Event Espresso vs. Planned

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.

Incentivized

Planned is well suited when you are stuck for ideas and require creative collaboration from a network of unique vendors.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Hands-on oversight of execution of a virtual event and client success management
• Connecting event industry professionals with companies in need of their services
• Highlighting services that an event industry professional or company offers

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The platform can use some tweaking (i.e.: when reserving hotels, adding guest rooms, including meeting rooms - instead of just spaces, which can be confusing when searching).

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.

Incentivized

Planned is the only event planning software company we have worked with, and plan to work with. The team behind the platform is constantly innovating to enhance features and the overall experience for both vendors and users.

• 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.

Incentivized

• We were able to get repeat business from a new client brought to us by Planned
• We were able to learn more about what types of virtual event services we'd like to grow as a business, as a result of working with Planned
• We have not seen a financial ROI for our business yet because we have only worked with one client on the platform and it has been costly for us to accommodate this client

Incentivized