If you want Whova's attendee app but cheaper, look at nothing on this page, because that app is genuinely good and the alternatives are not straight swaps. If what you actually need is registration depth, look at Swoogo. Enterprise scale, Cvent. Branded flagship events, Bizzabo. Simple ticketing with no app at all, Ticket Tailor. Predictable cost at volume, a flat subscription.
Why people go looking for a Whova alternative
Whova is an event app with registration attached rather than a registration platform with an app attached, and most of the frustration traces back to that. Its strengths are the delegate-facing bits: agenda, session bookmarking, community board, attendee messaging and matchmaking, exhibitor and lead retrieval tools. It is deservedly popular with academic and association conferences where the programme is dense and the networking is the point.
The complaints cluster in three places. The registration builder is shallower than a dedicated registration platform. The pricing is quote-based, so you cannot budget without a sales call. And the total is a per-event fee plus a per-ticket cut plus optional modules, which means three numbers to reconcile rather than one.
What does Whova actually cost?
Whova does not publish a price, so treat every figure here as reported rather than official. Independent write-ups converge on a per-event platform fee in the region of $500 to $1,000, plus a registration fee commonly cited at 3.0% plus $0.99 per paid ticket, plus payment processing on top. Free tickets generally do not attract the platform fee. Former users have reported add-on modules, unlimited document uploads being the example that comes up most, at up to $2,000 on top.
The pattern is worth naming because it is not unique to Whova: a modest headline entry price, then a percentage that scales with your success, then a menu. If you sell 1,000 passes at $400, the per-ticket component alone is roughly $12,990 before the per-event fee or any module is added.
The networking break is what an event app is really sold on, and it is the thing hardest to replace · credit: Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels
The alternatives, by what you are actually trying to fix
If the registration form is the problem: Swoogo
Swoogo is the deepest registration builder in this bracket: conditional logic, attendee-type routing, session selection and a proper page builder, sold as a flat annual licence by user rather than per registrant. Independent listings put it at roughly $7,800 a year for one full user plus a reporting user, rising to around $24,000 to $26,000 for up to eight users, with unlimited events and unlimited registrations inside the licence. There is no bundled attendee app of Whova's kind, which is the trade.
If you need the whole enterprise suite: Cvent
Cvent is the incumbent and prices like it: an annual licence commonly cited from about $20,000, plus a per-registrant charge for Attendee Hub and the event app, now merged into a single line at around $7 per registrant per event with annual increases scheduled from July 2026, plus implementation that is widely reported in the $5,000 to $50,000 range in year one. You buy it because you need sourcing, meetings management and a supplier network alongside the event, not because it is cheap.
If the brand experience is the point: Bizzabo
Bizzabo does polished, heavily branded flagship events well. Its published floor is roughly $499 a seat each month on an annual plan, and Bizzabo does not sell fewer than three seats, which puts its entry point near $18,000 for the year before a single event runs. Note what Bizzabo places outside that floor: API access, single sign-on and onsite badge printing are all priced as separate paid modules.
If you only ever needed ticketing: Ticket Tailor
No app, no networking, no matchmaking, and that is the appeal. $0.85 per ticket pay as you sell, from $0.30 on prepaid credits, free events free up to roughly 5,000 free tickets a year, 50% off for registered charities, and your own Stripe, PayPal or Square account taking the money. For a straightforward paid conference with no delegate app, it is the cheapest credible option here at low volume.
If the cause matters to your board: Humanitix
Humanitix donates its booking fee profits to children's charities. US rate is 5% plus $1.29 per paid ticket, inclusive of card processing, dropping to 3.9% plus $1.29 for registered charities, schools and not-for-profits. Registration is competent rather than deep and there is no Whova-equivalent app.
What Would Zero Booking Fees Save You?
eventcloud charges a flat subscription, not a cut of every ticket. Compare it with what your current platform takes.
If your programme is mostly on a screen: vFairs
vFairs is built for virtual and hybrid formats with an in-person capability attached. Pricing is fully quote-based with no public figure, structured around annual licence bands tied to registration volume, so a like-for-like cost comparison is not honestly possible.
What the same year costs on each
Platform fees only, one organiser account, a $50 paid ticket, one year of activity across however many events reach the volume. Humanitix is all-in on card processing; the others sit on top of separate processing of roughly $1.45 to $1.75 on a $50 ticket. The Whova and Cvent figures are reported floors, not published prices.
| Platform and fee basis | 500 tickets | 5,000 tickets | 50,000 tickets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ticket Tailor, $0.85 per ticket pay as you sell | $425 | $4,250 | $42,500 |
| eventcloud, flat annual licence, one user | $1,250 | $1,250 | $1,250 |
| Whova, about 3% plus $0.99 per ticket, plus a quoted per-event fee | from $1,245 | from $12,450 | from $124,500 |
| Humanitix, 5% plus $1.29 per ticket, card fees included | $1,895 | $18,950 | $189,500 |
| Swoogo, flat annual licence, one user | about $7,800 | about $7,800 | about $7,800 |
| Bizzabo, about $499 a seat each month, three-seat minimum | about $18,000 | about $18,000 | about $18,000 |
| Cvent, licence plus about $7 per registrant per event | from $23,000 | from $54,500 | from $369,500 |
Three of those rows are flat and four climb. That is the only structural difference on the page. Everything else is feature preference, and feature preference is a decision you can revisit next year, whereas a fee model quietly compounds.
Where eventcloud fits
Clearly labelled so you can skip it. eventcloud is a flat $125 per user per month, or $1,250 per user per year on the annual licence, with unlimited events, ticket types, tickets and registrations included and no per-ticket fee. Payments run through your own Stripe account, so the money lands with you rather than sitting on a platform payout schedule. It suits organisers running many in-person events a year on a small team, where the cost of a percentage model compounds fastest.
Unlimited means usage, not everything. It is not unlimited users: you pay per seat from one upwards, so a ten-person events team is a ten-times bigger bill. White-label branding sits on Enterprise rather than the Team plan. And Stripe still charges card processing directly to you.
Who this is not for
Attendee networking and matchmaking are not part of eventcloud, and there is no delegate community app. If the reason you bought Whova is that your delegates message each other, build their own agendas and find people to meet through the app, none of this is a replacement, so stay where you are or look at Bizzabo.
eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events either. If a large part of your programme is streamed with a production layer behind it, vFairs or Cvent will serve you better.
eventcloud connects to Stripe and to nothing else. If registrations need to land automatically in whatever your membership team runs on, that is an export to Excel at our end and an import at yours.
And if you run one conference a year with 300 delegates, a percentage model is genuinely fine, because the crossover has not arrived yet.
How to choose in about ten minutes
Write down three numbers: paid tickets last year, expected paid tickets next year, and your average ticket price. Apply each platform's fee basis to all three. Then ask one question that has nothing to do with cost: is the attendee app the product, or is it a nice-to-have that got bundled? If it is the product, pay for it and stop comparing. If it is a nice-to-have, you have been paying a percentage of every ticket for a feature your delegates open twice.
The pricing page has the flat figure, and the Cvent, Bizzabo and Swoogo comparisons run the same conference through each model side by side.
