Eventbrite alternatives for free events (2026)

Eventbrite is a marketplace for selling tickets to strangers. If your event is free, or your guests come from your own list, you are paying for reach you do not use and sending your guests to a page that is not yours. This guide looks at what that costs, what you give up when you leave, and which alternative fits which kind of event.

What a free event on Eventbrite actually costs

Publishing a free event on Eventbrite costs nothing per ticket. That is the honest starting point. The costs sit elsewhere.

• Your guests register on eventbrite.com. The page carries Eventbrite’s branding, its login prompts and its recommendations for other events. For a public festival that is fine. For a reception you host, it looks like you borrowed the venue.
• The guest list belongs to the platform first. You can export it, but the relationship runs through Eventbrite’s account system, its marketing consent and its mail templates.
• Invitation-only is a workaround, not a feature. A private event is hidden from search and protected by a link or a password. There is no step where you approve a registration before the ticket goes out, and no record of who declined.
• The moment one event has a paid ticket, fees start. Eventbrite’s organiser pricing changes often; check the current fee page before you plan a paid event, and read the small print about who pays the fee.

None of this is a complaint about Eventbrite. It is a tool built for a different job.

What you give up when you leave

An honest list, because every alternative has its own gaps.

• Discovery. Eventbrite puts your event in front of people who search for things to do. If you rely on that, nothing on your own domain replaces it.
• Paid promotion. Eventbrite Ads and the promotion tools inside the platform exist because the audience is there. A tool on your own domain has no audience to promote to.
• The organiser app. Eventbrite’s native app scans tickets and sells at the door. Alternatives handle the door through the phone’s browser, which works but feels different.
• Integrations. Eventbrite has a public API and an app marketplace. Smaller tools offer an Excel export and, on higher plans, an API.

If your guests come from your own list rather than from a search, the first two points do not apply. That is the test: where do your guests come from?

The alternatives, by kind of event

A form plus a spreadsheet. Google Forms or Microsoft Forms collects names, Excel holds the list, someone prints it for the door. Free, familiar, and fine up to a few dozen guests. It breaks at duplicates, capacity, declines and reminders, which is a story of its own: why Excel breaks at 200 guests.

A form builder. Typeform and its relatives make a beautiful form. The responses still land in a table you manage by hand, and there is no ticket, no reminder and no scanner. Good when the registration is the whole job. See event registration without Typeform.

A registration tool under your own domain. This is the category Mission Support sits in: the registration page on your address, personal invitations with a link per guest, optional approval before the ticket goes out, a QR ticket, reminders from your own sender address and a scanner that is any phone. There are no fees on free events on any plan, and the Free plan has no time limit for one live event at a time. Paid tickets cost 2.5 percent plus 0.50 euro per ticket on top of Stripe’s fee.

An enterprise event platform. Cvent and similar suites cover everything from hotel blocks to badge printing. They are priced and sized for conference teams, not for one person running a reception.

How to choose in five minutes

• Who are the guests? Strangers who search: stay on a marketplace. Your own list: move to your own domain.
• Is anything paid? If every event is free, pick the tool that charges nothing on free events, not the one that merely charges nothing today.
• Does anyone need approval before a ticket? Press, partners, a VIP list: you want an approval step and a record of declines.
• Who stands at the door? If it is a colleague with a phone, the scanner has to work in a browser without an app store.
• Where does the data live? For a European organiser, EU hosting and a processor contract save a conversation with the data protection officer.

Moving a list over

Export the attendee list from Eventbrite as CSV. Most tools import CSV or TSV with a preview, so you can check the columns before anything is sent. In Mission Support the import creates contacts and, if you want, personal invitations in bulk, each with its own link. Send a short note to your guests that the next invitation comes from your own address, so the first mail from a new sender does not surprise them.

Where Mission Support fits, and where it does not

It fits a reception, a lecture series, a members’ evening, a client launch: events where you know who should come. It does not fit a public festival that needs a marketplace to fill the room. If that is your event, Eventbrite remains the better choice, and the comparison page says so row by row.