Pros and Cons of Eventbrite

Eventbrite is an event management website that has made it very easy to organise an event. We use Eventbrite to plan events, webinars and networking sessions as it allows us to sell tickets and manage bookings in one convenient place. With so many options out there for you to choose from, we thought we’d give you the pros and cons of Eventbrite to help you decide:

Price

The immediate benefit of using Eventbrite over its competitors is that for events with 25 tickets and under, there’s no upfront cost to use the platform. There are, service fees per ticket if you’re selling tickets (currently 6.95% + £0.59 per sold ticket*) but you can incorporate them into the cost of the ticket, so your attendees pay the fee.

If you want to manage larger events through Eventbrite things start to get more expensive:

£7.99 per event for up to 100 tickets
£19.99 per event for up to 250 tickets
£34.99 per event for unlimited tickets

If you run a lot of events with over 25 people then you may want to consider Eventbrite’s Pro plan. Pro starts at £19 a month and gets more expensive depending on how many tickets you want.

On top of these price plans, the service fee still applies to every ticket you sell.

* Prices correct at time of writing on 08/04/24

Payment Process

When managing bookings for events you want it to be straightforward and easy to use when accessing payments. Details can change, people cancel and when this happens you need to authorise a refund quickly. Eventbrite has its own payment processing system that sends the funds directly to your account. Your attendees can either stay either on your website or on Eventbrite to complete their purchase. This is also why Eventbrite is able to roll its service fee into the cost of the ticket, meaning you don’t have to pay upfront to host. It also allows you to issue refunds quickly which is important for keeping clients happy.

Ticket sales widget

When people are purchasing a ticket, they want it to be quick and easy, and more than likely they will be on your website looking for events that your business is running.

Being able to purchase tickets for an event without leaving your website helps to speed up the process, and will encourage more traffic to visit your website. Eventbrite provides the capability to have a ticket sales widget for your event on your website.

Customisable checkout forms

Sometimes you will need to know things about attendees depending on what the event is, such as special dietary requirements, business names and other details.

Eventbrite provide the ability to have customised questions on order forms, Eventbrite provides a lot of versatility with the ability to have ‘optional’ questions that are dependant on attendees’ answers to other questions. This is particularly useful when an order form has a checklist of pre-set options, with an ‘Other’ option at the end, which auto-generates a ‘please specify’ field when selected.

Pay-outs before your event

Getting the pay-out is very important when running an event as you may need to pay for the catering, marketing and other expenses.

Eventbrite’s default payment schedule is to send a single pay-out 3 days after your event, however using their Professional and Premium packages, you can apply to receive payouts before your events take place by requesting scheduled pay-outs.

Eventbrite just needs a few additional details to identify you. If approved, the pay-out schedule you choose will apply to all the events in your account.

Public listing on site and partner sites (with option of Private events)

People sometimes search for events via the booking system. Eventbrite allows you to search for events that are close to you and filter them down to your needs. This is great because when an event is created it will go on the public listing. It will be visible to people searching for events.

Some have noticed that Eventbrite’s search system isn’t entirely accurate, or it can be hard to find events, even when you know exactly what you’re looking for. This means you can’t rely on Eventbrite’s own website to generate you traffic for your event – you still need to market it.

Sales Analytics

Good marketing is based on data. It’s always a good idea to track the response to your efforts with analytics. Sales data can tell you where attendees are coming from, the peak times that people book, and more. This information is great to know as you can use it to your business advantage. Eventbrite has the advantage of being able to look into the analytics deeper and get valuable information.

You can create customised ‘promotional tracking links’. These links record how many people have clicked it. For example, if you send an email to a list of contacts – you can then see on Eventbrite how many people clicked the link that you sent them.

Discounts and codes capability for tickets

A great way to encourage people to book is by applying discounts and codes for tickets. Everyone loves a good discount!

This is especially great when you create and upload your event early. People will not want to miss out on a cheaper, early bird ticket. Eventbrite lets you offer discounts by providing promotional codes that your attendees can apply at check out.

In-house email invite capability

If you do not wish to use an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp, it can be difficult to promote the event through invites, unless you manually email them out. On Eventbrite you can upload email contacts and then send out invites using Eventbrite’s own in-house email marketing platform. This is convenient, but the customisation is quite limited. Of the pros and cons of Eventbrite, this is a major one, that often comes up in reviews. Whilst you can apply your branding to emails, the overall look is based on their existing templates. You can’t create them from scratch. If you’ve got a specific vision in mind, or very unique branding the out-of-the-box templates might feel pretty restrictive. If you have the skills, you can tap into Eventbrite’s APIs to build custom front-end experiences, but it’s probably only worth doing if you’re going to use Eventbrite a lot.

App and Website integrations

On Eventbrite you can connect different website and apps, such as Mailchimp and SurveyMonkey. For example, the Mailchimp integration allows you to automatically generate invites for an event. This could be a great way to promote your event depending on what platforms your target audience uses. After the event you will want feedback from the attendees. What better way to get it than sending them a SurveyMonkey link through Eventbrite.

If you’re already invested in a niche or highly specialised piece of software however, you might find you’re not catered for on Eventbrite’s app marketplace. If you rely on third-party software for live-streaming, attendee engagement, or website building, you might find things getting complicated. It’s likely that you will have to spend time finding work-arounds or manually transferring data, which can be time consuming and open you up to mistakes.

The pros and cons of Eventbrite

To sum up, Eventbrite is a well established, user friendly platform and has a wide range of features and tools. It’s an attractive solution for streamlining creating, promoting and managing your events.

However, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of Eventbrite before committing wholly to the platform. Whether it’s the fees charged, limited customisation options or third-party integration challenges. Eventbrite’s capabilities may not be robust enough for the scale of your business and events. Ultimately, the decision to use Eventbrite will depend on your specific needs, budget, and the level of control and customisation you require.

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Will Gordon

Editors Note: This article was originally posted in 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.