Arts People vs. Bizzabo

Arts People is one of the best business decisions our theatre has ever made. It relieves staff of some of the tedious, time-consuming tasks while increasing the ease of selling tickets and subscriptions. That's our goal--to sell tickets easily, in a user-friendly manner at a reasonable cost. That's what Arts People allows us to do. It works for tiny venues (to greet each guest personally) as well as huge venues (ticket scanning solution). It is less appropriate for a one-time event. An Arts People user should have an ongoing series of events to take advantage of all the features (it even has a membership feature) and the time for training.

Incentivized

Bizzabo is really well suited for large-scale hybrid events. In this day and age, it's imperative to have a software that can successfully accommodate virtual and in-person attendees. Bizzabo blends these experiences extremely well. It is also great when event agendas are complex and need customizations - Bizzabo offers flexibility and has options for tracking session attendance. Bizzabo does not work well for smaller events with in-person only registrations. The risk of the equipment not working is high and, for smaller events, not worth the stress!

Incentivized

• Their customer service is unsurpassed. Sometimes several folks will be working on different aspects of a complicated request, to address all the details. Once things are exactly the way I want it, as in season subscription package sales, a representative checks in to make sure we're satisfied. Only then is the ticket closed.
• They have a very comprehensive, full featured ticketing system for all types of events and venues. Their dynamic door list is our favorite feature--no static printed door lists for us. That helps us greet each patron with up-to-date information and check them off the list. While my box officers are doing that, I can be at a remote location and see in real time who has arrived. We can make collaborative decisions about, for instance, holding the curtain for a critics arrival or adding a chair for an unexpected guest of a ticket-holder. We can keep a couple of tickets on hold for box officer discretion to address those unforeseen ticket window requests. Great flexibility which allows us to be efficient while giving good customer service to our patrons.
• Even though the system is full-featured, it is not beyond the skills of those who considers themselves non-technical. Two sessions of training will get a box officer up-and-running. Because there are different levels of access, we don't have to worry about someone changing essential programming while they are checking in patrons.
• They made their ticket landing page look like our website, so people don't even realize that they have been taken somewhere else. Plus, the patron can easily navigate back to our actual site, seamlessly.

Incentivized

• Bizzabo makes setting up registration for an event very simple. You can make it more complex if you require that, but if you only need to capture basics and payment, it is easy to set up.
• Making a custom event website is also very easy. There are a lot of widgets build in with content you might need, such as Speakers. While it takes a little bit of use to figure out how it works, once you know the basics, creating a multi page website with all your event info is super easy.
• Creating custom ticket types and promo codes is full of options and it’s easy to allow many different options for purchasing tickets. From expiring ticket types to tracking promo codes, you can allow people to buy tickets with unlimited options (early bird, sponsor discounts, etc.)

Incentivized

• Anything I've asked for, I've gotten so I don't see any need for improvement at the moment.

Incentivized

• Our attendees complained about having to login every time to view content
• You cannot be in the system working on the backend while a colleague is. We have found that the work doesn't save.
• The email system is hard to format within Bizzabo
• Staff would sometimes get kicked out of interact rooms. It would be nice to add virtual backgrounds in this space.
• Reports were missing data and it took two weeks to get corrected
• When recording a session, you have to go back and download it, and then upload it. This process should be easier.

Incentivized

Bizzabo has become integral to our ability to support and run events, so we will continue to renew as long as Bizzabo continues to run a great product.

Incentivized

Bizzabo is extremely user friendly. The website builder is very simple to use and can creative some astounding looking websites, with no technical know how. The setup of the account, adding users, managing events and user access to events, as well as creating events from scratch or from existing "templates" (actually just standard events that we set a far off date from and copy as a template) is very simple, but powerful as you can pick and choose exactly what to copy over. It is also a very user friendly platform for the attendees and speakers (both for virtual events and physical events for speakers as the speaker, and partner, portal is very simple to use and can be custom created for the exact specifications you need).

Incentivized

We have always gotten prompt responses from the Bizzabo team when reaching out. Additionally, in the 2 years we've been working with them, we've never had any kind of platform outage that impacted us.

Incentivized

We've never had any complaints from users about access to the platform or load times. From and admin portal perspective, no issues there either.

Incentivized

Support is always quick to respond. However, some issues are out of their hand, and in these cases, it is a laborious process to then submit a suggestion for how to improve the product. However, where they can rectify an issue, support has gone above and beyond to deliver and do so efficiently and in a friendly manner.

Incentivized

I say this to everyone I talk about Bizzabo with - it was the best platform onboarding experience I've had with a vendor in 25 years in the industry. They were extremely thorough in the onboarding, ensuring that we were successful throughout the process. They had a frequent meeting cadence and the customer success manager was extremely prompt in answering any questions we had, jumping on calls when necessary.

Incentivized

• Eventbrite is better for single, one-time events but isn't as full-featured as Arts People.
• Brown Paper Tickets is clunky to use and harder to change globally when an event changes or adds shows.
• Vendini--never used it because when I researched 10 different ticketing companies, they were the least helpful. They didn't listen to our needs, and instead told us what we should have. They were much more expensive than Arts People as well.
• Constant Contact is truly great as a marketing tool. But their events feature was awkward and the payment method was Paypal. However, since it's integrated with Arts People, we can use Arts People for sales and Constant Contact for marketing.

Incentivized

Bizzabo is definitely a great choice for your event tool. I don't find it as robust as Cvent, but I do find it more useful than an Eventbrite. We selected Bizzabo because of our initial support team, but they eventually moved on, which started our problems with Bizzabo. It gives us more data than Eventbrite, which we appreciate.

Incentivized

The terms and pricing were very clear and understandable upfront. The ability to understand the drivers and levers that can be changed and the impact on the pricing really drove a high level of trust in the process.

Incentivized

It's spreadsheet heavy and has to be exact. The devil is in the details and if you miss a detail you have to fix it and redo it with all the changes that need to be made manually.

Incentivized

• Positive - Our online vs phone call or in-person sales have increased steadily over the past 4 years since using Arts People. Less labor for us, more sales.
• Positive - People are buying their tickets earlier than they used to - to reserve a coveted seat in a possible sold-out performance. That makes planning our marketing easier--whether to offer HotTix or special coded offers for shows that have fewer sales.
• Negative - Some older folks still have problems with redeeming their subscription tickets for individual tickets without our personal assistance. We've been trying to pinpoint what that is--and Arts People helped us make a few adjustments. Sometimes people don't like to log in. That's one of the challenges of an integrated system. If the patron's profile changes in a way that impacts their subscription links, we need to step in. However, the overall time it has saved us in managing subscriptions is immeasurable.

Incentivized

• Since we have only used Bizzabo for a year we are still learning and figuring out the nuances of it but I would say that one thing it has done is impressed our current clients which makes them want to continue to work with us.
• We hope to use Bizzabo as a tool to recruit more clients i the future
• It has cut a third party out of the system as we have our own dedicated platform to use and do not have to rely on a separate agency to use a different platform.

Incentivized