Explara v. Eventbrite: Choosing the right event ticketing partner

There’s a lot that goes into organizing a successful event. Fortunately, there’s some great ticketing options that will free up time and let you focus on making your event awesome. Explara and Eventbrite are two of the biggest online ticketing platforms where you can create, promote and sell events far better than you could have on your own.

Choosing the perfect ticketing partner for your event is very important and it can get pretty confusing sometimes. To help you out, we compared the two over On-Boarding, Event Management, Pricing, Features, Marketing & Promotion, Customer Data Management and Pay-Outs and came up with some interesting results.

1. On-Boarding

Taking your event live

Explara has a streamlined and extremely user-friendly on-boarding process. It’s simple, clean and lets you publish your event quickly. If you’re in a hurry to go live you can even skip a couple of details and fill them in later.

Eventbrite is just as fluid and intuitive. The single page on-boarding process is convenient and lets you go live in minutes. You can scroll up for a quick correction at any time. Easy as 1–2–3.

2. Event Management

Managing your event online

Once you create your event, both, Explara and Eventbrite provide a powerful organizer dashboard that lets you control and manage your event (a dashboard is where you can edit event details, promote your event, integrate your tracking tools, provide customer support, manage attendee and ticket buyer lists and access reports among other things).

The Explara dashboard is organized and clean. It makes using tracking and promotional tools easy. Explara also allows you to tack in SEO and Social Media for your event page directly through the dashboard which is something we missed in Eventbrite.

Explara dashboard

Eventbrite dashboard

The Eventbrite dashboard is quite powerful in its own right, if a little cluttered. It is identical to Explara’s in all major tools but does not allow Support for queries through the dashboard. Queries would be routed to the event organizer’s registered e-mail.

Eventbrite does allow for extension integration with a large number of third-party tools that you may be using on a day to day basis directly through the dashboard. Both platforms support MailChimp so that makes managing mailing lists easy.

Eventbrite lets you manage your event and access all management features through their app. Explara offers a Point of Sales app for event day management but it doesn’t have the event dashboard on app yet.

3. Pricing

Ka-Ching

This is where Eventbrite takes a beating. Eventbrite hits you for 2.50 % + $ 0.99 per ticket sold. Explara charges 1.99 % + $ 0.49 per ticket sold. It’s not over yet. Explara goes lower on its fee per ticket; up to 1.5 % for large volumes.

Both could probably lower their fees per ticket further if you had a really huge event, but in terms of standard fees, Explara comes out on top.

The platform fees (levied by Explara and Eventbrite) can be passed on to the buyers. For events with low ticket fees or high ticket volumes, Explara’s charges work out to be incredibly low. Especially considering Explara also offers lower ticketing fees for large volumes. Which means there’s potential to reduce the charges by a further 0.49 % per ticket or further, depending on your event. Go figure.

Eventbrite works out to be slightly cheaper for high ticket value events with an upper cap on service fees of $ 9.95. Explara offers an upper cap of $ 10.0 on its service fees.

Payment Processing

Eventbrite and Explara offer payment processing via PayPal. So you have a standard processing charge per transaction with payments being linked directly to your PayPal account. On the other hand, Eventbrite offers their own payment processing gateway that charges 3.0 % per transaction.

4. Features

What you get and what you can do with it

Eventbrite has a neat little feature that lets your customers connect via Facebook and see which of their friends are going for the event. They also provide a social stream for the event that pulls photos and social posts with specific tags. This makes it much easier for promotion and marketing.

Fundraising events are slightly easier on Eventbrite as Explara offers fundraising as an additional option where you need to contact the team to set it up. Eventbrite offers Auctions and Crowdfunding through BiddingForGood, CrowdRise, Fundly and FirstGiving extensions.

Fundraising features on Eventbrite

Explara features offer a great solution for session based events. Through sessions you can ticket and manage passes for specific slots in conference schedules, plays in theatre festivals or day passes. This proves to be a powerful tool for events with multi-session events. Explara also lets you collect event feedback from your customers through its event feedback form so that you can get a head start on planning your next event.

For private events, Explara lets you be selective through Invitation Only Registrations. Eventbrite has a similar feature for private events but Explara’s option is easy to set up and use.

Ticket level attendee forms by Explara let you reduce data redundancy and make for faster ticketing for attendees. Explara’s communities feature helps you get better visibility among its own customer base.

Basically, both offer some great features across different types of events.

Features available in Explara

Features available in Eventbrite

5. Marketing & Promotion

Marketing is king. Make sure your event sells

One of the biggest advantages of going with Explara for your event is that Explara offers online marketing for your event through social posts, event page SEO, targeted mailers to Explara customers based on past event preferences along with standard automated marketing solutions.

Eventbrite offers similar automated marketing solutions including featuring your event in their newsletter subscriptions and targeted mailers. They also leverage their considerable database to ensure you reach the right kind of audience.

However, Explara actively markets your event on social media at no extra cost. You get creative and social media campaigns specially for your event. You can also promote your event through their channel partners.

Social Media promotion by Explara

6. Customer Data

Yes, you should be a lot more interested in this

Explara gives you complete access to your event attendee data including contact details of buyers and card abandonment details so that you can re-engage with your attendees for future events.

Apart from this, Eventbrite and Explara offer customized buyer forms that let you collect the information you want from your attendees. You can customize your data headers and download it easily.

7. Pay-outs

Receiving your payments

If you go for Eventbrite’s payment processing option, you will receive your payment 5 business days post event. A PayPal set-up will get you your payments on the go, as each ticket is sold. Explara has the same set-up when you use PayPal and you can get paid as soon as you register a ticket sale.

For other payment methods, Eventbrite has a standard pay-outs system with a 5 business day transfer set-up after your event. Explara offers pay-outs in 3 business days in India and only supports PayPal integration internationally.

Explara and Eventbrite are two of the best online ticketing platforms out there and you’d be hard pressed to pick one. That said, the lower pricing along with the marketing and promotion solutions offered by Explara make a lot of difference. Even if you decide to pass on the platform service fees to your buyers, pushing a smaller fee is definitely going a factor.

Eventbrite has some really good extensions that allow you to use tools you’re already using and comfortable with. It also provides a strong support for fundraising events. But ultimately, Explara edges ahead with the value they provide and at a lower price.