Microsoft Teams webinars and town halls
By Emil Björk · Microsoft ecosystem consultant, Gothenburg
The difference between Teams meetings, webinars, and town halls — and when to pick each for an event.
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Microsoft Teams supports three distinct event formats: regular meetings, structured webinars, and large-scale town halls (which replaced Teams Live Events in 2024). They share a lot of plumbing but solve different problems.
For the detailed comparisons see webinars vs meetings and licensing and town hall vs live events vs Stream; the premium features are in Teams Premium, the recordings end up under Stream on SharePoint, and the buying alternative is Teams vs Zoom.
Regular meetings
A standard Teams meeting is interactive: everyone can see and hear everyone else, share screen, chat, and unmute. It's the right format for working sessions, daily stand-ups, and small workshops. Practical capacity is a few hundred attendees, though all-microphones-open dynamics break down well before that.
Webinars
A Teams webinar is a meeting with structured registration, presenter/attendee roles, and a polished landing page. Typical webinar use cases include training, sales demos, and external presentations to a few hundred attendees.
Webinar features:
- Registration page with custom fields, automated confirmation emails, and reminder workflows.
- Co-organisers and presenters with distinct permissions.
- Q&A moderation, separate from open chat.
- Reports on registrants, attendees, and engagement.
- Green room for presenters to gather before going live.
Webinars are included in most Microsoft 365 plans, with the Premium webinar features (advanced registration, manual approval, waitlists) requiring Teams Premium.
Town halls
A town hall is built for one-to-many broadcasts — all-hands meetings, product launches, town-hall-style company updates. They scale to tens of thousands of attendees and offer a structured presenter / attendee separation: attendees can ask questions but cannot unmute or share. Town halls support:
- Multi-language audio (real-time interpretation channels).
- External presenters without tenant accounts.
- Captions, transcripts, and recording.
- eCDN partner integration for large internal broadcasts.
Hosting town halls of any size requires a regular Microsoft 365 plan; large-scale features and external attendees require Teams Premium.
How to choose
- Under 300 interactive attendees, working session: meeting.
- External or formal audience needing registration, under 1,000: webinar.
- Company-wide or large external broadcast, low interactivity: town hall.
Town halls replaced Teams Live Events, which was retired in 2024. Migration is mostly straightforward, but if you have automation calling Live Events APIs, plan a rewrite against the town-hall equivalents.
| | Meeting | Webinar | Town hall | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Interaction model | Fully interactive | Presenter/attendee, moderated Q&A | Presenter/attendee, moderated Q&A | | Registration | No | Yes, with custom fields | Optional | | Practical scale | A few hundred | Up to ~1,000 | Tens of thousands | | External attendees without accounts | Guest access only | Yes | Yes | | Reporting | Attendance list only | Registrant + engagement reports | Engagement + eCDN delivery reports |
Frequently asked questions
Can a webinar be converted into a town hall after it's scheduled, or the reverse? No — the meeting type is set at creation and determines which template, roles, and reporting are available throughout; changing formats means creating a new event of the target type and re-sending invitations, not editing the existing one in place.
Do attendees need a Teams licence to join a webinar or town hall? No — attendees join as guests or anonymously via the registration or join link with no Microsoft 365 licence or even an account required; only the organisation hosting the event needs appropriate licensing (and Teams Premium for the advanced features), not the audience.
What happened to the recordings and analytics from retired Live Events? Existing Live Events recordings already saved to Stream or SharePoint were not deleted by the retirement and remain accessible where they were stored; what changed is that no new Live Events can be scheduled, so any recurring broadcast previously built on Live Events needs to be recreated as a town hall going forward, with its own separate recording and reporting history starting fresh from that point.
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