Which Live Demo Tech is Right for You? HTML Capture vs. Interactive Demos

In this series, we’re taking a look at the different types of demo technologies companies tend to use for live demos. In case you missed it, our first and second pieces were focused on product demo videos and screenshots. Today is all about HTML capture.

Demos built with HTML capture show more functionality than a simple screenshot. Your product maintains some interactivity — think hovers and dropdowns. This makes for a higher fidelity experience that gives users a better taste for your product. It’s most commonly used for product tours, but some companies try to extend its usage to live demos.

There are, of course, pros and cons to this approach. Plus, not all HTML capture technology is built equal. Some capture methods let you make deeper edits to your product’s underlying code. This can make for even more realistic product experiences.

In this piece, we’ll help you navigate when to use HTML capture, what to look for when comparing vendors, and how to decide if they’re right for your live sales demo use case.

Pros and cons of using HTML capture tools for live demos

HTML capture technologies work by capturing your application’s frontend. With most HTML capture technologies, you can make surface-level edits to the UI, including logos, images, and text edits. These tools create an imitation of the product without the underlying functionality or interactivity. By linking screens together, you can make your demo clickable like a real application.

For some, that’s enough for the HTML capture to be useful as a live sales demo. Indeed, there are good reasons to pursue this approach.

Pros of HTML Capture for live sales demos

• HTML demos stay online even if your live app goes down. This eliminates some risks associated with live product demos, such as slow loading, outages, connectivity problems, unexpected changes, or exposing customer data.
• HTML capture tools are relatively easy to use. Captures are typically done through a Chrome extension with just one click per screen. Editing HTML demos is also usually straightforward, with little-to-no coding experience required.
• HTML demos are good if you want guardrails. HTML captures offer a curated view of your product. These can be useful for demos of complex products where you need to show prospects a limited amount of features and keep the conversation narrowly focused.

Some HTML capture technologies also allow you to make code edits, which lets you customize the look and feel of your demos. The best tools in this category give you the flexibility to edit HTML, CSS, and Javascript. That way you can inject additional interactivity back into your demo, and you can edit everything so it looks and feels exactly like you want it to. That’s why if you use an HTML capture tool for live sales demos, we recommend one that allows you to edit the underlying code.

However, with all HTML capture tools, there are significant cons to be aware of.

Cons of HTML Capture for live sales demos

• You can’t navigate freely: Where some might see a benefit in keeping guardrails up, most would prefer to give their sellers the option to deviate from a predefined flow. You can’t predict how a demo will go. Sales reps should have an environment that gives them the freedom to navigate to the parts of the product that will best resonate with the prospect.
• You’re limited in what you can edit: Most HTML capture tools are very limiting in what’s editable. For instance, you might be able to change text, swap an image, or even blur part of the product. But many demo builders need more control over what’s shown so they can customize demos for a variety of different use cases. Look for HTML capture tools that allow code editing to alleviate this concern.
• It will never be as interactive as your actual app: Even with custom Javascript, an HTML capture won’t reflect the interactivity of your real product. This risks prospects having an incomplete picture of your product and what it’s capable of. The product may come off as rigid, when in fact it can handle complex workflows and is highly customizable. To capture the full functionality of a product, some demo software is built to capture both frontend and backend web requests.
• Your product will always be out of date: By capturing your product at a moment in time, your demos will always lag behind your actual product. New features and functionality won’t get incorporated into the demo until you recapture everything.

Overall, we would recommend HTML demos for product tours and leave-behinds, but would exercise caution when considering them for live sales demos. Depending on your priorities, there are circumstances where an HTML capture tool can get you a demo that works for live calls. But you should be clear-eyed about its limitations, especially compared to approaches that are more purpose-built for that use case. Let’s explore three alternatives for interactive, live demos.

Three approaches to interactive demos: Which is best for you?

As mentioned earlier, live demos should include interactivity, allowing you to navigate to the features that matter most to your prospects. This flexibility isn’t always possible with a predefined, HTML capture demo. It’s equally important to demonstrate how your product works using data that is both relevant and aligned with your prospect’s specific use case. Let’s explore three approaches to live demos and examine the pros and cons of each.

• Using your live production environment, or live app, with data injection
• Creating a full app clone
• Using a full app clone with data injection

Using a live production environment with data injection

Showcasing your live app can effectively highlight the current version of your product. This approach works well if your product is stable and experiences minimal updates or changes. A live production environment stays up-to-date, is fully interactive, and allows you to focus on features most relevant to your audience.

Many teams enhance live demos by combining them with data injection, which enables you to customize datasets for specific industries or use cases. Some demo platforms support loading custom datasets directly into your live app, making it easy to tailor presentations for each audience.

Data injection simplifies demo preparation by allowing solutions engineers (SEs) or sales reps to quickly add relevant data to live demo environments. Without this feature, creating and maintaining demo data can be time-consuming and technical, often requiring hours of work. In contrast, data injection speeds up the process, enabling scalable, customized demos, accelerating sales cycles, and boosting efficiency for presales and engineering teams.

That said, live app demos come with risks. Concurrent users may interfere with each other’s experience, and unexpected UI changes could disrupt the presentation. Issues like outages, bugs, or connectivity problems can also derail a demo and risk losing deals. If these challenges are a concern, alternative demo methods might be more suitable for you.

Creating a full app clone

This approach clones your application and creates a self-contained demo environment by replicating the web requests and responses that drive your application. An app clone offers full functionality and interactivity with improved reliability, making it ideal for avoiding issues like outages, bugs, or unexpected UI changes during live demos. While it won’t reflect the latest updates to your product, its dependability often makes this trade-off worthwhile.

An app clone allows you to navigate workflows, maintain interactivity, and easily showcase key features. It is also highly scalable, with some demo platforms supporting hundreds of concurrent users—a critical capability for enterprise applications.

However, a common limitation is the lack of custom data injection on many cloning platforms, which can make tailoring demos to individual prospects challenging. To address this, some teams create multiple versions of the demo, each preloaded with data customized for specific audiences. Without such customization, it can be harder for prospects to see how your product meets their unique needs.

Using a full app clone with data injection

Injecting custom data into your demo, as outlined earlier, makes it more relevant to your prospects. Reprise’s demo creation platform is the only one that supports data injection in both live and self-contained demo environments. By adding synthetic data, you can automatically update charts, tables, and other elements, ensuring your demo is perfectly tailored to your audience. This allows you to populate an empty environment with realistic data or refresh it with relevant content in just a few clicks.

This method is highly efficient. You can quickly swap datasets to match different audiences, with connected data recalculating automatically and saving time. Instead of spending hours maintaining a production environment, your presales team can reset Reprise’s self-contained demo environment to its original state with a single click.

For many teams, this approach offers the best of both worlds: the flexibility of a live production environment with data injection and the stability of a full app clone. It reduces the risks associated with live app demos while enabling a high degree of customization. The main limitation is that app clones don’t update in real time, so you’ll need to refresh the demo to showcase new features or updates.

Key takeaways: Screenshot-based demos vs. live, interactive demos

For your reference, here’s a chart with some of the pros and cons of each live demo approach we covered above.

HTML capture tools:

• Pros: They remain online even if your production environment doesn’t. HTML + code editing provides a way to mimic the appearance and interactivity of your application within a predefined flow.
• Cons: Limited interactivity can hold teams back in the live demo process, especially if the prospect expects to see how the actual application works.

Live Production Environment with Data Injection:

• Pros: Shows the most up-to-date version of the product, full interactivity, and easy data customization.
• Cons: Risk of outages, bugs, user interface changes, and more affecting the demo.

Full App Clone:

• Pros: Reliable and scalable, with full product functionality, minimizing risks tied to the live production environment.
• Cons: Customizing datasets for prospects is challenging without data injection.

Full App Clone with Data Injection:

• Pros: Combines stability and interactivity, with easy, instant customization through data injection. Time-saving and scalable.
• Cons: As a self-contained demo, it doesn’t reflect the latest live app changes, but avoids associated risks.

The key takeaway? HTML capture tools offer flexibility that’s best for product tours, while interactive demos — especially those using a cloned app with data injection — show off a customized version of your application without the risks of a live production environment. Using a self-contained demo environment lets you consistently and quickly deliver relevant, easy-to-navigate demos that win deals.