Crowdcast vs Eventbrite
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedCrowdcast compared with Eventbrite
Eventbrite is a ticketing marketplace with genuine discovery: people browse it and find events they did not know about. Crowdcast is a streaming platform that happens to sell tickets, with no marketplace at all. Eventbrite takes 3.7 percent plus 1.79 dollars per ticket and charges nothing to publish free events; Crowdcast charges a monthly subscription plus two to five percent. If discovery and physical events matter, Eventbrite. If the event is online and the room quality matters, Crowdcast.
Eventbrite compared with Crowdcast
Crowdcast is a live streaming room with ticketing attached; Eventbrite is ticketing with no room at all. If your event is online and the session quality matters, Crowdcast hosts it, sells access through your own Stripe account at two to five percent, and gives you chat, timestamped Q and A, and an instant replay page. Eventbrite gives you none of that but brings discovery and handles physical events properly. Many organizers use Eventbrite to sell and Crowdcast or Zoom to deliver.
Choose Crowdcast if
Creators, educators, coaches, authors, and community-led small businesses who run live workshops, classes, and recurring community sessions, especially those selling tickets to those sessions and those whose attendance varies enough that a hard room cap is a real business risk.
Choose Eventbrite if
Organizers of public, ticketed events, especially in-person ones, who need payment handling, door check-in, and above all discovery, plus anyone publishing free public events who wants a permanently free tool with a large built-in audience.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Crowdcast | Eventbrite |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Webinars | Webinars |
| Starting price | $49 per month (Lite); annual billing saves 30 percent (14 days trial) | $0 to publish free events; 3.7 percent plus $1.79 service fee plus 2.9 percent payment processing per paid ticket (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Monthly tiers bundling live-attendee capacity, streaming hours, team seats, and storage, plus a transaction fee on ticket sales and metered overage on attendees and hours. | Transaction-based. Free to publish free events, per-ticket service and processing fees on paid tickets, and an optional Pro subscription priced by email marketing volume rather than by ticketing rights. |
| Free plan | No | Publish unlimited free events at no cost, with full event pages, marketplace listing, guest lists, QR check-in, and attendee messaging. |
| Free trial | 14 days with all features and integrations, limited to 60-minute sessions and 10 live attendees | Not applicable; the platform is free to use until you sell a paid ticket |
| Best for | Creators, educators, coaches, authors, and community-led small businesses who run live workshops, classes, and recurring community sessions, especially those selling tickets to those sessions and those whose attendance varies enough that a hard room cap is a real business risk. | Organizers of public, ticketed events, especially in-person ones, who need payment handling, door check-in, and above all discovery, plus anyone publishing free public events who wants a permanently free tool with a large built-in audience. |
| Setup time | Under an hour. Create a channel, schedule an event, connect Stripe if you are ticketing, and you are live. The Gallery makes the first dry run genuinely easy rather than an act of faith. | Thirty minutes to a live public listing with tickets on sale. Payment setup requires business and bank details for payouts, which adds verification time on a first event but only happens once. |
| Learning curve | Low. Crowdcast is one of the least intimidating live platforms to host on, and the audience side requires nothing beyond clicking a link. The only part with real depth is RTMP ingest from OBS, which is optional and follows standard streaming conventions. | Low for basic ticketing, moderate for the full feature set. Multi-tier pricing, access codes, reserved seating, and refund policies each carry their own configuration, and the fee absorption choice is the setting most first-time organizers get wrong. |
| Platforms | Browser-based for hosts and attendees on desktop and mobile, RTMP ingest from OBS, Wirecast, and Ecamm Live | Web application for organizers, Eventbrite consumer apps for iOS and Android, Eventbrite Organizer app with offline-tolerant QR check-in, Embeddable checkout for your own website |
| Compliance | GDPR handling for registrant data, PCI handled by Stripe for ticketing, No public SOC 2 report advertised | PCI DSS for payment handling, GDPR, SOC 2 practices within the platform |
| Founded | 2015 | 2006 |
| Headquarters | Oakland, California, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Ownership | Privately held, founder-led | Privately held (Bending Spoons) |
Strengths and limitations
Crowdcast
Strengths
- Overage billing instead of a hard attendee cap, which is a structurally kinder failure mode than every mainstream competitor in this category and removes the worst risk in webinar planning.
- Native Stripe ticketing with a falling transaction fee, so paid workshops and classes work end to end without a second platform.
- Instant replay on the same event page attendees already have, with chat and timestamped Q and A intact, so the recording is genuinely useful rather than an orphaned video file.
- The Gallery green room is the best pre-flight experience in the category, and it prevents the most common category of live-event disaster.
Limitations
- Streaming hours are metered monthly, so a heavy month costs extra even if attendance is modest, and no competitor at this price meters airtime the same way.
- Maximum session length is capped at two hours on Lite, four on Pro, and six on Business, which rules out full-day events on anything but the top plan.
- No SSO, no published SOC 2 report, and no data residency options, which will end an enterprise security review before it starts.
- CRM integration is Zapier and CSV rather than native Salesforce, HubSpot, or Marketo objects, so attendance-driven lead scoring requires building the pipeline yourself.
Eventbrite
Strengths
- The only platform in this category with a genuine consumer marketplace, so a listed event can be discovered by people who have never heard of the organizer.
- Publishing free events costs nothing at all, permanently and without ticket limits, which makes it the default for community organizers worldwide.
- No subscription is required to sell tickets, so an organizer running two events a year pays nothing between them, which is a fundamentally different commitment shape from Luma Plus or Crowdcast.
- The most complete ticketing feature set in this category, including reserved seating and seat maps, refund workflows, access codes, and multi-tier sales windows.
Limitations
- It is not a webinar platform. There is no streaming, no recording, no presenter console, and no in-session engagement of any kind, so virtual events still need Zoom or another room.
- The fixed 1.79 dollars per ticket makes low-priced tickets extremely expensive, reaching an effective rate near 25 percent on a 10-dollar ticket.
- Funds are held and paid out on Eventbrite's schedule rather than settling into your own processor, which constrains cash flow on events with upfront costs.
- Event pages are heavier and less attractive than Luma's, and the whole experience is oriented toward public consumer events rather than curated professional ones.
Pricing compared
Crowdcast
Monthly tiers bundling live-attendee capacity, streaming hours, team seats, and storage, plus a transaction fee on ticket sales and metered overage on attendees and hours.
- Lite$49
- Pro$89
- Business$195
Crowdcast is not the cheapest webinar tool and it is not trying to be. Lite at 49 dollars for a hundred attendees and ten hours a month looks poor next to Demio Starter or Zoho Webinar until you account for what those tools do not include: native ticketing, overage instead of a locked door, an instant replay page that keeps its chat, and Patreon gating. For a creator selling access to live sessions, Crowdcast replaces a webinar tool plus a checkout plus a replay host, and the two percent ticket fee on Business is competitive with what a standalone ticketing platform would charge before you even count the streaming. For a B2B marketing team that will never sell a ticket, most of that value is dead weight and the money is better spent on Demio or Livestorm.
Eventbrite
Transaction-based. Free to publish free events, per-ticket service and processing fees on paid tickets, and an optional Pro subscription priced by email marketing volume rather than by ticketing rights.
- Free events$0
- Paid tickets3.7% + $1.79 service fee, plus 2.9% payment processing
- Eventbrite Pro$15, $50, or $100
- PremiumCustom
Eventbrite's value depends almost entirely on ticket price and on whether you need discovery. On a 50-dollar or 100-dollar ticket, an effective take of around ten percent buys payment handling, refunds, door scanning, reserved seating, and access to a marketplace that can genuinely fill seats, and that is defensible. On a 10-dollar ticket the fixed 1.79 dollars pushes the effective rate close to 25 percent, which is indefensible against Luma Plus at 59 dollars a month and zero platform fee. The free-events case is unambiguous: it costs nothing, it works well, and the marketplace exposure is free distribution. The right way to decide is arithmetic. Multiply your expected annual ticket count by 1.79, add 3.7 percent of revenue, and compare that number against 708 dollars a year for Luma Plus. If Eventbrite comes out higher and you do not need the marketplace, you are paying for distribution you are not using.
Editorial verdict on each
Crowdcast
Crowdcast is a live event platform for people who sell access to their own sessions, and it is unusually well designed for that job. Native Stripe ticketing, Patreon gating, an instant replay page that keeps its chat and timestamped Q and A, the Gallery green room, and RTMP ingest for when you want real production add up to a coherent tool for creators, educators, and community-led businesses. Its best feature is not on any comparison chart: it bills you 15 cents per extra attendee instead of locking the door, which makes it the only mainstream option in this category where an unexpectedly successful event costs money rather than costing you the audience. The limits are equally clear: metered streaming hours, short session caps on the cheaper plans, a 1,000-attendee ceiling, no SSO or SOC 2, and CRM integration that stops at Zapier. Buy it if the live room is your product. Buy something else if the live room is your marketing.
Read the full Crowdcast profileEventbrite
Eventbrite is the right answer when you need strangers to find your event, and the wrong answer almost every other time. Nothing else in this category runs a consumer marketplace, and for a local business or a public workshop series that distribution can be worth far more than the per-ticket cut. Free events cost nothing at all, the in-person operations are genuinely excellent, and requiring no subscription to sell tickets suits an organizer running two events a year far better than a monthly plan would. But be honest about two things. It is not a webinar platform, so a virtual event still needs Zoom or Livestorm behind it. And the fixed 1.79 dollars per ticket makes cheap tickets brutally expensive, so if you sell in volume to an audience you already own, Luma Plus at 59 dollars a month with zero platform fee will save you serious money. New ownership under Bending Spoons adds a reason to keep watching the fee schedule rather than treating it as settled.
Read the full Eventbrite profileCrowdcast profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Eventbrite last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.