Event ticketing is a massive $65.04 billion industry that is expected to grow by another 14% by 2023. Event organizers who want to host great events focus on three important variables:
-
Event theme
-
Ticketing experience
-
Presentation
Today, we’ll look at the tools that make an excellent ticketing experience possible. We’re comparing — Eventbrite vs Meetup, two of the most popular tools used for organizing events.
While Eventbrite has been in the ticketing industry for over a decade, Meetup poses as a strong competitor owing to its more personalized, community-styled approach.
But which event ticketing system you should consider based on your unique needs?
What is Eventbrite?
Eventbrite is an event ticketing platform that allows you to showcase your events and purchase tickets. The events are displayed on the Eventbrite website, giving you an added advantage of their existing audience.
Eventbrite also offers an easy-to-setup system that you can use to get your tickets ready for purchase. However, since Eventbrite has an existing style to its website, there is a lack of customization available. The difference also becomes fairly obvious if a user is redirected to Eventbrite from your website.
What is Meetup?
Meetup is an online platform that helps people with similar interests meet up in person. While it started off as a community meetup organizing platform, users can also organize larger events through Meetup.
Meetup groups are organized around a certain topic or interest, and anyone can become an organizer to get started. Since users are looking for like-minded people to hang out with, it can be an excellent platform for organizing theme-focused events that appeal to smaller but more invested audiences.
Eventbrite vs Meetup — What are the main differences?
Let’s now compare both Eventbrite and Meetup on the individual uses for event organizers and see which one stands
Eventbrite vs Meetup — Ease of event setup
You do not need an app with a complex setup. Instead, the app should allow you to quickly set up the ticketing and completely get out of the way while you focus on organizing the event.
Since Eventbrite is designed to sell event tickets, it streamlines the process of setting up the event to sell tickets. You can sign up, create an event, set up the event details, price your tickets, and get ready to go. The payment processing is handled by Eventbrite and you can withdraw the payments through multiple methods as and when required.
Meetup is a community meeting platform so the setup is different. Here, you create new meetup groups that the website visitors can RSVP to. You can then choose to charge directly from the attendee or get the attendees to pay via Paypal on Meetup’s website. This can add an additional layer for your event attendees causing drop-offs.
Eventbrite vs Meetup — Event page customizability
Every event is unique and the event registration pages should reflect the same. Without that added uniqueness, it may become difficult to stand out among the hundreds of events on the website.
Both Eventbrite and Meetup offer minimal customization in terms of how the event pages look. You can add images, an attractive title, and change the description of your event. With Meetup, you can also add pictures of your previous meetups to encourage more people to attend.
However, neither of them allows you to create fully customizable experiences. For that, you need to set up event ticketing on your website — and that’s much simpler than it sounds.
If you already run a Shopify store, Evey Events is all you need to get the ticketing system running. It fits right into your store design and layout so you can customize every element of your event pages using Shopify’s site designer. Evey then takes over the technicalities of processing payments, delivering virtual tickets, and sending reminders behind the scenes.
You can also create custom tickets with an intuitive builder so they match your event theme and brand style. And getting started with Evey is simple — just install the app and create your events.
Set up your fully customized Shopify event ticketing experience with Evey.
Eventbrite vs Meetup — Integrations
Being able to integrate your event ticketing platform with other apps can be a great addition. It can help you work with existing technology for sending welcome and reminder emails, using calendars, tracking attendees, and even making payments available at your venue.
Eventbrite has an app ecosystem. This lets you enhance Eventbrite’s capabilities and helps you connect multiple systems together.
For example, you can connect your Google calendar to sync with the events. Along with that, you can keep Mailchimp and Eventbrite’s email lists in sync to ensure your emails are sent to all the customers automatically.
Meetup does not offer such integrations. But, you can use tools like Zoho Flow that integrate with Meetup Pro’s API to create custom integrations. If you need more customized integrations, you can get developer help to integrate the required tools with Meetup Pro’s API.
Eventbrite vs Meetup — Attendee management
Once the event is set up and the tickets are sold, you also need a way to manage your attendees at the event.
Eventbrite offers a complete event management dashboard that allows you to manage your attendees easily. You can confirm attendance, edit attendee details, manage the total headcount of your event, and more.
Meetup does not offer any attendee management tools. You only can see who in the group has RSVP’d a Yes for the event and manage the attendees based on that at the venue. This can become cumbersome if you are trying to host larger events.
Want a more seamless event management experience? Evey can be a great choice. It not only integrates with your Shopify store but also allows attendee management right from the Shopify dashboard. Evey also comes with mobile apps that let you manage your attendees at the venue from the convenience of your phone.
Eventbrite vs Meetup — Fees
Pricing can be a major deciding factor, especially if you’re hosting a small event. Both tools have very different pricing structures because of how they’re designed to be used.
Eventbrite charges a per-ticket fee along with the payment processing charges. It also allows you to choose between absorbing the fees or passing them to your customer.
To understand the pricing structure better, let’s take an example of a $10 event ticket. If you sell 100 tickets for this event, the expected revenue is $1,000. We’ll absorb the fees instead of passing them to the customer in this case.
So after the Eventbrite fees, your amount goes down to $876. This means Eventbrite charges $124 in fees for your $1000 revenue.
The lower fees at $124, mentioned above, are for the Essentials package. If you go for the Professional package, you would end up paying $219 in fees.
This is excluding the taxes and payment processing fees you will be charged on your sales. The impact of fees can become evident quite quickly as you sell more tickets.
There are many cheaper alternatives to Eventbrite that you can choose from instead.
Meetup is better in terms of fees. You only need to pay $35 per month per group or event you organize through the platform. Since it does not handle payments, you can then add the 2-4% transaction fees through the payment provider you use to take the attendee fees.
Want a better event ticketing and attendee management solution?
Eventbrite and Meetup are both great ticketing platforms. They allow event organizers to set up events and sell tickets without creating a website or handling payments. You can simply run an ad campaign to get traffic to your event page and make sales.
But for event organizers that are in the industry for long-term brand success, this can be limiting. You need more control to demonstrate your branding, make the event recognizable, and offer a premium experience to customers.
Evey is designed for such event organizers. It offers you full control of your event branding by integrating with a platform you’re already familiar with — Shopify. It also helps you design custom tickets with the attendees’ names, brand colors, and a custom QR code that can be scanned at the venue to verify attendance.
All that combined with your branding effort makes for a cohesive ticketing experience that your customers deserve.
