Likelihood to Recommend 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!
Read full review As far as I have found, Event Espresso has no peer. Yes, there are other WordPress plugins that provide for event registration, including a few available through Code Canyon, but none of them promise the rich feature set and robust support of Event Espresso. It seems to be the only real game in town, but luckily it's a good product. It's highly extensible, so it should scale well to any size or type of event. Through add-ons, it's doubtful there is an event scenario it can't handle. And because it runs on WordPress, you can incorporate it as part of your site--the plugin even does a good job of picking up design cues from your theme, or you can customize it using CSS.
Read full review Pros 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.) Read full review Instead of sending traffic to a third party, Event Espresso allows us to integrate our registration straight into our website. Easy to set up, dependable platform, and a variety of payment channel alternatives. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Integrating account creation with WordPress should be included in the core product, not an add-on. It's extremely frustrating to have to pay extra for that, especially when that add-on is not as flexible as it needs to be (for example, if someone is enrolling for a class on behalf of someone else). The data visualization is a mess. That feature doesn't seem to ever work and it should be left out until it does. The ability to show participant data on the front end is extremely limited. Event Espresso does provide a few hooks and some limited documentation on this feature, but I feel it should be more robust. Perhaps that can be a focus of future releases. Read full review Usability 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).
Read full review Reliability and Availability It's always working as intended.
Read full review Performance It's glichy
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review I looked at EventBrite, but it wasn't customizable enough for our needs and didn't provide the level of integration with our website that I desired. I also looked at the ticketing system offered by The Events Calendar for WordPress (by Modern Tribe), but it too lacked the feature set we needed. Only Event Espresso offered all the features, customization, and integration we desired and needed.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Event Espresso has literally changed the lives of our volunteer organization, saving hundreds of hours of time and eliminating the frustration of paper enrollment. The add-ons allow you to accomplish just about any event registration goals you might have. It's an extremely powerful product. Integrating the plugin into our website was a breeze, and it's approachable enough where volunteers can create the classes and conduct the online enrollment all in a web browser. Read full review ScreenShots