the host can control anything.

9. Orbits

Orbits has been designed with the intention of an “immersive online venue”, and it is indeed immersive. The key feature and significant benefit of Orbits is that it offers custom-made virtual party rooms.

For example, you can make it look exactly like your pre-COVID office, your favorite bar next door, or a medieval castle. Avatars also have a strong resemblance with real people, so you will surely recognize your work buddies, even if you haven’t seen them for a while.

Orbits can go for both large and small events. Ready to buy already? Oops, there’s a problem here. The company does not publicly state the cost of the virtual event platform, so you have to contact the support service to arrange an event.

10. Arena

As it is obvious from the name, Arena is a good fit for hosting events with hundreds or thousands of people. It can host virtual events for up to 100,000 participants!

Arena includes all the features a virtual event platform might have, including chats, polls, smaller booths, customizable invites, and even a virtual lobby. If you plan to try out Arena for an event with hundreds of attendees, note that pricing is per participant!

How to choose just one from the best virtual event platforms?

The best option is one that fits you. For example, if you want a small event, paying for an annual subscription to virtual conference platforms makes no sense.

Let’s highlight the main points you should consider when choosing a virtual event platform.

• Budget

To toss away options that do not suit you, decide how much money you can spend on a party. This way, you won’t waste time looking at alternatives that are out of your budget and will be able to focus on the perfect ones.

• Scalability

If you want to run a meeting for hundreds of people, you need a virtual event platform that’s ready for that size. At the same time, as already noted, using a virtual event platform for large crowds of people to host small events is simply superfluous.

• Interface

You can understand whether the chosen platform for virtual events is simple or cluttered only if you try it yourself. So don’t forget to book a demo before deciding. This option is available on Party.Space and some other online event platforms.

Zoom, Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, or even Skype could be used for virtual parties too! However, we’ve intentionally excluded them as they are too formal and make it impossible to implement any kind of “party vibe.”

Our concluding recommendation would be as follows: if you want your virtual celebration to be an actual party space — get as far away from Zoom settings and looks as possible. It has to be fun, mind-blowing, and different. Otherwise, your colleagues won’t even notice the difference and they’ll feel like they’re forced to attend yet another Zoom meeting.

Top virtual event platform comparison chart: from virtual event platforms for conferences to small team building solutions