Last updated: March 8, 2024

Looking for an event management platform that is easy to use, reliable, can fit your budget, and cover the functions you need?

To make your search for the best event management software easier, we’ve reviewed 25 event software solutions on the market. Start with our checklist, then see our detailed comparison to find the best fit for your event!

How to Compare Event Management Software

  • Satisfaction: Are the current organizers and participants satisfied with the platform? Is the tool user-friendly? And is the software both robust and secure?
  • Popularity: Is the platform being used by more events compared than others? The quantity of reviews and app downloads serves as a compelling indicator.
  • Features: Does it provide features you need? A comprehensive, all-in-one solution that efficiently handles these functions can save you countless hours.
  • Cost: How much do they charge if your event ticket is not free? What’s the additional cost?

Best Event Management Software: Comparison & Review

Below, we’ve listed 25 event planning software and tools, accompanied by aggregated ratings and comprehensive reviews. 

Event management software - a full comparison

(Scroll down to see more details)

1. Eventbrite

  • Rating: 4.4
  • #Reviews: 5,736
  • Fee of $500 Ticket: $20.29

Eventbrite is a popular ticketing solution for casual or entertainment event like meetups or concerts. The system is customizable and can also be used to send email confirmations and reminders. It also allows people to register from both their phones and computers. They charge an 3.7% of the ticket price plus $1.79 per ticket.

Pros: Easy to use, popular for entertainment and sport events.

Cons: It only offers event ticketing and limited email campaign feature. The ticket fee is a bit pricey compared to other event planning software like Whova.

2. Whova (Best Product)

  • Rating: 4.9
  • #Reviews: 4,280
  • Fee of $500 Ticket: $13.49

Whova is a widely used event management platform with comprehensive features developed by top-notch engineers. It has received the Best Product Team Award at the Event Technology Awards, and it’s also named on G2’s Global Top 50 Best Software.

Whova’s event planning software covers:

  • Registration & payment
  • Badging & check-in
  • Mobile app
  • Lead retrieval
  • Event website

Pros: Cost-effective, easy to use, fully integrated all-in-one system.

Cons: Not a good fit for a party or wedding, or events with less than 50 attendees.

Loved using Whova! The registration module was incredibly easy to use and had every feature that I wanted. The name badge generator was really helpful, too. I also loved that the program could be integrated/exported, for display on our website as well as in the app.

— Jamie Payton, Associate Professor @ Temple University

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3. Cvent

  • Rating: 4.3
  • #Reviews: 2,715
  • Fee of $500 Ticket: $35.00

Cvent is a cloud-based event management platform that provides a diverse range of features, including venue sourcing, seat diagramming, event marketing, registration, attendee engagement, and event analytics. Cvent primarily serves large enterprises, particularly for their external events.

However, many event organizers cited the software as outdated and challenging to navigate, while attendees reported instances of the mobile app being buggy and unstable.

Pros: Comprehensive features

Cons: Expensive, hard to use

4. RingCentral Events

  • Rating: 4.4
  • #Reviews: 2,074
  • Fee of $500 Ticket: $75.00

RingCentral Events (formerly Hopin) is a virtual event platform for organizers to create, host and manage virtual events. Its virtual venue connects distributed attendees with live video, helping them learn and interact remotely. It also offers a registration and ticketing component.

Pros: It is a nice option for virtual events. However with most professional conferences moving to in-person.

Cons: This platform lacks sophisticated event specific tools such as web page generationbadging, and call for speakers.

5. BigMarker

  • Rating: 4.8
  • #Reviews: 820
  • Fee of $500 Ticket: $25.00

BigMarker offers a broadcast studio feature to create live and pre-recorded virtual events that can be multi-streamed to different platforms. It does not require advanced video production skills. The streaming is accessible through a web browser, making it ideal for marketers, event planners, and educators running webinar and virtual events.

Pros: A good fit for webinars and virtual events.

Cons: BigMarker cannot meet the needs of in-person events.

6. Zoom Events

  • Rating: 4.6
  • #Reviews: 6,206

Chances are you’re already familiar with Zoom and how to use it, making their virtual event/webinar system, Zoom Events, an intriguing option. The platform is meant to help organizers run events online, such as hosting sessions via streaming, helping share events and manage ticketing, and more.

Pros: Zoom Events combines a few different steps of the event planning process, and is worth considering if you’re planning a small-scale event that won’t need all the features that all-in-one event planning software can provide. However, you may still want to consider these platforms if they allow you to opt in and out of which features you’ll need.

Cons:  It is mostly been focused on smaller courses and webinar series. It also lacks some of the more advanced features other platforms might have, like digital booths for sponsors and exhibitors.

7. Webex Events

  • Rating: 4.4
  • #Reviews: 770

Webex Events is an event management software that covers event app, registration, and some attendee engagement tools.

Pros: Webex Events integrates with the Webex streaming for virtual events.

Cons: It lacks some advanced features such as call for speakers, website builder and session feedback.

8. Splash

  • Rating: 4.5
  • #Reviews: 378

Splash is a comprehensive event marketing platform designed for creating branded and highly customizable, mobile-friendly event experiences. Some of its best event features include event promotion tools, ticketing, on-site check-in, and an app for event organizers.

Pros: Splash offers many event branding capabilities and website templates for event promotion.

Cons: It lacks some popular features such as mobile app for attendees and exhibition management.

9. Tripleseat

  • Rating: 4.4
  • #Reviews: 804

TripleSeat is an event management software designed for the hospitality industry. It offers accurate and detailed event mapping, access to in-depth reports and analytics, customizable branding, and credit card payment processing.

Pros: It is a great tool for hospitality (venues) for you to keep the chef, manager, and staff up-to-date.

Cons: Not a fit for full life cycle event planning and management.

10. AirMeet

  • Rating: 4.3
  • #Reviews: 867

Airmeet allows users to create fully customized webinars and hybrid/virtual events that interest the relevant audience. Automate registration, check-in, and post-event follow-up. It also offers exhibitors and sponsors engaging virtual booths.

Pros: Good for attendee networking, and high quality customer support

Cons: AirMeet is initially built for virtual events, hence its in-person features are not as sophisticated as Whova.

11. SpotMe

  • Rating: 4.5
  • #Reviews: 194

SpotMe offers event management tools to help enterprises event organizers to streamline their event planning processes. It integrates with CRM and marketing automation systems, manage registrations and other projects. Users complained about login failure.

Pros: SpotMe offers a good range of event management features and tools.

Cons: It’s not cost effective for ordinary event planners, and also the software is not as reliable as some others.

12. Stova

  • Rating: 4.2
  • #Reviews: 248

Stova (formerly Aventri) offers event registration and virtual event capabilities, targeting mainly enterprise users. Some customers recently complained that it’s “outdated and not flexible”.

Pros: Stova generates custom reports for almost all aspects of the event.

Cons: It is overpriced and didn’t much upgrades over the recent years.

13. RainFocus

  • Rating: 4.6
  • #Reviews: 41

RainFocus offers an event marketing platform that can capture event data and personalize the marketing and learning campaigns. RainFocus aims to simplify event registration, content management, exhibitor activation, and on-site experiences. It is mostly used by enterprise customers.

Pros: A data driven event marketing platform that is suitable for enterprise customers.

Cons: Less popular than other platforms. Slow at developing new features.

14. eShow

  • Rating: 4.3
  • #Reviews: 51

eShow provides web-based tools and solutions for trade show management teams, such as registration, event websites, and abstract collection. It integrates with some AMS and CRM, and also offers a very basic mobile app.

Pros: A cost-effective platform with a good set of features for in-person events.

Cons: Its interface may not be as intuitive as some other platforms. It also does not offer virtual event features. The development team is small.

15. BrightTALK

  • Rating: 4.0
  • #Reviews: 90

BrightTALK is a technology platform businesses use to host webinars and virtual events, and episodic series. The robust platform is geared towards lead generation and works best if you want to generate revenue from recorded virtual sessions.

Pros: It’s best suited to corporations or educational institutions that provide knowledge workshops or seminars – similar to the MasterClass Online Classes platform.

Cons: The a tool is not as comprehensive as Whova and Cvent.

Event Software for Audience Response

16. Slido

  • Rating: 4.7

A well-known Q&A and live polling tool, Slido enables users to crowdsource top questions in order to drive meaningful conversations. A live poll increases attendee engagement and participation, so many event apps and conference management tools also provide live poll features.

If you’d like to have an event software providing other features as well (personalized agenda, announcement, networking, gamification, document/photo sharing), check out other tools like Whova.

17. Poll Everywhere

  • Rating: 4.5

Poll Everywhere is also an audience response software suitable for events. Attendees can use their smartphones to submit live responses to your activities. It supports multiple choice questions, Q&A sessions, word clouds, rankings, competitions, and more. The platform includes a web app, mobile app, and integrates with PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote.

18. Quizizz

  • Rating: 4.9

Quizizz can be used as an event gamification features. With Quizizz, organizers can engage the attendees in live sessions or remote learning. Trainers receive instant feedback, which can be used to further improve the content.

Team Collaboration Software for Event Management

19. Airtable

  • Rating: 4.6

Airtable is a cloud-based collaboration platform that allows individuals and teams to organize and manage information in a spreadsheet-like database. It combines the ease of use of a spreadsheet with the power of a database to help users organize, track, and manage their work in a flexible and customizable way.

Airtable can be used for a variety of purposes, such as event planning, project management, customer relationship management (CRM), inventory management, and more. It also integrates with various other tools and services, such as Zapier, Slack, and Google Drive, to further enhance its functionality.

20. Slack

  • Rating: 4.5

This popular resource for team communication has also been used for session interaction within events. Slack allows you to create different channels for various topics within one workspace; so you can have private channels for your team to communicate, or public ones for attendees to use as discussion topics throughout the event.

In addition to group conversation, users can also message each other one-on-one, make video and voice calls, and share files through the app.

While the easy communication is a great benefit, it can also be annoying for attendees to switch between platforms. You may want to consider a platform like Whova that can integrate communication features with the rest of the event.

21. Monday.com

  • Rating: 4.7

Monday.com offers easy-to-use building blocks like dashboards, automations, and integrations for event organizing teams to build the workflow and collaborate. The platform is flexible, adaptable and customizable to fit event organizers’ needs.

Monday.com can be combined with event management software such as Whova to maximize the team productivity.

5 Project Management Software for Event Planning

22. ProjectManager

  • Rating: 4.4

ProjectManager.com is a cloud-based project management software, scalable to teams and businesses, that provides an approach to organizing, collaborating, and accelerating project delivery. For those in search of a solution that focuses on team efficiency and project organization, ProjectManager is definitely an option worth considering.

While ProjectManager is not designed specifically for events, it offers a centralized interface of tools for event organizers to manage schedules, tasks, and collaboration, to make event project management more efficient.

It’s a great option for project management needs, but keep in mind that it lacks a comprehensive set of features in comparison to other event management software. If you’re looking for a solution that provides specific event tools for things like registration, event engagement, or speaker management, check out the other options on this list.

23. BaseCamp

  • Rating: 4.1

Basecamp is another powerful project management software useful for event planning teams. It combines message boards, calendars, to-do lists, documents & file storage, and more into one single streamlined and organized place. Every event staff will know what to do.

This is another useful project management tool for your event planning team to get things organized and well coordinated. It, however, lacks the interface for participants (such as attendees, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors) to access information. Most organizers use it together with other platforms such as Whova to manage their logistics tasks as well as deliver a full experience for their participants.

24. Trello

  • Rating: 4.4

Trello (by Atlassian) uses a “card-design” to help you manage your event tasks. Users love how easy it is to start using this software when compared to other more heavyweight alternatives. Trello’s design and user-friendly interface makes this software not only extremely effective, but also visually pleasing.

Trello is a lightweight project management software with an easy to use interface. Its unique card design helps you define different stages of tasks and keep track of event logistics. Similar to ProjectManager and Basecamp, it does not provide interfaces for your participants to access information, such as the event app and web pages. It also lacks other event specific tools such as check-in and name badge generation. However, it is overall a useful tool to keep your tasks organized and synced.

25. Asana

  • Rating: 4.3

Asana’s flagship service is a web and mobile “work management” platform that creates a main project board where you can track tasks and deadlines and collaborate with team members and stakeholders.

This software company offers pre-made templates for common event types, like workshops and virtual events, to ensure consistent and cohesive planning. Asana also integrates with popular apps like Outlook, Slack, and Gmail, so you can turn messages and emails into actionable tasks.

As PCMags 2023 Business Choice Award winner for project management, Asana’s real-time tracking and delegation features make it an excellent choice for event planners who need a tool that seamlessly integrates with their existing management applications.

How It Works – Whova Event Planning Software

Curious how event planning software like Whova works? The video below shows how Whova helps busy event organizers save time and money and enhances the overall attendee experience.

 

Contact Whova

Free Live Demo – Whova Event Management Software

Now that we’ve given you this breakdown of popular event planning software, you can confidently decide which options to further explore. Keep in mind that the “best” event software isn’t the same for everyone. This process of selecting your event software platform is about finding the solutions that work best for your event, so you can be a rockstar event organizer.

Click here to request a free live demo from Whova.

 

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