Eventbrite vs Livestorm vs Eventonomy: Which Event Platform in 2026?

Eventbrite and Livestorm solve adjacent but different problems, and both bill you the same way underneath: a cut of every attendee, paid monthly or counted per ticket, for as long as you keep running events on their infrastructure. Eventbrite built its name on ticketed, mostly in-person events, a service fee plus a payment processing fee stacked onto every paid ticket sold. Livestorm went the other direction, a dedicated webinar and virtual-event platform with video hosting built in, billed on a credit system that burns one credit per unique attendee per session.

Eventonomy takes a third position: a self-hosted WordPress plugin that handles the calendar, the RSVPs, and the tickets, with attendee data staying in your own database and no platform fee on anything you sell. It doesn’t host video itself, so the webinar or livestream link still comes from whatever tool you already use, but for the layer both Eventbrite and Livestorm charge recurring fees on, registration, RSVPs, paid tickets, and recurring series, Eventonomy runs free, with native integration into BuddyPress and BuddyNext for sites that already have a member community. We compared what each platform actually costs at realistic volume, what each one is actually built to do, and where the self-hosted option genuinely can’t substitute for a hosted one.

Table of Contents

• Why Eventbrite and Livestorm Get Compared Against Eventonomy
• Eventbrite: Ticketing at Scale, With a Fee on Every Sale
• Livestorm: Webinar Infrastructure, Billed Per Attendee Credit
• Eventonomy: Self-Hosted RSVPs and Tickets, No Platform Fee
• A Real-World Scenario: Monthly Webinars Plus an Annual Hybrid Conference
• What a Year Actually Costs
• Side-by-Side Comparison Table
• Setup Time: Signing Up vs Installing a Plugin
• Who Each Platform Is Actually Built For
• FAQs
• Conclusion

Why Eventbrite and Livestorm Get Compared Against Eventonomy

Eventbrite and Livestorm rarely show up in the same sentence in their own marketing, because they’re built for different moments. Eventbrite is the default answer when someone needs to sell tickets to something happening in a physical room, or wants a public discovery page where strangers can find and RSVP to an event. Livestorm is the default answer when the event itself is the video call, a product demo, a webinar funnel, an all-hands, anything where registration, the live video, and the follow-up email all need to live in one dashboard.

What pulls both into a comparison with Eventonomy is the audience asking the question: a community site, a membership business, or a WordPress-based company that already has members and doesn’t want to rebuild its audience inside a third-party platform’s database every time it runs an event. Eventbrite and Livestorm both ask that audience to create a new account, hand over payment details, and let attendee data live on servers neither the site owner nor the member controls. Eventonomy asks the opposite: run the event where the community already is, with no separate login and no cut taken off whatever you charge.

Eventbrite: Ticketing at Scale, With a Fee on Every Sale

Eventbrite publishes a straightforward structure: free events cost nothing to list, and paid tickets carry a 3.7% + $1.79 service fee per ticket plus a separate 2.9% payment processing fee per order. Organizers choose whether to pass those fees to the attendee at checkout or absorb them out of ticket revenue, but either way, the fee is owed on every paid transaction, indefinitely, with no tier that removes it. An optional Eventbrite Pro add-on for email marketing starts at $15/month, and Eventbrite Ads are available in select markets for an additional ad-spend budget.

Key strengths:

• Massive built-in discovery, a public marketplace of events that can bring in attendees who were never on the organizer’s own mailing list
• Free events cost nothing at all, a real zero-fee tier for anyone not charging for tickets
• Deep familiarity on the attendee side, most people have an Eventbrite account already and know the checkout flow without instruction

Where it falls short:

• The service fee plus processing fee compounds on every paid ticket, with no flat-rate or subscription option that caps the cost as sales grow
• Attendee and payment data live on Eventbrite’s infrastructure, not the organizer’s own site or database
• No native community layer, member profiles, recurring forum discussion, or group-based RSVP visibility live anywhere on the platform

Livestorm: Webinar Infrastructure, Billed Per Attendee Credit

Livestorm’s current pricing page lists two plans. Pro runs on a credit system at €2.50 per attendee credit, where one credit is consumed for each unique participant, per session, over a 12-month period, team members excluded. Pro supports up to 3,000 attendees per event and 4-hour session limits, with unlimited events, unlimited recordings, unlimited team members, and popular integrations like HubSpot and Zapier included. Enterprise is custom-priced, extending session length to 12 hours, adding enterprise integrations like Salesforce and Marketo, custom analytics, a dedicated Customer Success Manager, and SLA-backed multilingual support. Add-ons including AI Studio, live translations, SAML SSO, restreaming, and RTMP input carry pricing not listed on the public page.

Key strengths:

• Video hosting, registration, and the live session all live in one dashboard, no separate Zoom link to paste into a registration page built somewhere else
• Credit model means a single well-attended session is predictable to cost out in advance, unlike a percentage-of-revenue fee that scales with ticket price
• Enterprise-grade integrations, Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, and Microsoft Dynamics, make it a realistic fit for a marketing team’s existing funnel tooling

Where it falls short:

• Attendee credits are consumed per session, so a recurring weekly or monthly series racks up cost every time, regardless of whether anyone paid to attend
• No listed free-forever tier on the current pricing page, both plans require either a credit purchase or a custom Enterprise contract
• Entirely separate from any WordPress site or member community, registrant data lives in Livestorm’s own system with no native profile, group, or forum tie-in

Eventonomy: Self-Hosted RSVPs and Tickets, No Platform Fee

Eventonomy is the WordPress events plugin built at Wbcom Designs, and it starts from a different assumption than either hosted tool above: the organizer already has a website and, often, an existing member community, and the event layer should live inside that site rather than asking attendees to go create a new account somewhere else. The free plugin ships unlimited events and RSVPs (going, maybe, or waitlist), Month, List, Grid, and Upcoming calendar views, custom RSVP questions, an ICS feed with add-to-calendar links, a venue and organizer catalog, and daily, weekly, and monthly recurring events, all with no license key and no artificial cap on usage.

Key strengths:

• Zero per-ticket or per-attendee platform fee at any tier, free or Pro, “nobody takes a cut of your ticket sales” per Eventonomy’s own pricing page, only standard payment gateway processing fees apply
• Native integration with BuddyPress and BuddyNext: with BuddyNext Pro active, event activity surfaces directly in the community feed, search, and member profiles, and classic BuddyPress sites get a native Events tab inside groups with Eventonomy Pro
• Attendee and RSVP data stays in the site’s own WordPress database, not a third-party vendor’s servers, so there’s no export scramble if a hosted platform changes pricing or shuts down a feature

Worth knowing:

• No built-in video hosting, unlike Livestorm, so a virtual or hybrid event still needs a Zoom, Google Meet, or YouTube Live link pasted into the event; Eventonomy handles the registration and reminder layer around that link, not the video call itself
• No public discovery marketplace the way Eventbrite has, attendees find the event through the organizer’s own site, email list, or community, not by browsing a third-party events directory
• Deeper ticketing tools, paid checkout via Stripe, PayPal, or WooCommerce, tax and booking fees, coupons, door check-in, SMS reminders through Twilio, and analytics, sit in Pro, at $99/year for one site, $199/year for five, or $249/year unlimited, with lifetime options from $249 to $629

A Real-World Scenario: Monthly Webinars Plus an Annual Hybrid Conference

Picture a WordPress-based SaaS company running a 2,400-member BuddyNext community for its customers. Twice a month, the company hosts a live product webinar that pulls around 400 attendees, and once a year it runs a paid hybrid user conference, 150 tickets at $150 each, split between an in-person room and a livestreamed virtual track.

Run on Livestorm, the webinar series alone consumes 400 attendee credits per session, twice a month, 24 sessions a year, 9,600 credits annually. At €2.50 per credit, that’s roughly €24,000, close to $26,000 at typical exchange rates, just for the recurring webinars, before the conference is even in the picture. The hybrid conference’s virtual track would need its own Livestorm session too, adding more credits on top.

Run on Eventbrite, the conference ticketing is straightforward: 150 tickets at $150 is $22,500 in revenue, and Eventbrite’s combined 6.6% service fee plus $1.79 per ticket works out to roughly $1,753 for the event, whether absorbed by the company or passed to attendees at checkout. But Eventbrite has no answer for the recurring webinar series at all, it isn’t built for registration-only virtual sessions with no ticket to sell, so the company would still need a separate webinar tool alongside it.

Run on Eventonomy, the picture changes shape. The recurring webinars cost nothing in platform fees, free, recurring, with RSVPs and reminders handled natively, paired with a Zoom or YouTube Live link the company already has a license for. The conference ticketing runs through Eventonomy Pro at $99/year for the one site, with Stripe handling the $22,500 in ticket revenue at Stripe’s standard processing rate and zero additional cut taken by Eventonomy itself. The entire year’s event infrastructure, recurring webinars and the paid conference together, costs $99 in platform licensing, against roughly $26,000 in Livestorm credits for the webinars alone or a Livestorm-plus-Eventbrite combination that still leaves two separate systems and two disconnected attendee databases.

What a Year Actually Costs

Using the scenario above, 24 webinar sessions at roughly 400 attendees each plus one 150-ticket hybrid conference at $150 a ticket, as the baseline:

Figures are approximate, based on publicly listed pricing as of October 2026 and EUR-to-USD conversion at the time of writing. Livestorm’s and Eventbrite’s figures each cover only part of the scenario; a company replicating this setup on hosted tools alone would need both platforms running at once, with no shared attendee data between them.

Eventbrite vs Livestorm vs Eventonomy: Side by Side

Setup Time: Signing Up vs Installing a Plugin

Time to a first working event differs across the three in a way that’s worth weighing alongside the fee structure. Eventbrite’s signup is the fastest in absolute terms: create an account, build an event page, publish, a first free or paid event can be live within minutes, since there’s no software to install and no server configuration involved. Livestorm’s onboarding is similarly fast on the signup side, a managed dashboard with no server work, though building out a polished registration page with branding, automated reminder emails, and integration into a CRM takes longer than Eventbrite’s simpler ticket page.

Eventonomy’s setup time looks like a typical WordPress plugin: install, activate, run through the initial calendar configuration, a process most WordPress site owners can complete well under an hour if a working WordPress install is already in place, which is the realistic baseline for any site considering it. The tradeoff for that extra ten or fifteen minutes of setup compared to Eventbrite or Livestorm’s instant signup is the fee structure difference that compounds for the rest of the time the event calendar is in use, not just the first event.

Who Each Platform Is Actually Built For

Eventbrite fits an organizer who needs public discovery and ticketing for a standalone, mostly in-person event, a concert, a conference, a one-off fundraiser, and doesn’t mind a percentage of every sale going to the platform in exchange for the built-in marketplace and a checkout flow attendees already recognize. Livestorm fits a marketing or customer-success team whose events are the video call itself, where registration, live video, polls, and CRM integration all needing to live in one tool outweighs the per-attendee credit cost.

Eventonomy fits a WordPress site, especially one with an existing BuddyPress or BuddyNext community, that wants recurring events, RSVPs, and eventually paid tickets without a platform fee eating into revenue or attendee data living somewhere the organizer can’t query directly. It won’t replace Livestorm’s built-in webinar video engine for a team that specifically needs polls, breakout rooms, and session recordings inside the registration tool itself, and it won’t replace Eventbrite’s public discovery marketplace for an organizer trying to reach people who’ve never heard of the event before. For a community that already has an audience and just needs the calendar, RSVP, and ticketing layer running on infrastructure it owns, it’s built for exactly that.

FAQs

1. Does Eventonomy really charge no fee on paid tickets, even on Pro?

Correct. Eventonomy doesn’t process payments itself or take a cut of ticket sales at any tier. Stripe, PayPal, or WooCommerce handle the payment directly and keep their own standard processing fee; Eventonomy adds the event, RSVP, and ticketing layer on top with no additional platform cut.

2. Can Eventonomy host the actual video call for a webinar or virtual event?

No. Eventonomy manages the calendar, registration, RSVPs, and reminders, but the live video comes from whatever tool the organizer pairs it with, Zoom, Google Meet, YouTube Live, or similar. A join link works on any Eventonomy event today; a dedicated built-in video engine the way Livestorm has is not part of the plugin.

3. Is Eventbrite free for organizers who never charge for tickets?

Yes, Eventbrite’s own pricing page states there are no fees for free events, with the service fee and payment processing fee applying only once a ticket has a price attached.

4. How does Livestorm’s credit system actually work?

One attendee credit is consumed per unique participant, per session, over a 12-month period, at €2.50 per credit on the Pro plan. The same person attending two different sessions consumes two separate credits; team members do not consume credits.

5. Does Eventonomy work with an existing BuddyPress or BuddyNext community?

Yes, natively. With BuddyNext Pro active, event activity surfaces in the community feed, search, and member profiles. On classic BuddyPress, Eventonomy Pro adds a dedicated Events tab inside groups, with the option to attach one event to multiple groups at once.

6. Can members submit or run their own events on any of these three?

Eventonomy ships a member-facing My Events dashboard and submission form in its free plugin, with approval optional. Eventbrite and Livestorm are both built around an organizer account creating and managing events centrally; neither offers a native member-submission workflow for an existing community’s own users.

7. What happens to attendee data if I stop paying for Eventbrite or Livestorm?

Both platforms offer data export tools, but the live, queryable version of that data exists on their infrastructure for as long as the account or subscription is active. Eventonomy’s attendee and RSVP data lives in the site’s own WordPress database from the start, so there’s no separate vendor relationship to maintain to keep querying it.

8. Which of the three is cheapest for a single paid conference with 150 tickets?

At $150 a ticket, Eventbrite’s combined fees run roughly $1,753 for 150 tickets. Eventonomy Pro at $99/year covers the same ticketing with zero platform fee, only the payment gateway’s standard processing rate applies. Livestorm isn’t built for in-person ticket sales in the same way and isn’t a direct comparison for this scenario.

9. Does Eventonomy support recurring webinars the way Livestorm does?

Eventonomy supports daily, weekly, and monthly recurring events for free, with yearly and more complex recurrence rules in Pro, and handles the registration and reminder side of a recurring webinar series at no per-session cost. It does not include Livestorm’s in-session tools like polls, breakout rooms, or automated post-webinar email sequences; those would need to come from whatever video platform is paired with the event.

10. Can I migrate an existing Eventbrite calendar into Eventonomy?

Eventonomy’s free plugin ships importers for several WordPress event plugins and calendar tools; a direct Eventbrite importer isn’t listed in current documentation, so moving from Eventbrite usually means recreating the event catalog by hand, manageable for most organizers since past Eventbrite events don’t need to be recreated, only the ones still upcoming.

Summary

Eventbrite earns its place as the default for ticketed, discoverable, mostly in-person events, with a fee structure that’s simple to understand even if it never goes away. Livestorm remains the strongest dedicated option when the event is the video call itself and the team needs registration, live video, and CRM integration in one dashboard, at the cost of a credit that burns on every attendee, every session. Eventonomy skips both platforms’ recurring cut: a genuinely free RSVP and calendar layer, zero platform fee on paid tickets at any tier, and attendee data that lives inside the WordPress site and community the organizer already runs, worth testing against either hosted tool’s ongoing bill before committing to it long-term.

Whichever tool ends up running the event, the detail that matters most over a full year isn’t the feature checklist, it’s who’s still taking a percentage after the tenth event, the hundredth attendee, or the thousandth ticket.

Interesting Reads:
How to Run a Virtual Summit on WordPress with Eventonomy
How to Run a Hybrid (In-Person + Virtual) Event on WordPress