Excel and Google Forms vs an event registration tool

The spreadsheet is free in practice. Google Forms and Sheets come with a Google account. Excel for the web is free with a Microsoft account (Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-online-for-the-web, 3 Nov 2026). The desktop version of Excel is part of Microsoft 365 Single at €10.00 per month or €99.00 per year in Austria (Source: https://www.microsoft.com/de-at/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products, 3 Nov 2026). For an organisation on Google Workspace, Forms is included in every plan; Business Starter is listed at €6.80 per user per month (Source: https://workspace.google.com/pricing, 3 Nov 2026). Most organisers already pay for one of these for other reasons, so the registration itself costs nothing extra.

Mission Support has a Free plan with no time limit: one live event, 100 guests per event, one admin, a sign-up form with the basic fields, a confirmation mail, the guest list and the Excel export. Plus is €49 per month or €490 per year and adds QR tickets with the door scanner, your own logo and event address, reminder mails, campaigns and companions. Pro is €149 per month or €1,490 per year for personal invitations with approval and decline flows, ticket sales, conditional logic, a custom domain and the GDPR export. Prices exclude VAT. There is no per-guest and no per-response pricing, and free events carry no fees at all.

The honest sum: for a small event with no door, the spreadsheet wins on price every time. The question is what the hours cost that go into chasing duplicates, counting rows and typing names from a printed list into a file the next morning.

The setup works until the day it does not. Someone registers twice because the first confirmation never came. The room holds 80 and the sheet has 94 rows. Twelve people said no in reply to the invitation, and those replies live in an inbox, not in the file. At the door, two colleagues work from two printouts and tick different names.

Google Forms can limit a form to one response, but only if every guest signs in with a Google account (Source: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2839588, 3 Nov 2026). For a public event that is a barrier, so the setting stays off and duplicates come in. Volume is not the issue: Google syncs responses to Sheets up to 100,000 per form (Source: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/139706, 3 Nov 2026). The issue is that a spreadsheet records what was typed and nothing else.

• Every guest has one record and one personal link. The confirmation goes out on its own, from your own sender address on Plus and Pro.

• Capacity is a number on the event, not a row count someone watches. When the room is full, the form says so.

• A decline is a status. RSVP-no from the guest and a decline by the organiser are both recorded, so the count of who is coming is a real number.

• Companions are named on the ticket and counted against the capacity.

• Reminder mails go to the people who have not answered, not to the whole list.

• The ticket carries a QR code. Any phone browser is the scanner: green frame, sound, done. A second scan of the same ticket is blocked.

• The door sees one live list. Who is in, who checked them in, who left.

Price is the obvious one, and it is not close. Beyond that, a spreadsheet has no opinion about your columns. If the finance team wants a cost centre next to every name and the catering team wants a free-text allergy column with colour coding, Excel does it in a minute. A form builder gives you field types, not a canvas.

Excel on the desktop also works without a connection. Mission Support runs in the browser, and the door scanner needs a signal. In a venue with a bad connection, a printout is a fair backup, and the Excel export exists for exactly that. If the event is small and the spreadsheet works for you, keep it.

A guest list is personal data. With a spreadsheet, the honest answer to "where is it" is: on the laptop of whoever downloaded it last, in a few mailboxes as an attachment, and in a shared drive with a link that was once sent around. Each copy is a copy you have to delete when the retention period ends.

Mission Support keeps the data in Frankfurt, with mails sent from Paris. The organiser is the controller and the platform is the processor with an Art. 28 contract. Guest pages run without analytics or cookies. On Pro, a GDPR export per contact is one click, and the retention purge removes data after the period you set. The tool is the system of record; an Excel export is a copy you chose to make.