Five people do not fit in a Linkside room. The limit is four participants total, including the person presenting.
A licensed room can hold one presenter and up to three viewers. A free room holds one presenter and one viewer. If your 5 person webinar means five people total, Linkside is one place short. If it means five viewers plus a presenter, you need room for six people.
For four people or fewer, Linkside offers a focused format: a temporary room link, screen sharing, live audio, and in-session chat. Here is how to decide whether it fits and how to run the version it supports.
Count the presenter too
“Five people” and “five viewers” are different room sizes. The person sharing the screen occupies a participant slot.
| Planned room | Linkside fit |
|---|---|
| One presenter and one viewer | Yes, in a free room |
| One presenter and two or three viewers | Yes, in a licensed room |
| Five people total | No, the room limit is four participants total |
| One presenter and five viewers | No, that would require six participant slots |
These are firm room limits, not recommendations. A license raises the capacity from two people to four; it cannot raise it beyond four.
That small-room boundary is deliberate, as our account of why we built Linkside explains. If everyone must attend at once and the total is five or more, use a tool whose stated capacity includes the host and every viewer.
Run the supported four-person version
Use desktop Chrome or Edge for the presenter; those browsers provide Linkside’s recommended hosting experience. Nobody needs to create a Linkside account or install an app, extension, or plugin.
Use this sequence:
- Choose one outcome: explain a proposal, walk through a dashboard, teach one process, or settle one set of questions.
- Put the material in a dedicated browser tab or application window. Close unrelated messages and move private material away from the surface you plan to share.
- Open Create a Linkside room. Before selecting Create room, turn on the waiting room if you want to approve guests individually.
- Copy the invite link from the session header and send it in your existing group chat or email thread.
- Ask viewers to open the link, choose a nickname, and select Join room.
- Once the expected names are present, select Start sharing and choose the prepared tab or window in the browser’s picker.
- End the room when the questions are answered.
If you need room for three or four people, validate the license before creating the room. A valid license already stored in the presenter’s browser creates a four-person room. Otherwise, the room starts with the free two-person limit. If a third person tries to join, that attempt is rejected and the presenter sees an Upgrade action. After the presenter validates a license key, the rejected guest must select Join room again.
The live product demo guide has a tighter rehearsal checklist and a short agenda. The same useful constraint applies here: prepare one path and remove everything the audience does not need to see.
Make the screen share the whole format
A small screen-share webinar does not need to imitate a large event. Give each part of the session one job:
- Opening: name the decision, skill, or result the group should leave with.
- Walkthrough: show the finished state first, then explain the shortest path to it.
- Questions: stop moving the pointer while someone speaks, then return to the exact screen that answers them.
- Close: state the next action and end the room.
Choose the narrowest capture surface that contains the material. After you select Start sharing, your browser presents the list of tabs, windows, or screens you can share. Linkside does not choose for you. The guide to sharing one browser tab covers the tab-specific behavior.
If “webinar without software” means “without installing a new webinar application,” Linkside fits the supported four-person version. The presenter and viewers use their browsers. The presenter still has to choose and approve what to share in the browser’s picker.
Know what happens to the session
Each viewer gets a separate WebRTC connection to the presenter. Linkside tries a direct browser-to-browser path first. If a restrictive network prevents that connection, it can fall back to an encrypted relay. The relay routes encrypted packets; it does not hold the browser-managed keys needed to view the presentation.
Linkside does not record the presentation, transcribe the audio, or analyse the shared screen. Chat messages travel between peers and remain in browser memory rather than a Linkside archive. Reloading clears the local message list. When the session ends, the temporary room does not become a recording or a reusable webinar page.
Operating the room still requires limited connection information. Linkside’s signaling service can observe that a room exists, roughly when guests join, and how long the session lasts. A relay, when needed, can observe the routing of encrypted packets, and the network edge sees IP-level traffic. Those systems do not see the screen or audio content.
“No recording” describes what Linkside does. It is not a promise that invited viewers cannot take screenshots or make their own recordings. Share only with people you trust, and show only what they need. Our no-recording guide explains that distinction plainly.
Choose the tool by the actual requirement
Do not split a five-person audience into rotations merely to fit Linkside. Pick another tool when any of these are required:
- five or more total participants in the same live room;
- five viewers plus a separate presenter;
- attendee registration or scheduled reminders;
- a recording, transcript, or persistent event page;
- formal presenter, moderator, and attendee roles;
- polls, hand-raising queues, or audience reporting.
The decision is simple: a free Linkside room is one presenter plus one viewer, and a licensed room is one presenter plus as many as three viewers. Five people total—or five viewers and a presenter—requires a larger-room tool.