It's hard to beat free.
In a new survey of 400 event management software users, the most popular platform is Eventbrite (17 percent). Use of Eventbrite for invitations, ticketing, and check-in is free, with a portion of each attendees’ ticket price paying the freight. (Or, if your event is free to attendees, your use of Eventbrite is free.)
About half of the respondents have marketing titles and only 10 percent have meeting titles, so respondents may be primarily concerned with consumer marketing events rather than the meetings and conferences that typically fall under a strategic meetings management umbrella and for which planners employ software that includes site-search, RFP, budgeting, and reporting capabilities.
The second most popular, EventPro Planner, came in at 15%, and is the one product called out in the report that offers full meeting-management services. Like Eventbrite, the third and fourth most popular products in the report are basically free invitation and registration tools (XING, with 9 percent, and Eventzilla, with 7 percent).
The survey was conducted by Capterra, a free software research and comparison website, and the full report is available for download.
A Lot of Non-Users
The research shows that more than half of respondents spent less than three months researching and demo-ing software products before either purchasing them or, in the case of the free platforms, choosing to use them.
Respondents seem to think they made the right choices, with 78 percent saying they feel very satisfied, satisfied, or neutral about their software and only 22 percent reporting that they are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. Most of those who are dissatisfied said they want more features or better support.
Capterra notes that the most interesting finding may be that 56 percent of initial respondents to the survey were disqualified because they report using no event management software. Capterra intends to continue monitoring event management software use to gauge whether the non-user segment shrinks as software companies try to meet event planner demands for software features.
The 38-question survey was conducted during a two-week period and received 402 qualified responses.
Also worth a look is Capterra’s Top 20 Most Popular Event Management Software list, which was compiled by looking at and weighing several variables for each product: number of customers, users, Facebook likes, LinkedIn followers, and Twitter followers.
