Best Virtual Funeral Platforms in 2026: 8 Compared
Somebody in the family cannot get there. A brother in another country, a grandmother who cannot travel, a cousin who found out too late to book a flight. So somebody says can we stream it — and then the question becomes what to stream it with, usually with two days to decide.
There is no single product that does all of it. What most families end up with is two things: something that carries the live video on the day, and somewhere the service lives afterwards, because the day itself is over in forty minutes and the people who missed it still need somewhere to go.
How this list is ordered: by how much you have to arrange with someone else. Everything you can set up yourself comes first; the services that go through a funeral home come last. Within the self-serve group, the three that carry live video come before the three that hold the page. You can check every one of those claims yourself, which is the point.
1. YouTube Live
Cost: free. Carries live video: yes. Needs a funeral home: no.
The most capacity for the least money, and nobody needs an account to watch. You get an unlisted link, you send it, people click it. It works on a decade-old phone and a hotel television.
Two things families get wrong. First, live streaming from a phone requires the channel to be verified and, on mobile, to clear a subscriber threshold — this can take a day or two to sort out, so do not discover it on the morning of the service. Second, unlisted is not private: anyone with the link can watch and forward it. For most funerals that is fine. If it is not, use something else.
The recording stays up afterwards, which is the quiet advantage. Half the people who "attend" a streamed funeral actually watch it two days later, alone, when they can cry without an audience.
2. Facebook Live
Cost: free. Carries live video: yes. Needs a funeral home: no.
Reach is the argument here. The extended family is already on Facebook, already sees the notification, and does not have to be sent anything. If the death has already been announced there, this is the shortest distance between the family and the people who care.
The cost is control. Comments arrive live and unfiltered, under the eulogy. Anyone can screenshot. And afterwards the video sits inside one person's profile, subject to their privacy settings and their account still existing — which is a poor long-term home for the only recording of your father's funeral.
Good for reach on the day. Not a place to leave it.
3. Zoom
Cost: free tier, with a limit; paid tiers remove it. Carries live video: yes. Needs a funeral home: no.
Zoom is the right choice when the service is small and you want it to feel like a room rather than a broadcast. People can speak. A grandchild in Melbourne can read a poem and everyone hears it. Nothing else on this list does that as naturally.
The free tier caps group meetings well short of a full service, so if you go this route, buy one month of a paid plan and cancel it after. It is the cheapest insurance on the list.
Assign someone who is not immediate family to host — muting, admitting late arrivals, watching the chat. Do not give that job to a grieving son. It is a real job and it will take his whole morning.
4. GetMemorial ⭐ Editor's Pick
Cost: free to create a memorial; paid tiers for more. Carries live video: no. Needs a funeral home: no.
Straight answer first, because this is our own product and you should be able to discount it accordingly: GetMemorial does not stream anything. It will not carry the service. If you are here for live video, use one of the three above.
What it does is the other half of the problem — the page the link lives on. You create a memorial before the service, put the join link on it, and send one URL instead of four separate messages. Afterwards the recording, the photographs, the eulogy text and the messages people leave all stay in the same place, and family can keep adding to it for years. The page does not expire and does not depend on anyone's Facebook account.
We also do not do fundraising, there is no Android app yet, and nothing here gets your obituary into a newspaper search. If those matter, one of the next two is a better fit.
5. Ever Loved
Cost: free memorial pages; paid options. Carries live video: no. Needs a funeral home: no.
Ever Loved is the strongest option on this list for the money side of a funeral. Fundraising is built in rather than bolted on, and the funeral-home price comparison is genuinely useful when you are being quoted numbers you have no way to judge. If the family is raising money for costs, start there rather than here.
The memorial page itself is straightforward and free. It is broader than it is deep — it wants to help you organise a whole funeral, not just remember someone — which is either what you want or more than you want. We wrote a longer comparison in Ever Loved alternatives.
6. Kudoboard
Cost: free tier; paid for larger boards. Carries live video: no. Needs a funeral home: no.
Not a memorial and not a stream — a wall people post to. For a virtual service it does one job very well: collecting messages from the people who watched, especially the ones who would never write a card and will happily paste a photo and two sentences.
It is designed for a moment, not a decade. Boards are per-occasion and the free tier caps how many posts you get. Use it alongside something permanent, not instead of one.
7. OneRoom
Cost: quoted through the funeral home. Carries live video: yes. Needs a funeral home: yes.
Fixed cameras installed in the chapel, operated by staff, streamed to a private link. The video looks like a service rather than a phone propped against a hymn book, and nobody in the family has to think about it on the day.
You cannot buy it directly — it depends entirely on whether your funeral home has it. Ask early, because it is a room feature, not a package you can add on the morning. If they have it, take it.
8. GatheringUs
Cost: priced per service. Carries live video: yes. Needs a funeral home: no, but it is a service rather than a tool.
A staffed virtual service: a producer runs the technical side, cues speakers, plays the slideshow, handles the person whose microphone will not work. For a large service with speakers in four time zones, that is worth paying for, and it is a completely different experience from someone's nephew sharing a screen.
It is the most expensive option here and overkill for twenty people. If the guest list is long and geographically scattered, it earns its price. See our GatheringUs alternatives if you want the fuller picture.
The Combination Most Families Actually Use
Free video plus a permanent page. YouTube Live or Zoom on the day, a memorial page that holds the link before and the recording after.
That costs nothing, takes about an hour to set up, and solves the thing that goes wrong most often — not the stream failing, but the link getting lost in a group chat, and the recording quietly disappearing three months later when the person who owned the account changed phones.
If you want the running order for the day itself — timing, who speaks when, what to test the night before — that is in our virtual memorial service guide. If a slideshow is part of it, how to build a memorial slideshow covers the format and length that hold people's attention.
Test It the Night Before
Every failure we have heard about was preventable and none of them were the platform's fault.
- Do a full rehearsal from the actual room, at the actual time of day, on the actual network. Chapel wifi is worse in the afternoon.
- Have a phone on cellular data as the backup camera, already logged in.
- Send the link twice: once two days before, once ninety minutes before. People lose the first one.
- Tell remote guests to keep themselves muted, then have the host enforce it anyway.
- Nominate a name — one person, not "someone" — to press record.
FAQ
Do we need permission to stream a funeral? Ask the venue and check with the officiant. Most funeral homes and churches are used to it now, but some have rules about camera placement, and a few will say no. Ask when you book, not on the day.
Is it disrespectful to stream a funeral? It was an unusual question in 2019 and it is a normal one now. What people generally object to is not the camera but being surprised by it — so tell the family it is happening, keep it off the front pew, and let anyone who wants to grieve off-camera sit where the camera does not reach.
How long should we keep the recording available? Longer than you think. The people who most need it are often not ready in the first week. Keeping it somewhere permanent rather than on a personal social account is the difference between "we have it" and "we had it".
What if an elderly relative cannot manage the technology? Do not send instructions. Send one link, and ask someone local to them to sit with them and open it. The technical problem is almost never the technology.
Can we charge or collect donations during a virtual service? Yes, and it is common. Ever Loved and GatheringUs both handle it directly; with a free platform you would post a separate donation link. Our guide to memorial donations covers how to word the request.
GetMemorial helps families build beautiful, lasting online memorials in minutes — a permanent home for the service link, the recording, the photographs and the tributes. Build yours at GetMemorial.com.
