Likelihood to Recommend 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 Hopin is very suitable for large events involving 100+ people where there are only a couple of people speaking. You can have a bunch of features such as networking and all in all, is quite a professional experience to use. For smaller groups, It takes too much effort to set up and isn't worth using over
Google Meet or Zoom.
Read full review Pros 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 Awesome for managing several sets of panelists Very easy to manage event attendees Love the chat functionality during the events, enabling the audience to connect with each other Hugely simple for anyone with little tech knowledge to design and run an event Cost effective for the volume of events we run, where we need scale and quality Live streaming an event is also very well catered for Branding across the platform is simple to implement Read full review Cons 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 The biggest hangup we've encountered is from guest speakers who need to join us on either tablets or smartphones. Hopin doesn't play well with mobile devices for onscreen guests. I'd like to see the broadcasts in vendor booths be recordable in the way broadcasts in the sessions or on the stage are. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We most likely will, but with such a high annual renewal rate, we are forced to look at alternative solutions yearly when that license fee comes due
Read full review Usability I'm a pretty tech-savvy person but I still feel that Hopin was pretty user-friendly even for those of you who are less tech-savvy. Great thing is, you can play around and test the platform with the free version which allows you to get familiar with it before committing to the paid. I learned most of it on the free version which then made me more confident when deciding to use the paid version. Not only did it help me on the setup side, but it also proved to me that this was what we needed to do what we needed to do.
Read full review Support Rating For the most part you're able to get a response from a support person within a few minutes, but there was a stretch when Hopin was reshuffling its staff that it sometimes took 24-48 hours, which is too long. However, as long as the staff remains stable - which seems likely - then its Support team is usually quite responsive.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 We were with a company before Hopin - we explored elsewhere due to cost. Pros were design and custom look. We moved to Hopin, it was innovative at the time, although the design wasn't strong the features were. The majority now have the same features. So we did leave Hopin for another platform again because we wanted a custom look, and we were preparing for hybrid. Hopin wasn't ready. We soon realised other platforms we came across are complex, difficult to use. We left and came back to Hopin.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Without Hopin, it would have been impossible to host an event at the scale and user interface that we did, with the staff limitations we have. Hopin enabled us to execute a very high standard with limited resources. For example, before Hopin, we could only attract about 100-200 attendees. With Hopin, we 3x our registrations and attendees. The data collected from their system on attendees allows us to more accurately speak to our target market based on their tracked habits during the event. Read full review ScreenShots