How to Choose a Ticketing Platform for Your Events
A practical guide to selecting the right event ticketing platform for your startup. Covers pricing models, attendee experience, and integration needs for everything from small meetups to large conferences.
Key Decision Criteria
Event Scale and Frequency
High PriorityA monthly meetup for 30 people has fundamentally different needs than a 2,000-person annual conference. Smaller events benefit from simple, free-tier platforms while larger events need reserved seating, multi-track scheduling, and robust check-in tools.
Fee Structure
High PriorityTicketing fees range from 0% (Luma for free events) to 3.7% + $1.79 per ticket (Eventbrite). For a $100 ticket, that's nearly $6 per sale. Decide whether you absorb fees or pass them to attendees — and model the math at your expected volume.
Attendee Experience
Medium PriorityYour ticketing page is the first impression of your event. Evaluate customization options for branding, mobile check-in flow, and post-purchase communication tools like automated confirmation emails and calendar invites.
Data Ownership and Integrations
Medium PrioritySome platforms restrict access to attendee data or charge extra for exports. Ensure you can sync attendee lists with your CRM, email marketing tool, and community platform without manual CSV wrangling.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Are your events free, paid, or a mix of both?
Free events: Luma offers unlimited free event hosting with no per-ticket fees — hard to beat. Paid events: Eventbrite charges 3.7% + $1.79 on their standard plan, while Tito charges 3% with no fixed per-ticket fee, making it cheaper for low-price tickets. Mixed: Choose a platform that handles both without forcing you onto a paid plan for free events.
How important is custom branding on your event pages?
If your events are a core part of your brand (product launches, developer conferences), you need full control over colors, logos, and page layout. Tito offers clean, developer-friendly customization. Eventbrite provides templates but limits deep branding on lower tiers. Luma's pages are sleek by default but less customizable.
Do you need on-site check-in and badge printing?
For events over 100 attendees, manual check-in creates bottlenecks. Eventbrite includes a free check-in app with QR scanning. Tito supports check-in via API and third-party integrations. Luma offers basic QR check-in. If you need badge printing, Eventbrite has the most mature built-in solution.
Red Flags to Watch For
Locking into annual contracts before validating event demand
Many ticketing platforms offer discounts for annual commitments, but if you're running your first few events, you don't yet know your cadence or scale. Start on monthly or pay-per-event pricing until you've run at least 3-4 events and understand your real volume.
Ignoring payment processing fees on top of platform fees
Platform fees (e.g., Eventbrite's 3.7%) are separate from Stripe or PayPal processing fees (typically 2.9% + $0.30). On a $50 ticket, you could lose $3.50+ in combined fees. Always calculate the total cost per ticket, not just the platform's advertised rate.
