How to Choose an Event Management Platform

Every event platform demos well. They are demonstrated with clean data, by someone who knows where everything is, using an event designed to suit the product. Your evaluation has to break that.

Write your requirements as last year's event

Not a feature list — your actual event. "Four ticket types, one of which needs a purchase order. Two-day agenda across three rooms. Session access by ticket type. 40 speakers with bios collected by form. Badges printed on site. A report of attendance per session for the funder." Every line of that is a test a platform either passes or fails.

Then run it, yourself, in a trial

Ignore the demo. Take a free trial and spend two hours reproducing last year's event. You will learn more in that hour than in three sales calls, and you will find the things that are awkward — which are the things that will be awkward every week for a year.

Specifically, try to: build your registration form with your oddest question; create your ticket structure; import fifty attendees; build one day of the agenda; and export an attendee report.

Ask the questions vendors find uncomfortable

• Can I export everything, including custom fields, at any time? If the answer is complicated, that is a lock-in you will meet at the worst moment.
• What happens at the limits? The attendee cap, the storage cap, the event cap — and what it costs when you cross one mid-event.
• What is not included at my tier? Ask them to name it, rather than reading a matrix.
• What are the payment fees on top of the platform fee?
• What does support mean on the day? A named contact and a phone number, or a ticket queue with a 24-hour SLA?
• Where is attendee data stored, and who can access it? See event data and GDPR.

Count the total cost honestly

Platform fee, per-attendee charges, payment processing, badge printing, the app if it is extra, and the hours your team spends on setup. A cheaper platform that needs a fortnight of workarounds is not cheaper.

Weight the things you do most

You will touch registration and the attendee list every day for months; you will touch the floor-map editor twice. Score accordingly. Most platform regret comes from choosing on a feature demoed impressively and used once.

Check the exit before the entrance

How does data come out, in what format, and how long do they keep it after you leave? Ask before you sign, when you still have leverage. Our guide to migrating platforms explains why this matters more than it sounds.

Gathervo has a free tier you can run a real event on — not a sandbox — so the evaluation above costs nothing. See the plans or start free.