Eventbrite is the name people reach for by default when they need to sell a ticket, which is exactly the problem. It was built to be a marketplace, not your events page, and the moment you look closely at what that costs, three things show up: a service fee stacked on top of payment processing on every paid ticket, attendee data that lives in Eventbrite’s database instead of yours, and an events page that sits on eventbrite.com instead of the community site you actually built.
None of that matters for a single one-off paid meetup. It matters a lot once you are running events every month, your list is the asset, and you are paying Eventbrite’s fee on every single ticket whether the event is five dollars or five hundred. The fee does not shrink as your community grows. It compounds.
This guide ranks five real Eventbrite alternatives, starting with Eventonomy, the free WordPress events plugin we build at Wbcom Designs for community and membership sites. We will stay honest about where Eventbrite itself is still the right call, because for a single public ticketed event with no existing site to host it on, it sometimes is.
Last updated: 6 November 2026
Quick Verdict
- →Pick Eventonomy if you run a WordPress community or membership site and want events and ticketing built in, with no per-ticket cut going anywhere.
- →Pick Ticket Tailor if you want to keep selling on a hosted platform but swap Eventbrite’s percentage fee for a flat per-ticket price.
- →Pick Humanitix if you want a hosted platform similar to Eventbrite but with lower fees and the money actually going somewhere useful.
- →Pick Zeffy if you run a registered nonprofit and want genuinely free ticketing with zero platform cut.
- →Stay on Eventbrite if you are running one public ticketed event with no existing site, and marketplace discovery matters more than fees.
In This Guide
Market Snapshot
The Scale of What Eventbrite’s Fee Touches
By Eventbrite’s own FY2024 annual report, the platform hosted 4.7 million events in nearly 180 countries and sold 83 million paid tickets to 89 million monthly users in 2024. Every one of those paid tickets carried a 3.7% + $1.79 service fee on top of 2.9% payment processing. On a $25 ticket, that is roughly $3.50 gone before the organizer sees a cent, and it is why organizers running recurring events start pricing alternatives the moment ticket volume climbs.
- Eventbrite’s FY2025 annual report shows about 4.6 million events, 258 million tickets and over $3.0 billion in gross ticket sales in 2025, a decline from 2024.
- Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Eventbrite for about $500 million in December 2025, and the deal closed on 10 March 2026, so check current fees and terms before relying on older pricing.
- Eventbrite’s pricing page still lists a 3.7% + $1.79 service fee per paid ticket plus 2.9% payment processing per order (checked November 2026).
Why People Look for Eventbrite Alternatives
The search almost always starts with the same math. Eventbrite’s standard fee is 3.7% of the ticket price plus a flat $1.79 per ticket, and that is before a separate 2.9% payment processing fee on the order. Organizers can pass the fee to the buyer or absorb it, but either way it is charged on every paid ticket, every time, with no volume discount. Sell 40 tickets a month at $30 and you are handing Eventbrite somewhere around $160 a month, every month, for a feature set you are mostly not using. Free events are free to list, which is why Eventbrite still makes sense for a one-off RSVP page, but the fee shows up the moment money changes hands.
The second reason is ownership. An Eventbrite event lives on eventbrite.com. Attendee emails, RSVP history, and repeat-attendance patterns sit in Eventbrite’s database, reachable through Eventbrite’s export tools on Eventbrite’s terms. If Eventbrite changes its fee structure, its design, or its policies, that is simply what happens to your event page. Nothing about it is yours to control, and a CSV export once a quarter is a poor substitute for owning the underlying table.
There is a related, quieter cost: every attendee who registers through Eventbrite becomes, functionally, Eventbrite’s contact, not yours. Eventbrite can email that attendee about other events in its marketplace, including a competitor’s event in the same category, because the attendee relationship sits on Eventbrite’s platform rather than inside your own list. For a community organizer, that is the exact audience the free or low-cost event was supposed to build.
The third reason is where the page lives at all. A community that already has a site, a membership list, a forum, or a BuddyPress or BuddyNext community, wants its events to live there too, inside the same login, the same member profile, the same notification system attendees already check. Sending members off to a separate platform to RSVP to something your own community is hosting breaks the thing that made it a community site in the first place. That is the gap Eventonomy exists to close, and it is the same gap, with different trade-offs, that Ticket Tailor, Humanitix, Zeffy, and Eventzilla each answer in their own way.
1. Eventonomy, Best Eventbrite Alternative for Community Sites
Eventonomy is the free WordPress events and RSVP plugin we build at Wbcom Designs, and it starts from the opposite assumption Eventbrite makes. Eventbrite assumes your event needs to be discovered on a marketplace. Eventonomy assumes you already have the audience, on your own site, and just need the calendar, the RSVPs, and the ticketing to live there instead of somewhere else.
The free plugin ships month, list, grid, and upcoming calendar views, daily, weekly, and monthly recurring events, custom RSVP questions, guest-count RSVPs with an automatic waitlist once an event fills, add-to-calendar links, an ICS feed, and email reminders. Members get a My Events dashboard and a submission form, so people in your community can run their own calendar entries without you touching the admin area. None of that sits behind a paywall, and none of it routes an attendee off your site to register.
Eventonomy Pro is what replaces Eventbrite’s paid-ticketing role specifically: Stripe, PayPal, or WooCommerce checkout with tax, booking fees, and coupon codes, plus door check-in with secure tokens, week and day calendar views, maps and geocoding, SMS reminders through Twilio, organizer analytics, a discovery feed, and custom email templates. Pro runs $99/year for one site, $199/year for five sites, or $249/year unlimited, with lifetime pricing from $249 to $629 if you would rather pay once. There is no percentage fee on top and no per-ticket surcharge layered in afterward. The price is the price, and it does not move with how many tickets you sell.
Run the math on a real season of events and the gap widens fast. A community hosting two paid events a month at an average $25 ticket and 25 attendees pays Eventbrite roughly $2,100 a year in service fees alone, before payment processing. The same calendar on Eventonomy Pro costs $99 a year flat, with the only per-transaction cost being whatever Stripe or PayPal already charges for processing, the same processing fee Eventbrite passes through separately anyway. The fee gap is not a rounding error; it compounds with every event you add.
The feature with no Eventbrite equivalent at all is community integration. Eventonomy is tested against BuddyX, so events inherit your theme instead of looking like an embedded widget. On BuddyNext, event activity surfaces in the community feed, search, and member profiles, with RSVP reminders landing in the same notification bell members already check. On classic BuddyPress, Eventonomy Pro adds a native Events tab to every group. If you are already running a community on BuddyX or BuddyNext, our guide on replacing The Events Calendar with Eventonomy walks through exactly what that migration looks like, and our guide to adding paid ticketing to a community site covers the Pro checkout setup in detail.
Side-by-Side Comparison Table
| Platform | Starting Price | Per-Ticket Fee | Hosted On | Own Your Data | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eventbrite | Free for free events | 3.7% + $1.79, plus 2.9% processing | eventbrite.com | No | One-off public ticketed events |
| Eventonomy | Free / $99-$249/yr | $0 platform fee, only your payment processor’s own rate | Your WordPress site | Yes | Community & membership sites |
| Ticket Tailor | Free for free events | From £0.22-£0.60 flat per ticket | tickettailor.com | Partial | Flat-fee hosted ticketing |
| Humanitix | Free for free events | 2.1% + $0.99 (1% + $0.99 for charities) | humanitix.com | Partial | Lower fees with charitable payback |
| Zeffy | Free, always | 0%, funded by optional donor tips | zeffy.com | Partial | Registered nonprofits only |
| Eventzilla | Free for free events | $1.50 flat, or 1.9-2.9% + $1.50 by tier | eventzilla.net | Partial | Lean paid registration, no community layer |
Fees and tiers change; check each vendor’s own pricing page before you commit. The column that actually decides the match for a community site is “Hosted On”: Eventonomy is the only option here that runs on infrastructure you control, inside the site your members already use.
2. Ticket Tailor
Ticket Tailor is the alternative most often recommended purely on fee structure, because it replaces Eventbrite’s percentage-based fee with a flat per-ticket price. Free events cost nothing to list, up to 5,000 free tickets a year. Paid events run on either Pay As You Go, at £0.60 per ticket plus VAT charged as you sell, or Pre-Paid Credits purchased in bulk starting from £0.22 per ticket, with credits that never expire. Payment processing through Stripe is separate, typically around 2.9% + $0.30 in the US, the same processing cost nearly every platform in this list passes through.
The flat-fee structure is the real win: a $100 ticket and a $10 ticket cost the same £0.60 on Ticket Tailor, where Eventbrite’s percentage scales up with price. Registered charities get 50% off all fees. Where Ticket Tailor does not help is the hosting question: your event page still lives on tickettailor.com (or a connected custom domain on higher plans), and your community still has to leave your site to register. It solves the fee problem without solving the ownership problem.
3. Humanitix
Humanitix is the closest like-for-like swap for Eventbrite: a hosted ticketing marketplace with a similar event-discovery layer, just with a different fee philosophy. Standard paid tickets carry a 2.1% + $0.99 fee, dropping to 1% + $0.99 for registered charities and schools, plus the same 2.9% + $0.30 payment processing most platforms charge separately. Free events are free to list. The fee itself is noticeably lower than Eventbrite’s 3.7% + $1.79, and Humanitix puts 100% of its profits toward charitable causes, which is the platform’s actual differentiator rather than just a marketing line.
Humanitix is a genuine fee downgrade if you want to stay on a hosted marketplace model rather than self-host. On a $40 ticket, Eventbrite’s fee lands around $3.27 before processing, while Humanitix’s standard rate comes in closer to $1.83, a difference that adds up fast across a few hundred tickets a year. It does not solve the data-ownership or on-your-own-site problem any more than Eventbrite does, though: attendee data lives in Humanitix’s system, and the event page lives on humanitix.com, not inside your community.
4. Zeffy
Zeffy is the only platform in this comparison that is actually, verifiably 0% fee, not “low fee” or “fee waived under conditions.” Zeffy covers all credit card and processing costs itself and makes money through an optional tip prompt shown to donors at checkout, which the platform says roughly two out of three people leave. There is no mandatory charge layered on anywhere.
The catch is eligibility, not pricing: Zeffy is built exclusively for registered nonprofits, not general organizers, community groups without that status, or businesses. If your organization qualifies, it is hard to argue with genuinely free ticketing, and for a fundraiser or annual gala where every dollar is meant to reach the cause, that matters more than almost any other feature on this list. If it does not qualify, Zeffy is not an option regardless of how good the fee structure looks, and like the other hosted platforms here, your event page still lives off your own site, on zeffy.com rather than inside the site donors already trust.
5. Eventzilla
Eventzilla is a lean, no-frills Eventbrite alternative built around predictable per-registration pricing rather than a marketplace experience. Free events stay free with unlimited creation. The Basic paid tier is a flat $1.50 per registration for a single ticket type. Pro adds 1.9% + $1.50 per registration for unlimited ticket types and deeper reporting. Plus runs 2.9% + $1.50 for white-labeling and speaker management. A Scale tier removes per-registration fees entirely in exchange for custom annual billing, aimed at organizers running enough volume that a flat annual number beats any per-ticket math.
Eventzilla’s tiered flat-fee model gives organizers more pricing predictability than Eventbrite’s blanket percentage, and the Basic tier in particular is cheap for simple single-ticket-type events: a $20 ticket on Eventzilla Basic costs $1.50 flat, against roughly $2.53 on Eventbrite before payment processing. It is, however, a registration tool first: there is no community layer, no member dashboard beyond the ticket itself, and nothing resembling a BuddyPress or BuddyNext integration, so it solves the fee problem for a standalone event without solving where that event actually lives.
Eventbrite was built to help a stranger discover your event. Eventonomy was built for the version of the question that matters more once you have a community: how does the member who already knows you RSVP without leaving?
Which Should You Actually Pick
Match the platform to where your audience already lives, not just to the lowest fee on paper. The fee is easy to compare in a spreadsheet; where the attendee relationship actually sits afterward is harder to see until month six, when you realize you cannot email your own list without going back through someone else’s platform.
- A WordPress community, membership site, or BuddyPress/BuddyNext build: Eventonomy. Nothing else here keeps the event, the RSVP, and the ticket inside your own site.
- A hosted platform, but Eventbrite’s percentage fee feels punishing at volume: Ticket Tailor’s flat per-ticket pricing.
- A hosted, Eventbrite-style marketplace but at a meaningfully lower fee: Humanitix.
- A registered nonprofit that wants zero fees, full stop: Zeffy, if you qualify.
- A single ticketed event with simple, predictable per-registration pricing: Eventzilla.
- One public event, no existing site, and marketplace discovery actually matters: Eventbrite can still be the right, narrow answer.
For more on the broader WordPress events category, see our best event management plugins for WordPress roundup, and if ticketing is the specific feature you are evaluating, our paid ticketing on a community site guide covers the Stripe, PayPal, and WooCommerce setup Eventonomy Pro uses in place of a platform cut.
FAQs
What is the best free Eventbrite alternative for a WordPress community site?
Eventonomy. Its free plugin covers calendars, RSVPs, guest counts, a waitlist, recurring events, and a member submission dashboard, all inside WordPress, with no fee charged anywhere in the free tier.
Does Eventbrite really take a cut of every paid ticket?
Yes. Eventbrite charges a 3.7% + $1.79 service fee per ticket plus a separate 2.9% payment processing fee on the order, by Eventbrite’s own pricing page. Free events are free to list; the fee only applies once a ticket has a price.
Which Eventbrite alternative has the lowest fees?
Zeffy, at 0%, but only for registered nonprofits. Among platforms open to any organizer, Eventonomy charges no platform fee at all since it runs on your own site and payment processor, and Ticket Tailor’s flat per-ticket price beats Eventbrite’s percentage fee at higher ticket prices.
Can I run paid ticketing without any per-ticket platform fee?
Yes, with Eventonomy Pro. Because it is self-hosted, checkout runs through your own Stripe, PayPal, or WooCommerce account, and Eventonomy charges a flat annual license fee instead of a cut of each sale. The only cost per transaction is whatever your payment processor charges, which every platform in this comparison passes through regardless.
Is Ticket Tailor actually cheaper than Eventbrite?
Usually, especially on higher-priced tickets, because Ticket Tailor charges a flat fee per ticket rather than a percentage of the price. On a $100 ticket, Eventbrite’s 3.7% + $1.79 comes to roughly $5.49, while Ticket Tailor’s flat rate stays the same regardless of ticket price.
What’s the catch with Zeffy’s 0% fees?
Eligibility, not pricing. Zeffy is built exclusively for registered nonprofits; it is not available to businesses, community groups without nonprofit status, or individual organizers. Zeffy covers processing costs itself and relies on optional donor tips to stay funded.
Does Eventonomy work without BuddyPress or BuddyNext?
Yes. Eventonomy is a standalone WordPress events and RSVP plugin that works on any theme. BuddyPress and BuddyNext integration is an added layer for sites already running a community, not a requirement to use the plugin.
Can I import my existing Eventbrite events into Eventonomy?
Eventonomy’s free plugin ships an importer for The Events Calendar, EventON, Events Manager, and WP Event Manager. A direct Eventbrite importer is not currently part of that list, so check Eventonomy’s documentation for current migration paths, or export your Eventbrite event list and recreate it, which is usually fast since most organizers are not running hundreds of past events.
Which alternative is best for nonprofits specifically?
Zeffy if you want a hosted, zero-fee platform and qualify as a registered nonprofit. If your nonprofit already runs a WordPress site or community, Eventonomy Pro’s $99/yr flat price with no per-ticket fee is usually cheaper over a year of regular ticketed events than any percentage-based platform, Eventbrite included.
Do I lose attendee data when I leave Eventbrite?
You lose ongoing access to it, even if you export a one-time list before leaving. Eventbrite’s attendee data lives in Eventbrite’s database on Eventbrite’s terms. With Eventonomy, RSVP and attendee data is stored in your own WordPress database from the first event, so there is nothing to migrate or lose later.
Where to Start
If your events are something your community already shows up for, install Eventonomy’s free plugin on a staging copy, add the calendar block to a page, and test an RSVP with a guest before touching production. If you are planning one public ticketed event with no existing site to host it on, Eventbrite’s marketplace reach may genuinely be worth the fee for that one event. The honest question either way: a year from now, whose database is your attendee list sitting in?
Interesting Reads
- How to Replace The Events Calendar With Eventonomy on a Community Site
- How to Add Paid Ticketing to a Community Site