Finding the right event planning platform can transform how you organize, promote, and execute successful events. While industry giants like Eventbrite and Cvent dominate the market with comprehensive features, their premium pricing can be prohibitive for many organizations.

Fortunately, the event technology landscape now offers diverse solutions for every budget and requirement. At Rent2way, we understand the importance of choosing the right tools, so in this guide, we’ll examine the 7 best event planning platforms available today—highlighting their distinctive capabilities, pricing structures, and ideal use cases to help you make an informed decision for your next event.

1. Eventbrite

With a record of selling over 90 million event tickets in a year, Eventbrite stands high on the list of easy-to-use event planning apps. It has become a go-to app for flexible ticketing, marketing, and secure attendee check-in and out. You can also use its budgeting template, Canva integration feature, and analytics tool to reach as many people as possible.

In my opinion, the most useful feature of Eventbrite is its ads and promotion tools that allow you to make your event visible to its huge user base. Besides, you get to create homepages and exciting promotional pages, create graphics, and launch social media campaigns right from Eventbrite. Although you have to spend some dollars, landing your event on the Eventbrite homepage will increase its visibility by over 50%.

From event creation to marketing to seat allocation, Eventbrite helps you in every step with extensive tools, integrations, campaigns, and expert suggestions. You can create a venue map so that your attendees can decide where to sit. Apart from ticketing, organizers can also sell merch, food items, packages, etc., to earn some extra. Its AI-powered tools help you to write event summaries, agendas, and FAQ sections to grab more attention.

Despite all its great features, Eventbrite received a lot of criticism for not filtering scammers. Anyone can create a fake event on the platform and send automated emails using the app to make customers buy tickets to events that don’t even exist. Also, their customer support is not at all helpful when it comes to fast issue-solving.

Key Features

• Easy-to-use event creation tools
• Various ticketing options
• Safe money management channels
• Attendee management tools for check-ins and updates
• Marketing opportunities
• Analytics on ticket sales, attendee demographics, and marketing performance
• Best for: Small to medium-sized events
• Available on: iOS and Android

Pricing

Depending on which country you live in, the exact fee per ticket will vary. For example, up to 100 tickets in the USA cost $9.99 per event, with additional service fees of 3.7% + $1.79 per ticket and a payment processing fee of 2.9% per order.

2. vFairs

Coming to a more affordable all-in-one event management platform, vFairs is a great choice for small to large-scale virtual, hybrid, and in-person hosting. It has a record of serving over 20 million attendees and hosting events with the world’s largest brands, including Unilever, P&G, Amazon, Starbucks, Nestle, etc.

Each of its associates showered praise for the excellent customer support of fairs. From pre-event management to on-site support, you can ask for a dedicated team at every step of the event execution to quickly solve any complications. vFairs offers on-site badge printing, QR scanning, tech support, and face recognition for smooth check-ins.

With 100+ free templates, the event website is highly customizable with ChatGPT integration, branded logos, bios, floor map navigation, custom registration forms, and more. Apart from the organizers, vFairs provide great features for exhibitors and vendors, as they can create their own customizable booths.

For each booth, the exhibitors get dedicated chat support, analytics tools, and lead-generating tools. Therefore, they can instantly import contacts, sell products, and collect event data without competing with their fellow exhibitors.

Unfortunately, not all the features of vFairs work swiftly or smoothly. Some customers complained about bugs within the app and delayed delivery of graphic modifications, certificate generators, and turnaround updates.

Key Features

• Virtual and in-person event creation, custom registration, online and on-site stalls and booths
• CRM, automation, live chat, and secure payment gateway integration
• Unlimited attendee registration, ticketing, and custom branding
• Real-time reporting and analytics
• 24/7 customer support, even for attendees and exhibitors
• Best for: Medium and large-scale conferences
• Available on: iOS and Android

Pricing

vFairs offers 3 annual packages: Basic, Premium, and Enterprise Annual License. You can also book per event/product package with custom add-ons. Unfortunately, the platform doesn’t disclose its prices upfront on its official website.

3. Cvent Events

A perfect app for business events, Cvent primarily focuses on one key element of event planning – attendee engagement. Interactive event maps, 1:1 chatting, AI-powered content suggestions, custom games, instant hotel room reservations, etc. are some attendee-friendly features that helped Cvent manage over 7 million events.

Apart from easy registration and marketing, Cvent also allows you to source venues, book hotels, and search for vendors. Therefore, if you regularly host large-scale events with international guests, Cvent will be an ideal candidate.

Thanks to its huge network, you get to search for suitable event venues, check their availability, and directly make bids for your preferred destinations. The app provides you access to an extensive database of venues with reviews and detailed specifications for informed decision-making.

3D diagramming, virtual booths, and automated exhibitor management are some user-favorite features that make event management a breeze. Recently Cvent launched its new AI assistant to help organizers with event description and summary writing, registration planning, attendee support chatbots, and email marketing.

Get ready to invest your time on the app, though, as using the more advanced features isn’t easy at all. Besides, many users complain that Cvent takes a more complicated route for payments and invoice creation.

Key Features

• Venue sourcing, event registration, and travel management tools
• Email marketing, customizable website building for promotion
• Q/A sessions, live sharing, interactive polls
• Attendee tracking, post-event feedback, and analytics
• 3D event diagramming, floor plans, and seating layouts
• Best for: Large-scale in-person events
• Available on: iOS and Android

Pricing

For each registered attendee, Cvent charges $3 to $12 depending on whether you choose the Professional or Enterprise package. Plus, it takes a total transaction fee of around 3.99%. The good thing is, you can request a free demo.

4. Eventee

Want a free trial before putting your money? Go with Eventee for event ticketing, attendee management, agenda building, and sponsor engagement. The app is continuously developing to add highly useful and interactive features like global search and a custom menu.

With global search, attendees and organizers can sort and search for relevant events, sessions, exhibitors, speakers, and their fellow attendees. Another cool feature is the social wall that allows attendees to create their public profiles and share their experiences and photos while other users can like or dislike these posts to encourage networking.

As a White Label platform, Eventee allows you to rebrand the app according to your preferences. Even if you don’t want to spend extra bucks for it, there are tons of customization features to represent your brand on the Eventee home page. You can create branded invitations, emails, logos, and banners and align the background colors with your brand’s theme.

The best part? You get to create your own custom menu and make it visible to your attendees too! Within the app menu, organizers can add external links and event-related content such as overview maps, dress codes, nearby hotel addresses, restaurant menus, parking space locations, etc.

One key limitation of the app includes very few integration options for marketing and analytics. It also lacks multi-level ticketing options.

Key Features

• Event creation and management app, website, and promotional pages all in one package
• Effortless switch to virtual streaming, chatting, and polls
• User-friendly interface, customized branding
• Robust analytics and reporting tools
• Dedicated support and white-label solutions
• Offline mode for continuous event info flow
• Best for: Small to medium events
• Available on: iOS and Android

Pricing

Eventee allows for one free trial. Paid plans start at $1,499/event for the Solo package. Multiple Events a Year and Enterprise packages cost $2,999/6 events and $4,999/12 events, respectively.

5. Whova

Go paperless with Whova’s cutting-edge technology to digitize your programs and make them classy and modern-looking so that all your attendees and sponsors are engaged. Generate, scan, and share digital brochures, business cards, presentation slides, PDFs, documents, badges, coupons, and everything else related to event check-ins and marketing.

According to its users, Whova stands out among a hundred other event-planning apps for its most detailed attendee profiling system powered by SmartProfile technology. Attendees, sponsors, speakers, and general users get to create public profiles with their professional backgrounds, work experience, education, interests, and passions.

What’s more, you don’t even need to put this information manually, as Whova’s automated system collects it from sources like attendee registration systems, LinkedIn, and other public information. Speaking of automation, Whova excels at easing tedious tasks and event logistics with its automated tools.

Payment processing, registration, session scheduling, setting big-screen display info, web page generation, and many more time-consuming chores are done in just a few clicks. Yet, one common gripe with the app is that its premium plans aren’t exactly affordable, and customers can’t access all the advanced tools without purchasing an expensive package.

Key Features

• Detailed agenda creation and management
• Customizable notifications and push updates
• Live streaming and video conferencing integration.
• Virtual exhibitor booths and sponsor showcases.
• Analytics for tracking attendee engagement
• Smart ID cards, QR scanning, attendee profiling, and easy check-ins
• Best for: Large-scale business events
• Available on: iOS and Android

Pricing

For event registration, Whova charges $0.99 for each ticket, along with a 3.0% transaction fee. As for packages, the price starts at $1,000 for 500 tickets. It varies depending on the event size and type.

6. Eventify

A trusted partner of over 5,000 event managers, Eventify hosted some notable events over the years, including the World Heart Summit, CanadianSME Business Expo, ePharmacy Summit, and more. Using the app, you can smoothly perform all the basic tasks, from creating detailed event schedules to managing guest lists and sending out invitations.

Eventify stands out for its numerous personalization options for organizers, attendees, and exhibitors. Using its AI-powered networking tools, you can create personalized promotional materials based on the attendee’s Interests. Exhibitors and sponsors can display a digitized version of their brand featuring product photos, details, personalized PDFs, etc.

Thanks to Eventify’s interactive event maps, managing programs with multiple venues or complex layouts is easier than ever. These maps help attendees navigate the event space with ease, reducing confusion and improving user experience.

The app smoothly integrates with other popular tools like Google Calendar, Outlook, and various social media platforms. Hence, your attendees are always engaged without missing any notifications or updates.

Coming to the negatives, Eventify faces setup problems while handling a huge amount of users. It doesn’t offer enough materials to get started with large-scale events on your own.

Key Features

• Fully customizable event websites with a variety of themes, templates, and branding designs
• AI-powered personalized recommendations based on the event type
• Detailed analytics and reports to track attendance and engagement
• Virtual meeting rooms, live streaming integration, and tools for managing virtual attendees
• Real-time team collaboration with built-in chat features
• Best for: Medium to large-scale events
• Available on: iOS and Android

Pricing

For multiple events, Eventify offers these annual packages: Register ($50/month), Engage ($125/month), and Advance ($200/month).
Single event packages are: Register ($249/event), Engage ($799/event), Advance ($1,199/event).

7. Bizzabo

A trendy tool that creates engaging, data-driven experiences, Bizzabo empowers both in-person and virtual attendees. It allows organizers to manage attendees, speakers, sponsors, and sessions in one place. To fulfill all your event needs, the registration process is highly customizable, with options for ticketing, discounts, and attendee data collection.

Bizzabo is unique for its dedicated dashboard for sponsors that lead retrieval and make it easier to demonstrate ROI for sponsors. It also features live streaming, virtual booths, and networking tools to ensure a cohesive experience for all participants.

From the mobile app, both organizers and attendees can access chats, meeting scheduling, and virtual lounges for better networking opportunities. As it integrates with popular tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom, and Slack, you can ensure seamless data flow across platforms.

Now, for the downsides, the interface can be a little complex for some users. Also, some design options and flexible choices are limited.

Key Features

• Networking and engagement tools for all types of events, including in-person, virtual, and hybrid
• Free branded event websites with drag-and-drop functionality=
• Customizable registration options and safe money management
• Push notifications to keep attendees informed in real time.
• Data-driven insights for revenue collection and feedback
• Best for: Medium to large-scale events
• Available on: iOS and Android

Pricing

Annual packages cost $499 per month for every user. The prices for single events aren’t disclosed on Bizzabo’s official website. You can also ask for premium add-ons, paying some extra bucks.

Final Words

All our picks have all the basic features to plan and execute successful events. While choosing an app, consider the scale of your event, platform pricing, and ease of use.

As we’ve included apps with cutting-edge technologies, free plans, extensive customization, and huge promotional capabilities, you can easily find the right pick for all your events, from corporate conferences to wedding gatherings.

Read more: 12 Event Planning Software – Top Choices For Professionals