Free Eventbrite alternatives.Including the part most lists skip.

Yes: Eventbrite is free for free events, with no fees for you or your guests, and you can publish as many as you like. There is no free version for paid tickets: in the US each one carries a 3.7% + $1.79 service fee plus 2.9% of the order for processing, which buyers pay unless you choose to absorb it.

Free events still get Eventbrite’s core tools: its pricing page lists automated reminders and mobile check-in among what is included. The extras that cost money are optional: Eventbrite Pro for sending more marketing emails, from $15 a month, the Eventbrite Premium subscription, and Eventbrite Ads.

So if every event you run is free, Eventbrite already is the free version. An alternative matters when you sell tickets and want lower fees, or want something Eventbrite does not do.

For a nonprofit selling tickets, Zeffy is usually better on cost: it charges no platform or card-processing fee, while Eventbrite’s US fees on a $25 ticket come to $3.44. For anyone else it is not an option, because Zeffy does not let individuals or for-profit businesses sell tickets.

Zeffy is funded by optional tips that buyers can add at checkout and can decline. To use it, an organization must be a nonprofit or registered charity in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia or Germany, with a bank account in its own name.

Eventbrite’s advantage is reach. Public events can appear in its marketplace, which it says has 89 million monthly users. If most of your guests are strangers who find you there, a nonprofit may still sell more tickets on Eventbrite than it saves in fees on Zeffy.

For free tickets, most ticketing systems cost nothing, Eventbrite included, so choose on features. For paid tickets, the only one we compared that is free outright is Zeffy, and only for nonprofits; for everyone else, the best free system is the one with no monthly fee and the lowest fees at your ticket price. On a $25 ticket, the cheapest in our table below is TixFox at $1.42 a ticket, against $3.44 on Eventbrite.

Free to you is not free to your guests. Most of these let you pass the fees to buyers, which keeps your payout whole but raises what each guest pays at checkout.

Then check the limits that matter for a series: how many events and ticket types the free plan allows, and whether you can export your guest list. SocialLoop’s Free plan covers 1 event per month with 1 ticket type per event, and takes 5% plus processing on paid tickets.

For free tickets, nearly all of them, Eventbrite included, charge nothing when nobody pays. For paid tickets, Zeffy is the only platform we compared with no platform or card-processing fee, and only nonprofits can use it; on every other platform someone pays a cut of each ticket or a subscription, plus card processing.

When a ticket site advertises no fees, it usually means one of three things: the fee is added to the buyer’s price instead of taken from yours, a subscription replaces the per-ticket fee, or the site is a resale marketplace for people buying tickets, not a place to host your own event.

A subscription can remove the platform fee but not card processing. Luma Plus, $59 a month billed annually, has a 0% platform fee on paid events, but Stripe still charges its card fee, typically 2.9% + 30¢, on each payment. It is worth paying for only once the fee it removes is bigger than the subscription, as worked out further down this page.

SocialLoop is not a no-fee platform either: free RSVPs cost nothing, and paid tickets carry a platform fee of 5% on every plan, plus card processing, which you can pass on to buyers or absorb.

For a small paid event in the US, “free” only means no monthly fee: every hosted option except Zeffy, which is for registered nonprofits, takes a cut of each ticket, so the useful one is the cheapest at your ticket price that has no limit you will hit. At a $25 ticket the fees in the table differ by up to $2.02 a ticket, so check the limits and catches before the price.

Flat fees per ticket hurt cheap tickets most; percentage fees hurt expensive ones most. Run your own ticket price through the table’s rates, or our fee calculator.

For a recurring event, the catches matter as much as the fee: whether free tickets stay free, how many events or ticket types the free plan allows, and whether you keep your guests’ details to invite them next month.

A paid plan is cheaper when its yearly price is less than the fees it removes on what you sell in a year: divide the subscription by the fee it saves on each ticket to find how many tickets you need to sell.

Luma Plus costs $708 a year ($59 a month, billed annually) and removes Luma’s 5% fee. It pays for itself once you sell more than $14,160 of tickets a year, about 567 tickets at $25. At 40 tickets a month, the free plan is still cheaper.

Ticket Tailor has no plan to buy; prepaid ticket credits lower its per-ticket fee, which pays off once you know roughly how many tickets you will sell.

Meetup is the opposite case: its free Starter plan does not allow paid events, so a paid Meetup group needs the Standard plan, from $29.99 a month.

On SocialLoop, paid plans do not lower the fee: it is 5% on every plan. You upgrade for room, not price: more events a month, more ticket types per event and a larger community.