Bizzabo vs. Planning Center

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

Planning Center is incredibly helpful if you are in the business of putting on events, performances, or productions. In such situations, Planning Center will help you coordinate with a large group of people, clearly showing who is expected to do what during the order of a service. If you are planning a major event (a wedding service, a major birthday party, a work event, or any kind of production), Planning Center will foster both teamwork and clarity. The only scenario I can envision Planning Center not being helpful would be a more laissez-faire type of event, (like a "come and go" reception).

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

• Volunteer Management
• Scheduling
• File Hosting
• Communication tools
• Automated reminders

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

• Adding files to an item on a playlist can be hard to find outside of that set.
• Previewing songs on import gives very limited info - can be hard to find the correct one.

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

Planning Center is very user friendly on both the front and back ends.

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've not needed to use Planning Center support. In the few instances that I would have thought would "require support," tips and notices popped up on screen letting me know what was happening. There are very VERY few issues that I've found with Planning Center. The interface has been intuitive and powerful, so I've not needed to use their support service.

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

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

At one point, I was presented with both Asana and Trello as helpful tools to facilitate teamwork and collaboration amongst a large group of people. However, when it comes to putting on productions/services/events, Planning Center just seemed to have everything we need. I have never really once given thought to moving on from Planning Center. I'm sure Asana and Trello have much to offer, and I did briefly consider the, but Planning Center (for what we needed) was a grand-slam, home run.

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

• 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

• Planning Center Services has become an irreplaceable part of our Sunday gathering preparation
• Planning Center Music Stand is an invaluable tool for rehearsal and performance of songs each week
• Planning Center Giving helped us establish easy ways for folks to give online during COVID and beyond
• Planning Center Registrations helped us navigate attendance issues during COVID, and has always been our go-to for gathering information for Events

Incentivized