If you search for a WordPress event plugin, these two names dominate the results: Modern Events Calendar and The Events Calendar. Between them they’ve been the default answer to “what calendar plugin should I use” for the better part of a decade, and most “best event plugins” roundups just alternate between the two. What those roundups rarely do is put a third option next to them that was actually built for a community site rather than a standalone marketing calendar.
Last updated: 6 November 2026
Quick answer: Pick Modern Events Calendar for the deepest layout options and bundled Zoom and Webex tools, if you can install a plugin from outside the WordPress.org directory. Pick The Events Calendar for the largest free base. Pick Eventonomy if members add events and RSVP, with BuddyPress and BuddyNext integration.
This guide puts all three head to head: Modern Events Calendar (MEC), the feature-dense bundle from Webnus; The Events Calendar (TEC), the largest free incumbent in the category; and Eventonomy, the free WordPress events plugin from Wbcom Designs with native BuddyPress and BuddyNext integration. We’ll cover real pricing, what each one actually ships in its free tier, where each falls apart under a member community, and which one fits your site once you stop reading marketing pages and start reading the fine print.
Table of Contents
- Market snapshot
- In This Guide
- The WordPress Event Plugin Market, By the Numbers
- How the Three Plugins Actually Stack Up
- 1. Modern Events Calendar (MEC)
- 2. The Events Calendar (TEC)
- 3. Eventonomy
- Setup Time and Admin Experience
- A Real-World Scenario
- The Cost of a Feature-Complete Setup
- Side-by-Side Comparison Table
- Which Should You Actually Pick
- Where to Start
- FAQs
- Sources
Market snapshot
- The global event management software market (all vendors, not just WordPress plugins) was valued at USD 9.90 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 32.62 billion by 2034, a 14.16% annual growth rate over 2026 to 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights.
- The Events Calendar reports 600,000+ active installations on WordPress.org (checked 6 November 2026).
In This Guide
- The WordPress Event Plugin Market, By the Numbers
- How the Three Plugins Actually Stack Up
- 1. Modern Events Calendar
- 2. The Events Calendar
- 3. Eventonomy
- Setup Time and Admin Experience
- A Real-World Scenario
- The Cost of a Feature-Complete Setup
- Side-by-Side Comparison Table
- Which Should You Actually Pick
- FAQs
- Where to Start
The WordPress Event Plugin Market, By the Numbers
The global event management software market was valued at roughly $15.20 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $24.17 billion by 2031, a 9.73% CAGR, according to Mordor Intelligence. WordPress alone runs a meaningful share of that volume, and a handful of plugins, including the two compared here, account for the bulk of the installs behind it.
How the Three Plugins Actually Stack Up
MEC and TEC solve the same core problem from opposite directions. MEC bundles almost everything (layouts, booking, ticketing, virtual event tooling) into one paid product and backs off the free tier hard. TEC keeps a genuinely useful free core and sells depth through a long list of add-ons. Neither was built with a membership site in mind: both treat “event” as a standalone content type that happens to live on a WordPress install, not as something tied to a member’s profile, RSVP history, or group.
Eventonomy starts from a different premise. It assumes the events live on a community site where members already have accounts, profiles, and groups, so RSVPs, waitlists, and ticket purchases tie straight back to a member record instead of a guest checkout form. That’s a genuinely different product shape, not just a cheaper version of the other two.
There’s also a distribution difference worth flagging up front, because it changes how you’ll install and maintain each one. TEC and Eventonomy both live on the WordPress.org directory, which means automatic update notices in wp-admin, a public support forum, and the directory’s own security review process. MEC used to live there too, until its Lite version was closed in 2022; today it’s a direct download from Webnus, managed the way you’d manage any premium plugin you buy outside the repository; manual update checks, vendor-run support, no directory-level review. None of that makes MEC unsafe, but it does mean one more thing to track on your maintenance checklist that the other two handle for you automatically.
1. Modern Events Calendar (MEC)
Modern Events Calendar, built by Webnus, is the most feature-dense of the three. It ships 60+ calendar and list layouts, booking and ticketing tools, appointment-style time-slot booking, and integrations for Zoom and Webex for virtual events. Webnus cites 200,000+ active users across its customer base (a vendor figure, not a WordPress.org-verified install count, since the plugin is no longer distributed through the directory).
MEC has been around since the early WordPress calendar-plugin wave, and it shows in the breadth of its settings panel: countdown widgets, speaker and sponsor profiles, booking forms with custom fields, and a theme of visual customization that goes well past what either TEC or Eventonomy attempts. That depth is the plugin’s main selling point for event-marketing sites that want a calendar to look like a designed product page rather than a utilitarian list of dates.
Key Strengths
- Layout depth. 60+ calendar, grid, and list views cover almost any visual style a site owner might want without custom CSS.
- Bundled booking and ticketing. Appointments, time-slot bookings, and paid ticket sales ship in the same Pro license, so there’s no second add-on purchase to sell a ticket.
- Virtual event tooling. Native Zoom and Webex integration covers hybrid and online-only events without a third-party connector plugin.
- One license, multiple capabilities. Where TEC splits ticketing, recurring events, and imports into separate paid add-ons, MEC’s Pro tier bundles most of that into a single purchase.
Where It Falls Short
- Delisted from WordPress.org. The free Lite version was closed by WordPress.org on May 11, 2022 over a guideline violation, and that closure is permanent. It no longer shows up in a wp-admin plugin search, has no WordPress.org support forum, and isn’t covered by the directory’s automatic security scanning. Webnus still distributes Lite as a direct download from its own site, but you’re installing it the way you’d install any third-party plugin, not the way WordPress normally recommends.
- No per-site free Pro trial path. Every meaningful feature past the free Lite basics sits behind Pro, starting at $99/yr for one site and scaling to $999/yr for unlimited sites.
- No membership layer. MEC has no concept of a member profile, group, or BuddyPress/BuddyNext hook. RSVPs and bookings are standalone records, not tied to a community account.
- Feature sprawl. 60+ layouts and a dense settings panel make MEC powerful but slower to configure than either TEC or Eventonomy for a straightforward recurring-events setup.
2. The Events Calendar (TEC)
The Events Calendar is a WordPress.org plugin with 600,000+ active installations and a 4.2 out of 5 rating across 2,461 reviews, making it the largest free incumbent in this category by a wide margin. Its free core covers event creation with saved venues and organizers, month/list/day views, Google Maps integration, iCalendar and Google Calendar export, block editor support, categories and tags, and a REST API.
TEC is maintained by StellarWP (formerly Modern Tribe), the same company behind several other widely used WordPress tools, which gives it longer-term institutional backing than a smaller single-product vendor. That matters for site owners who weight plugin longevity heavily: a plugin with a corporate parent, a long changelog, and a 2,461-review history is a lower-risk long-term bet than a newer or more niche alternative, even before you compare features.
Key Strengths
- Genuinely useful free tier. Unlike MEC’s post-2022 Lite, TEC’s free core isn’t a stripped demo. Event creation, venue and organizer management, multiple calendar views, and CSV import all work without paying anything.
- Largest install base in the category. 600,000+ active installs and a long WordPress.org review history (2,461 reviews) mean broad theme and hosting compatibility testing by other site owners before you.
- Modular add-ons. Events Calendar Pro ($99/yr) adds recurring events and extra views, Event Tickets Plus ($89/yr) adds ticket sales, and Event Aggregator ($99/yr) adds automatic imports from Meetup, Eventbrite, and Google Calendar. You only buy what you need.
- REST API and developer ecosystem. A large install base means more themes, more documentation, and more Stack Overflow answers than either competitor.
Where It Falls Short
- Recurring events aren’t free. The feature most community organizers need on day one, a weekly meetup or a monthly series, sits behind Events Calendar Pro at $99/yr.
- Ticketing is a separate purchase. Selling a paid ticket requires Event Tickets Plus on top of Pro, pushing a feature-complete single-site setup to roughly $188/yr before any imports or filtering add-ons.
- No native community layer. Like MEC, TEC has no BuddyPress or BuddyNext integration. Community Events (a separate, free Modern Tribe plugin) lets members submit events from the frontend, but it’s a bolt-on, not a built-in RSVP or membership tie-in.
- Add-on math adds up fast. Pro, Tickets Plus, Filter Bar, and Promoter are each sold and licensed separately, so a fully equipped setup across several sites can cost more than MEC’s bundled Pro tier.
3. Eventonomy
Eventonomy is Wbcom Designs’ free WordPress events plugin, built specifically to run on a community site rather than sit beside one. Its tagline, “run events on the WordPress site you already own,” sums up the pitch: the calendar, RSVPs, and ticketing all live in your own database, with no per-ticket platform fee and no third-party account required to check attendance.
That matters most for the question neither MEC nor TEC was designed to answer: who, specifically, is coming to this event, and what else have they done on this site? On a BuddyNext community, an RSVP isn’t an anonymous row in a spreadsheet, it’s tied to a member who also posted in a group, filled out a profile field, and maybe earned a badge last month. Eventonomy was built to make that connection visible to the organizer without custom development, which is the gap both of the bigger-name plugins leave open.
Key Strengths
- Native BuddyPress and BuddyNext integration. This is the one feature neither MEC nor TEC offers at any price. RSVPs, waitlists, and the member dashboard at
/manage-events/tie directly into a member’s existing profile and group memberships. - A genuinely complete free tier. Unlimited events and RSVPs with waitlist support, four calendar views (Grid, List, Month, Upcoming), daily/weekly/monthly recurring series, a venue and organizer catalog, CSV exports, and custom RSVP questions with ten answer types all ship free, GPL-licensed, forever.
- No per-ticket platform fee. Where SaaS tools like Eventbrite take a cut of every paid ticket, Eventonomy Pro’s $99-249/yr license is a flat annual cost regardless of how many tickets you sell.
- Guest RSVP without an account wall. Members can RSVP from their profile; non-members can RSVP through a magic link, so you’re not forcing a signup just to attend one event.
Where It Falls Short
- Smaller install base. Eventonomy is newer than either MEC or TEC, so it doesn’t yet have the years of theme-compatibility testing or the thousands of WordPress.org reviews that TEC has built up.
- Fewer visual layout options. It ships four calendar views versus MEC’s 60+ layouts. If your priority is a highly stylized, marketing-forward calendar display over community RSVP logic, MEC’s layout library goes further.
- Paid tickets require Pro. The free tier handles RSVPs and waitlists but not Stripe, PayPal, or WooCommerce checkout; that’s a $99/yr Pro upgrade, same as it is with the other two once you factor in their paid tiers.
- Built for community sites specifically. If you’re running a standalone marketing calendar with no member accounts at all, Eventonomy’s member-dashboard-centric design is solving a problem you don’t have.
Setup Time and Admin Experience
None of these three is hard to install, but “installed” and “configured the way you actually want it” are different milestones, and they take very different amounts of time per plugin.
MEC’s setup is the longest of the three purely because of surface area. Between layout selection, booking form configuration, and the Zoom/Webex connection, a first-time admin is looking at an afternoon rather than an hour to get a single event type fully dialed in, though the payoff is a calendar that can look like almost anything once it’s done.
TEC’s free core takes the least time to get a basic calendar live, often under thirty minutes from install to a published event, since the defaults are sensible and the settings panel is comparatively compact. The time cost shows up later, when you’re hunting down which paid add-on unlocks the feature you actually need and reading separate documentation for each one.
Eventonomy sits in between: the free tier’s settings are close to TEC’s in simplicity, but because the member dashboard and BuddyNext hooks are already wired in, there’s no separate integration step to connect events to member profiles the way you’d have to build by hand with the other two. For a site that already runs BuddyNext, that’s the difference between a same-day launch and a multi-day custom integration project.
A Real-World Scenario
Dana runs a 2,200-member regional nonprofit network built on BuddyNext. The group hosts a weekly volunteer shift calendar, a monthly fundraising dinner with paid tickets, and an annual conference that needs both in-person check-in and a virtual track for members who can’t travel.
With MEC, Dana gets the layout polish and the Zoom integration for the virtual track, but every RSVP is a standalone record; there’s no way to see “which of my BuddyNext members RSVP’d” without exporting and cross-referencing by email. Pro at $99/yr (one site) covers ticketing for the dinner, but the community tie-in has to be built by hand or skipped entirely.
With TEC, Dana gets a reliable free core for the weekly shift calendar, but recurring events need Pro ($99/yr) and the dinner’s paid tickets need Tickets Plus ($89/yr) on top, for $188/yr before any member-specific reporting, which still doesn’t exist natively.
With Eventonomy, the weekly shifts, the RSVP waitlist, and the member dashboard are free out of the box, members see their own RSVP history on their BuddyNext profile, and the $99/yr Personal Pro tier unlocks ticket sales for the dinner plus the door check-in scanner for the conference. Total cost: $99/yr, with the community tie-in already built in instead of bolted on.
The Cost of a Feature-Complete Setup
“Feature-complete” here means: recurring events, frontend/member event submission or RSVP, and paid ticket sales, on a single site, for one year.
| Plugin | Core/Free Cost | Add-ons Needed | Total Year-One Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Modern Events Calendar | $0 (Lite, direct download) | MEC Pro, 1 site | $99/yr |
| The Events Calendar | $0 (WordPress.org core) | Events Calendar Pro + Event Tickets Plus | $188/yr |
| Eventonomy | $0 (recurring events + RSVPs + waitlist included) | Eventonomy Pro, Personal (1 site) | $99/yr |
MEC and Eventonomy land at the same $99/yr for a single feature-complete site. The difference is what that $99 buys on top: MEC adds 60+ layouts and virtual-event tooling; Eventonomy adds native BuddyPress/BuddyNext integration, door check-in, SMS reminders, and organizer analytics. TEC is the only one of the three where “feature-complete” requires stacking two separate paid products.
Side-by-Side Comparison Table
| Feature | Modern Events Calendar | The Events Calendar | Eventonomy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Lite (direct download only, not on WordPress.org) | Yes, full WordPress.org core | Yes, GPL, WordPress.org |
| Recurring events, free | Yes (Lite) | No, requires Pro | Yes (daily/weekly/monthly) |
| Community/member event submission | Yes (Lite) | No, separate Community Events plugin | Yes, via member dashboard |
| Paid ticketing | MEC Pro, $99-999/yr by site count | Event Tickets Plus, $89/yr | Eventonomy Pro, $99-249/yr by site count |
| Calendar view options | 60+ layouts | Month, list, day (more with Pro) | Grid, List, Month, Upcoming (+ Week, Day in Pro) |
| Virtual event tooling | Native Zoom/Webex | Via third-party add-ons | Hybrid-friendly via custom fields; no native Zoom |
| BuddyPress/BuddyNext integration | None | None | Native |
| WordPress.org distribution | Delisted May 2022 | Active, 600,000+ installs | Active |
| Rating (WordPress.org) | Not applicable, delisted | 4.2/5, 2,461 reviews | N/A, newer listing |
Which Should You Actually Pick
Pick Modern Events Calendar if you want the deepest layout customization and native Zoom/Webex integration, you’re comfortable installing a plugin outside the WordPress.org directory, and you don’t need any tie-in to member accounts.
Pick The Events Calendar if you want the largest, most battle-tested free core in the category and you’re fine buying recurring events and ticketing as separate add-ons as you need them, with no community layer required.
Pick Eventonomy if your events live on a BuddyPress or BuddyNext community site, you want recurring events and RSVPs free without an add-on purchase, and you’d rather pay one flat $99/yr than stack two separate TEC add-ons to reach the same feature set.
If you’re already running MEC or TEC and considering a switch, the honest answer is that it’s rarely worth doing mid-season. Migrate between major events, not during your busiest registration window, and expect to manually re-check recurring-event rules and any custom fields after an import; no cross-plugin importer preserves 100% of a heavily customized setup. The guide linked in Interesting Reads below walks through exactly what moves automatically and what you’ll need to rebuild by hand when moving off The Events Calendar specifically.
Where to Start
If you’re building on top of an existing WordPress.org-approved plugin ecosystem with no interest in member accounts, The Events Calendar’s free core is a safe, proven starting point, and you can add Pro or Tickets Plus later as your needs grow. If layout depth and native video-call integration matter more than anything else, MEC’s bundled Pro tier gets you there in one purchase, delisting notwithstanding.
If your events already live on a BuddyPress or BuddyNext community site, neither of the other two was built for that job. Download Eventonomy free and connect it to your member dashboard in minutes, or compare Free vs Pro if you already know you’ll need ticketing from day one.
Interesting Reads
- Replace The Events Calendar on Your Community Site with Eventonomy
- WP Event Manager vs Modern Events Calendar vs Eventonomy
FAQs
Which of these three is completely free to use?
The Events Calendar’s core and Eventonomy’s free tier are both genuinely usable without payment, including recurring events on Eventonomy. MEC’s free Lite tier exists but is no longer distributed through WordPress.org.
Why was Modern Events Calendar removed from WordPress.org?
WordPress.org closed Modern Events Calendar Lite on May 11, 2022 for a guideline violation. The listing states the closure is permanent. Webnus continues to sell and distribute MEC directly from its own site.
Does The Events Calendar support recurring events for free?
No. Recurring events are part of Events Calendar Pro, which starts at $99/yr for one site. The free core handles single, non-repeating events.
Can members submit their own events without buying an add-on?
With Eventonomy, yes, any logged-in member can create and manage events from the /manage-events/ dashboard in the free tier. With TEC, frontend submission needs the separate (free) Community Events plugin. MEC’s Lite tier includes community event submission as a core feature.
Which plugin has native BuddyPress or BuddyNext compatibility?
Only Eventonomy. Neither MEC nor TEC has a BuddyPress/BuddyNext hook, so any member tie-in on those two has to be custom-built.
What’s the cheapest way to sell a paid ticket on one site?
MEC Pro ($99/yr) and Eventonomy Pro Personal ($99/yr) both reach ticketing at the same price point. TEC needs Events Calendar Pro plus Event Tickets Plus, $188/yr combined.
How many active installs does each plugin have?
The Events Calendar reports 600,000+ active installations on WordPress.org with a 4.2/5 rating across 2,461 reviews. Modern Events Calendar cites 200,000+ users as a vendor figure since it’s no longer tracked by the WordPress.org directory. Eventonomy is newer and doesn’t yet have a comparable public install count.
Can I migrate from The Events Calendar to Eventonomy?
Yes. See our dedicated guide, Replace The Events Calendar on Your Community Site with Eventonomy, which covers what the importer moves and what stays behind.
Do any of these three handle virtual or hybrid events out of the box?
MEC has native Zoom and Webex integration built in. TEC and Eventonomy both support virtual events through custom fields or third-party video-call links rather than a dedicated native integration.
Is Eventonomy Pro a lifetime license or a subscription?
Both options exist. Eventonomy Pro is $99/yr (Personal, 1 site) as an annual subscription, or $249 as a one-time lifetime license for the same tier. Higher tiers (Professional, Agency) scale both the annual and lifetime price by site count.
Which plugin is the fastest to get a basic calendar live?
The Events Calendar’s free core is the quickest path to a published, working calendar, often under thirty minutes, because the default settings need the least configuration. Eventonomy is close behind for a basic setup and faster overall if you also need the member dashboard connected, since that part is already built in rather than custom-integrated.
Does any of these three charge a per-ticket platform fee, the way Eventbrite does?
No. All three process paid tickets through your own Stripe, PayPal, or WooCommerce account once you’re on a paid tier, so you keep 100% of ticket revenue minus the payment processor’s own transaction fee. None of them take an additional cut on top of that.
Is Modern Events Calendar still on WordPress.org?
No. The post notes it was delisted from the WordPress.org directory in May 2022, so you install it from the vendor rather than through Plugins, Add New. The Events Calendar remains listed with 600,000+ active installs. Delisting does not mean the plugin stopped working, but updates and trust signals come from the vendor, not the directory.