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
Ticket Tailor
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
London-based Ticket Tailor offers their online ticket sales system supporting different volumes of events with differing pricing tiers, touting a relatively low cost of service compared to other ticketing solutions.
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 want to quickly and easily sell tickets to an event without a lot of hassle or absurd fees, this is a great platform. I'm not sure this would work well for complex, multi-tiered ticket sales for events that have thousands of tickets.
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.
Customer support representatives were amazingly responsive to questions. We received replies even outside of their stated available hours. They always understood the question/issue immediately and were very thorough and specific in their explanations and step-by-step instructions. Ticket Tailor customer support is among the best I have seen in any industry. Quick, smart, and always helpful.
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.
Ticket Tailor is much more flexible at a much lower price point than Eventbrite. It was, by far, the most practical and affordable solution. The same functionality with Eventbrite would have required the more expensive "professional" price level which was prohibitively expensive for our small company, especially in its early stages.
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.
