Business Operations

The Top 5 Virtual Waiting Room Software

Virtual waiting room software helps manage online queues and control user access to digital services, ensuring a smooth and equitable user experience during peak times or high demand.

Last updated on Dec 02, 2024

Written by Mirren McDade

Technical review by Laura Iannini

The Top 5 Virtual Waiting Room Software Includes:

1. AWS Virtual Waiting Room
2. Cloudflare Waiting Room
3. NetFUNNEL
4. Queue-Fair
5. Queue-it

Virtual waiting room software is a digital solution that allows businesses to manage the flow of visitors within their websites while ensuring a seamless and well-organized waiting experience for users. These solutions are particularly useful when dealing with high traffic volumes during sales events, product launches, or online registrations, as well as for healthcare providers offering online consultations. By implementing virtual waiting room software, organizations can prevent their sites from crashing during high demand periods, ensure fair access to limited online resources, and improve overall user satisfaction.

Virtual waiting room software works by redirecting excess visitors to a virtual queue, where they wait for their turn to access the desired webpage or application. The waiting room typically displays real-time updates on the user’s queue position and estimated waiting time, thereby keeping them informed. Additionally, these solutions offer a range of customization options, allowing businesses to tailor the waiting experience to their unique brand identity.

With a renewed focus on eTicketing and digital queue systems, it is important that you find the right sized solution for your needs. To assist you in this, we have compiled a shortlist of the top virtual waiting room software solutions on the market. These providers have been selected based on their functionality, ease of use, scalability, integration capabilities, and customer feedback.

AWS Virtual Waiting Room

AWS is a prominent cloud computing service provider, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers worldwide. Their open-source solution, AWS Virtual Waiting Room, is designed to help businesses manage and protect their websites during high traffic periods by buffering user requests and providing customization options.

The AWS Virtual Waiting Room creates a cloud infrastructure that temporarily offloads incoming traffic, acting as a holding area for website visitors. Users are assigned a queue number upon entering the waiting room and admitted to the target site when capacity allows. This queue-based system ensures that traffic spikes do not overwhelm the website, maintaining its accessibility for customers. To further protect downstream systems, the AWS Virtual Waiting Room generates signed, time-limited JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), allowing downstream APIs to validate users’ waiting room passes before processing requests.

The solution can be integrated as a standalone tool or used with OpenID, offering a set of OpenID Connect (OIDC)-compatible APIs that work with existing web hosting software supporting OIDC identity providers. Additionally, AWS provides a sample waiting room website, demonstrating a minimal end-to-end waiting room solution for customization purposes.

Cloudflare Waiting Room

The Cloudflare Waiting Room is designed to control the number of users accessing an application by placing excess traffic into a virtual queue, creating a smoother and more predictable user experience. The Waiting Room maintains custom limits for user access by monitoring and gating requests, ensuring low latency, and a seamless end user experience.

Users are clustered by the time of their request, only allowing new users in when active ones leave or when their session cookies expire. This effectively minimizes wait times in the queue. Cloudflare Waiting Room also provides customization options with HTML and CSS for flexible template design and supports multiple languages and custom branding. Using encrypted cookies, Cloudflare’s Waiting Room issues a ticket to each visitor in the queue and manages traffic flow to protect the application from sudden spikes in requests.

The tool syncs data within and across locations for accurate wait times and runs in each location with a global Anycast network to prevent any single point of failure. The Waiting Room is easily set up through the Cloudflare dashboard or APIs and provides a low maintenance solution for managing traffic during periods of high demand.

NetFUNNEL

NetFUNNEL is a virtual waiting room service provider serving over 450 clients, ensuring stable service operation even during peak traffic periods. Their real-time service monitoring allows users to keep an eye on their overall service and individual segments through the NetFUNNEL monitoring dashboard, providing comprehensive insights into system performance.

NetFUNNEL’s resilient architecture operates on an independent server, guaranteeing stability without impacting the server connections of customers even if NetFUNNEL were to shut down. This means users can maintain uninterrupted service even in exigent circumstances. Moreover, NetFUNNEL enables businesses to create a fully customizable waiting screen that reflect their unique brand identity. Organizations have access to various customization options, such as adding a progress bar, displaying expected wait times, showing the number of people waiting, editing messages, and incorporating the organization’s logo.

Ease of use is also a key factor, as NetFUNNEL’s simple control panel allows users to readily add and manage virtual waiting rooms. By registering URLs in the project monitoring settings, applying virtual waiting rooms becomes a seamless, more efficient process.

Queue-Fair

Queue-Fair offers a patented virtual waiting room software designed to manage website traffic and improve user experience during high-traffic periods. By implementing Queue-Fair, websites and apps can maintain quick and fair service for visitors, ensuring a smooth experience even during traffic spikes.

The virtual waiting room can be applied to an entire site or to specific pages to control traffic flow and prevent crashes. It also offers a fair access solution for users accessing popular events or products by assigning randomized queue numbers. The system operates with 24-hour protection, automatically activating the virtual waiting room when traffic exceeds capacity thresholds. This feature helps maintain website responsiveness and shields against malicious bots. Queue-Fair also provides traffic-monitoring to support informed decisions about server scaling without losing visitors or incurring unnecessary costs.

The secure signature technology helps prevent duplicate purchases and offers protection against bots. With easy setup and adaptability across various platforms, businesses can start using Queue-Fair’s innovative solution to manage their website traffic more efficiently and enhance the user experience.

Queue-it

Queue-it is the leading developer of virtual waiting room services to control website and app traffic surges by offloading visitors to a waiting room. The robust SaaS platform ensures that systems stay online during peak periods, visitors stay informed, and you can capture key sales and online activity. Queue IT is used by enterprises and governments around the globe.

Queue-it serves a diverse range of industries, ensuring reliability and fairness during peak demand for online retailers, ticketing companies, educational institutions, and public sector organizations. Notable clients include Ticketmaster, The North Face, Home Office U.K., and The London School of Economics. Queue-it offers a variety of features to optimize and capitalize on peak traffic moments, including bot mitigation, exclusive access functionality, detailed traffic analytics, and fully customizable waiting rooms.

Established in 2010, Queue-it is headquartered in Denmark and offers 24/7 support through offices in the U.S., Australia, and South Korea. Queue-it’s fast integration process is compatible with over 25 edge, server-side, and client-side connectors and can be completed within a day. Furthermore, Queue-it maintains GDPR and CCPA compliance by ensuring no sensitive data passes through its system.

Everything You Need To Know About Virtual Waiting Room Software (FAQs)

What Is Virtual Waiting Room Software?

Virtual waiting room software is a type of cloud-based software solution that organizations and businesses use to control the online traffic to their websites or mobile apps. This software helps to prevent website crashes during times of high traffic and ensures fairness in times of high demand, such as online ticket sales or government registrations.

The most common way people experience virtual waiting rooms is in a digital queue, just like with a physical queue, a virtual waiting room helps organizations to managed traffic in an orderly fashion. This is very important as the experience users have on the website needs to be positive in order to leave them with a good impression of the business that might encourage them to visit again. Having mechanisms in place to ensure the site doesn’t become so overwhelmed that the user experience is impacted negatively is important. This is what makes virtual waiting room software so beneficial – particularly to businesses with high or highly fluctuating volumes of traffic.

How Does Virtual Waiting Room Software Work?

Virtual waiting room software works by automatically redirecting visitors to a virtual space, or waiting room, while they wait for the site to have capacity for them.

In this virtual waiting room, visitors are given a queue position that reflects their position of priority. When it is their turn, they are automatically directed to the site with their unique queue token that allows them to continue their desired action, without further disruption or delay. These virtual waiting rooms are often customized to resemble the original site in both style and URL, even though they are hosted elsewhere. This means that the strain of additional visitors waiting for access is placed onto the external servers, rather than your organization’s.

What Features Should You Look For In Virtual Waiting Room Software?

Some key features to look out for when considering which virtual waiting room software to choose include the following:

Communication. To avoid confusion and frustration, users should be provided with real-time information on their position in the queue, an estimation of their wait time, and any other relevant updates. This kind of clear and transparent communication is helpful for managing user expectations and leaving them with a positive impression of the organization.
Queue management. By managing the queue largely on a first come, first-served basis, you ensure that it is fair and cannot be gamed. A fair queueing system is helpful for maintaining a sense of equality amongst waiting users.
Access control. It is important to set limits on the number of users accessing the systems at any one time to avoid risking server overload. If an organization requires access for VIP or priority customers, access controls may be needed to facilitate this.
Scalability And Performance. Since virtual waiting room software is a tool designed to streamline the users experience and avoid issues with site performance, it is important that these solutions provide ways to handle incoming traffic effectively. The ability to manage large numbers of users and scale the systems to accommodate them and their demand is crucial for ensuring performance remains strong during peaks times, while load balancing is useful for distributing incoming traffic evenly across servers for optimized performance.
User Experience. A good virtual waiting room software solution should be able to ensure the waiting space is responsive and accessible on a range of devices, including tablets and smartphones. Users and administrators also benefit from a user-friendly interface that is intuitive and easy to navigate, as this enhances the overall experience and reduces the risk of confusion and frustration.
Analytics And Reporting. To continually improve the user experience, it is helpful to have a way to gain insight into user behaviors and monitor queue performance. A good virtual waiting room software solution should gather insights for optimization, as understanding user patterns can lead to improvements in the waiting room experience.

Mirren McDade

Senior Journalist & Content Writer

Mirren McDade is a senior writer and journalist at Expert Insights, spending each day researching, writing, editing and publishing content, covering a variety of topics and solutions, and interviewing industry experts. She is an experienced copywriter with a background in a range of industries, including cloud business technologies, cloud security, information security and cyber security, and has conducted interviews with several industry experts. Mirren holds a First Class Honors degree in English from Edinburgh Napier University.

Laura Iannini

Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.