Eventbrite vs Livestorm
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
Editorial assessmentEventbrite compared with Livestorm
Livestorm is a browser-based webinar platform with a presenter console, engagement tools, recording, and CRM sync, sold on attendance. Eventbrite has none of that and does not host sessions. They only compete in the narrow case of a free virtual event where registration is all you need, and there Eventbrite is free while Livestorm is not. For any interactive or lead-generating virtual session, Livestorm is the tool and Eventbrite is at most the front door.
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.
Choose Livestorm if
European and EU-data-conscious marketing teams running a steady program of live webinars, product demos, and customer onboarding sessions, especially those with high registration volume and typical no-show rates, who want attendees to join in a browser with zero friction and would rather pay for people who turned up than for a seat licence.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Eventbrite | Livestorm |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Webinars | Webinars |
| Starting price | $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) | Pro at approximately 2.50 euros per attendee credit; third-party trackers report an entry block around 105 euros per month (free trial) |
| Pricing model | 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. | Attendee-credit consumption model. One credit is consumed per unique participant per session across a rolling twelve-month period. Team members are not counted, and no-shows consume nothing. |
| Free plan | Publish unlimited free events at no cost, with full event pages, marketplace listing, guest lists, QR check-in, and attendee messaging. | No |
| Free trial | Not applicable; the platform is free to use until you sell a paid ticket | A trial is available on request through the signup flow; Livestorm does not publish a fixed trial length on the pricing page |
| Best for | 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. | European and EU-data-conscious marketing teams running a steady program of live webinars, product demos, and customer onboarding sessions, especially those with high registration volume and typical no-show rates, who want attendees to join in a browser with zero friction and would rather pay for people who turned up than for a seat licence. |
| Setup time | 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. | Under an hour for a first event. Create the event, choose the format, restyle the registration page, edit the reminder emails, and connect your CRM. There is no software rollout and nothing for attendees to prepare, so the usual pre-launch IT work simply does not exist. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Low for the basic live event. The parts that take practice are the automated event mode, the role and permission model in a larger workspace, and the analytics export, which is powerful but not self-explanatory. |
| Platforms | 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 | Web browser (attendees and presenters, desktop and mobile), iFrame embed on your own site, RTMP simulcast to YouTube, LinkedIn, X, and custom endpoints |
| Compliance | PCI DSS for payment handling, GDPR, SOC 2 practices within the platform | ISO 27001, GDPR |
| Founded | 2006 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Paris, France (fully remote team) |
| Ownership | Privately held (Bending Spoons) | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Livestorm
Strengths
- Genuinely zero-install for both attendees and presenters, which lifts attendance rates and removes the most common day-of-event support ticket.
- Attendee-credit billing means no-shows are free, which is a real saving in a category where more than half of registrants routinely fail to attend.
- Unlimited team members at no additional cost, so a large marketing organization does not pay per host.
- Live, on-demand, and automated formats are all first-class rather than one of them being a token feature.
Limitations
- The pricing page publishes no flat monthly number and no free plan, so building a budget requires a conversation or a configuration exercise rather than reading a table.
- Running out of attendee credits blocks new joiners mid-session rather than billing you for the overage, which is an unusually harsh failure mode.
- Replay and on-demand views consume credits, which quietly makes evergreen content more expensive than it looks.
- Production control is thin compared with a studio tool: no scene composition, no multi-camera switching, no high-bitrate local recording.
Pricing compared
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.
Livestorm
Attendee-credit consumption model. One credit is consumed per unique participant per session across a rolling twelve-month period. Team members are not counted, and no-shows consume nothing.
- ProAbout 2.50 euros per attendee credit
- EnterpriseCustom quote
Livestorm is good value when your no-show rate is high and your attendance is uneven, and poor value when it is neither. Paying only for people who turned up is genuinely fairer than a seat licence with a fixed room cap, and the unlimited team members clause means a twenty-person marketing org pays the same as a solo operator for the same audience. The catch is forecasting. A quote-free per-credit model turns your webinar bill into a variable cost that rises exactly when a campaign works, and the hard block when credits run out during a live session is a worse failure mode than an overage invoice. If you can predict your annual attendee volume within twenty percent, buy the credits and the economics beat Demio or Zoom at similar volume. If you cannot, a capped per-seat platform will be less stressful even if it is nominally more expensive.
Editorial verdict on each
Eventbrite
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 profileLivestorm
Category LeaderLivestorm is the best browser-first webinar platform for a marketing team that treats webinars as a lead channel rather than a big meeting, and the attendee-credit model is the fairest billing structure in the category for anyone whose no-show rate is typical. Zero-install attendance is not a marketing line; it measurably changes how many registrants become attendees. Buy it if you run a steady program with volatile attendance, have many occasional hosts, and want EU hosting with ISO 27001 behind it. Think twice if you need a fixed, forecastable monthly cost, because credits that run out block joiners mid-session, or if your strategy is really an evergreen funnel, in which case a dedicated automation tool will do more for less.
Read the full Livestorm profileEventbrite profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Livestorm last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.