Is Eventbrite or Zoom Webinars cheaper?

Eventbrite starts at $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). Zoom Webinars starts at From about $66.67 per licence per month billed annually (300-attendee capacity), plus a paid Zoom Workplace licence (free trial).

Eventbrite vs Zoom Webinars

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 assessment

Eventbrite compared with Zoom Webinars

These are complements rather than competitors, and are frequently used together. Zoom Webinars provides the room, presenter controls, recording, and the attendee capacity you buy by tier. Eventbrite provides the public listing, the ticket sale, the payment handling, and the reminders, then hands the buyer a Zoom join link. Buying Eventbrite does not remove the need for Zoom, and buying Zoom does not give you ticketing or discovery.

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 Zoom Webinars if

Organizations that already run on Zoom and need a large, reliable, compliance-approved broadcast channel: all-hands meetings, customer town halls, investor updates, regulated-industry events, and any webinar where audience familiarity and IT approval matter more than registration-funnel optimization.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Eventbrite	Zoom Webinars
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)	From about $66.67 per licence per month billed annually (300-attendee capacity), plus a paid Zoom Workplace licence (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.	Per-licence monthly add-on to a paid Zoom Workplace subscription, priced by the attendee capacity band you select. Three product lines: Webinars, Webinars Plus, and Events.
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	Zoom offers trial access through its sales and self-serve flows; no fixed published trial length for the Webinars add-on
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.	Organizations that already run on Zoom and need a large, reliable, compliance-approved broadcast channel: all-hands meetings, customer town halls, investor updates, regulated-industry events, and any webinar where audience familiarity and IT approval matter more than registration-funnel optimization.
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.	Minutes if you already run Zoom: add the licence, schedule a webinar, enable registration. Days if you do not, because you are deploying Zoom Workplace first, which involves identity integration, policy configuration, and client rollout.
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.	Very low for hosts who already use Zoom, since the scheduling interface is a superset of the meeting one. The genuinely new concepts are the panellist and attendee distinction, the practice session, and, on Webinars Plus, Production Studio scene control, which needs a rehearsal.
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	Zoom desktop client on Windows, macOS, and Linux, Zoom mobile apps on iOS and Android, Browser join (with functional limitations compared with the client), RTMP output to external destinations
Compliance	PCI DSS for payment handling, GDPR, SOC 2 practices within the platform	SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA-eligible configurations, FedRAMP authorization, GDPR, CCPA
Founded	2006	2011
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States	San Jose, California, United States
Ownership	Privately held (Bending Spoons)	Publicly traded (NASDAQ: ZM)

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.

Zoom Webinars

Strengths

Universal audience familiarity, which is worth real conversion percentage points in a category where attendee attrition is the dominant problem.
The compliance posture is unmatched here: SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA-eligible configurations, FedRAMP authorization, SSO, and regional data routing controls.
Scale that no other vendor in this batch approaches, advertised up to 100,000 attendees with infrastructure that genuinely holds.
Overage billing rather than hard lockouts on some configurations, which means an unexpectedly popular session costs money rather than turning away registrants.

Limitations

Requires a paid Zoom Workplace licence underneath, so the real cost is always two subscriptions and comparisons quoting the add-on alone understate it.
Registration pages and reminder-email tooling are functional but basic; a dedicated webinar platform will out-convert them noticeably.
The join flow frequently pushes attendees toward the desktop client rather than keeping them in the browser, which is precisely the friction Livestorm and Demio remove.
No evergreen automation engine: simulive schedules a recording but there is no interaction library, conditional logic, or just-in-time session start.

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.

Zoom Webinars

Per-licence monthly add-on to a paid Zoom Workplace subscription, priced by the attendee capacity band you select. Three product lines: Webinars, Webinars Plus, and Events.

Zoom Workplace Pro (prerequisite)About $14.16
WebinarsFrom about $66.67 (annual) at 300 attendees; around $83.33 annual or $95 monthly at 500
Webinars PlusFrom about $99
Zoom EventsFrom about $149

Zoom Webinars is expensive for what a marketer gets and reasonable for what an enterprise gets, and both statements are true at once. A 500-attendee capability at roughly 97 dollars a month all-in (Workplace plus Webinars, billed annually) buys you scale, reliability, isolated recording tracks, breakout rooms, SSO, SOC 2, FedRAMP, and an audience that already knows how to attend. Compared with Contrast at around 69 dollars for 250 registrants with better email and HubSpot depth, or Demio at around 164 dollars for a 500-attendee room with far better marketing tooling, Zoom is mid-priced and weakest exactly where marketers care most. The prerequisite licence and the per-host structure make it worse value for small teams with several presenters. Buy it for infrastructure, compliance, and audience familiarity. Do not buy it expecting a demand-generation platform, because that is the one thing it conspicuously is not.

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 profile

Zoom Webinars

Zoom Webinars wins on the things that are hard to buy and loses on the things that are easy to buy. Nobody else in this category can offer FedRAMP, HIPAA-eligible configurations, SAML SSO, regional data routing, 100,000-attendee scale, and an audience that needs no instruction on how to attend. Buy it if you already run Zoom, if the compliance review is real, or if the event is genuinely large, and accept that the registration and email tooling is a checkbox rather than a competitive feature. Do not buy it as your demand-generation platform: it needs a paid Workplace licence underneath, it prices per host, and Contrast, Demio, or Livestorm will out-convert it on registration and out-integrate it on CRM at a fraction of the all-in cost.

Read the full Zoom Webinars profile

Eventbrite profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Zoom Webinars last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.