Event Espresso headquartered in Utah offers an event registration and management platform supplying automated help for ticketing and ticket purchases, registration forms and pricing, promotions and correspondences (e.g. email), multiple attendee registration, and other features.
$79.95
per year
Eventzilla
Score 8.2 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Eventzilla provides a free management and registration solution targeted for organizers of any size. This solution allows users to host free events at no charge. However, for paid events, there is a $1 flat fee per attendee.
The solution can be used for conferences, fundraisers, classes, festivals, parties, concerts sporting events, networking events and more.
N/A
Pricing
Event Espresso
Eventzilla
Editions & Modules
Personal Support License
$79.95
per year
Everything Support License
$299.95
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Event Espresso
Eventzilla
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Free forever to register and set up events
Free forever for free events
$1 flat fee per attendee for paid events
No margin on credit card processing fees which are payable directly to the payment gateway.
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.
If you are an organization who is hosting a ticketed event such as a concert, a block party, a 5k fun run, or anything that may require a pre event registration / ticket purchase, this product could potentially be very useful for you! My Fraternity used Eventzilla's product for our last four events including a concert, a 5k run, and 2 golfing tournaments! Using this tool, we were able to raise significantly more money than we had from previous events. Additionally, this product was exceptionally useful for the 5k because of the amount of information we needed to collect through the registration form prior to the event. Using the Eventzilla forms, we were able to discover participants' age, gender, t -shirt size, # of registrations, phone #, email, name, etc. and provide them each with an excellent, personalized experience.
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.
Customization features for emails could be improved since most are automated reminders.
Sometimes too difficult to create a simple event with loads of choices available. Many times we simply want to create a normal event without much hassle.
As, stated before, the only thing that I found to be difficult when using this software was pointing an existing domain to the Eventzilla Registration landing page. I followed all of the steps as illustrated and I continued to experience errors when trying to navigate via the domain. I could not get in contact with support and so we chose to use the extremely long Eventzilla domain. This was not a big deal, but it would have been nice to use our own domain that we purchased
Support is adequate, but sometimes has difficulty grasping all of the pieces of a question. Once, I asked for help with a relatively technical integration that we were using to track event effectiveness, and their answer left me wondering if they even understood that the feature I was asking about even existed in their system.
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.
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.
We use it for internal events, so mostly our ownemployees join the events. These are usually fun events, so ROI is not expected.
Most of the times, we are simply organizing recreational events for our employees, so it boosts the morale of the participants to have a proper organized setup for the events they attend.
