Cap a conference at three levels: the event as a whole, each ticket type, and each bookable session. Ticket-type and event-wide capacity are settings on your registration, and a session takes 1 to 100,000 places, counted at booking. Set all three before registration opens, so the form closes itself.
Why Does a Conference Need Three Caps Instead of One?
Because the building, the audience and the room are three different limits, and a single number hides which one you are about to hit. A venue licence says how many people can be on site. A delegate pass, a speaker pass and an exhibitor staff pass each have their own allocation. A workshop room holds forty even when the conference holds four hundred.
Treat them separately and the awkward conversations get shorter. If the exhibitor staff allocation fills, delegates keep registering. If the Thursday masterclass fills, the conference does not close. If the event-wide cap is reached, everything stops at once, which is exactly what you want from a fire marshal's number. For a multi-track programme the same logic runs one level deeper, and the piece on running registration for a multi-track conference walks through how the tracks map to tickets.
How Does Capacity per Ticket Type Work?
You set a capacity on each ticket type and, separately, an overall capacity for the event. Delegates, speakers, exhibitor staff, sponsors, press and students can each have their own ticket group with its own form, so a full exhibitor allocation never blocks a delegate.
A few details are worth knowing before you build:
Private ticket groups are reachable only by a secret link, so speakers and exhibitor staff register on their own pass without anyone else seeing it, and their capacity is theirs alone.
Stacked price windows switch themselves, early bird to door, so the price can step up on its own while the capacity you set stays where you put it.
One order line takes up to 99 of a ticket type, so a company booking a block of delegates is a single order and not a stack of them.
If something stops a ticket selling, your team sees the reason on the ticket page and the event dashboard, with a link to the setting that fixes it. Buyers simply see that sales are paused.
That last point matters on the day the form quietly closes. Nothing is more annoying than a sold-out ticket type that nobody on the team knows about, apart perhaps from the email asking why registration is "broken". It is not broken. It is full.
The registrations behind those caps are not metered. eventcloud counts team seats, not tickets, so a ticket type filling up is a capacity decision you made, not a billing event. The registration features page shows how forms, ticket groups and capacity fit together.
How Do You Cap a Session, Not Just the Event?
Switch on booking for the session in the agenda, give it a capacity, and delegates choose it as they register. Capacity runs from 1 to 100,000, or you leave it blank for unlimited. It cannot be set below the number of places already booked, and a session with bookings cannot be deleted, which saves you from the classic mid-campaign "who removed the workshop?" mystery.
Four settings do most of the work:
Who can book. Either every ticket type that asks for attendee details per ticket (the default, which also covers ticket types added later), or only the ticket types you choose.
Included with. Include a session with a ticket type, such as a masterclass with every VIP pass, and it lands straight on that attendee's agenda. Included places are not counted against the session's capacity, so size the room for bookings and inclusions together.
Booking cut-off. You set how many minutes before the start booking closes. The default is 15, and the range is 0 to 10,080 (a full week). The same cut-off applies in checkout, the event app and the attendee portal.
Free or paid. Paid sessions take a price in the event currency, with VAT following the organisation's setting.
In checkout, a Sessions step shows one card per named attendee. Rows read "Fully booked" when a session is full, and "N places left" once 10 or fewer remain. Sessions that overlap by even a minute are refused for the same attendee, and back-to-back sessions are fine. Only ticket types that ask for attendee details per ticket can book sessions, which is why a ticket type without named attendees can have sessions included but not booked.
Conference Registration Without the Procurement Saga.
Delegate types, early-bird windows, session booking, badges designed in millimetres and check-in from any phone, with no limit on delegates.
What Happens at the Session Door?
Session scanning decides who gets in, and the count tells you how full the room really is. On the check-in link, door staff choose the session they are scanning at. A valid ticket that booked the session, or whose ticket type includes it, is admitted. Anyone else is refused with a message saying the ticket does not include the session and it was not booked.
Every device at that door shows a running count of admissions against capacity, refreshed every 10 seconds. Re-entry is admitted and flagged, so a delegate who nips out for coffee does not cause a scene. A session with booking switched off reads as an open session and admits every valid ticket. Afterwards, each session has an attendee list that shows who attended and when they first came in, with a spreadsheet download.
Two honest details about how it behaves, so your door team is not surprised: access is per session, not per room, and the door produces first-entry times, not a minute-by-minute record of who was inside. If you plan to run several sessions back to back in one room, give each its own scanning location.
How Do Other Tools Handle Capacity?
They differ most on what happens when a session or event fills. The table compares what each vendor says on its own pages; where a page is silent on a point, the cell says so rather than guessing.
| Tool | Per-session Capacity | When It Is Full | Source (Read 5 November 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| EventMobi | Organiser sets a limit per session in the event app; blank means unlimited | Full sessions are greyed out and show no seats available; attendees see seats remaining; the page does not mention waitlists | EventMobi help article, dated 12 August 2026 |
| Cvent | Not covered by the waitlist release note | Built-in waitlist for events at capacity in Cvent Essentials and Cvent Webinar, with automatic promotion as spots open; the note does not mention sessions | Cvent release board, projected done 22 July 2026 |
| Eventcombo | Session management and an agenda builder are listed on Professional; capacity is not stated | Not stated on the pricing page | Eventcombo pricing page, updated 22 October 2026 |
| eventcloud | 1 to 100,000 places per session, or unlimited; separate capacity per ticket type and event-wide | "Fully booked" and "N places left" in checkout; running admissions count at the session door | Platform behaviour as built |
Sources: EventMobi session access and capacities, Cvent waitlisting release note and Eventcombo pricing. Vendor pages change without notice, so check the current version before you rely on a row.
The useful question to put to any vendor is the one the table keeps circling: when the room is full, what does the attendee see, and what does your team see? The first is a design question and the second is an operations question, and you want good answers to both.
What About the Delegate Who Wants in After a Session Fills?
Today, a full session shows as fully booked and the organiser decides what to do next, which in practice means raising the capacity if the room allows or pointing people to the repeat. Coming soon: a waitlist for sold-out tickets and full sessions. Need it for your event? Tell us how your registration works at eventcloud.io/contact.
The one waiting list that does exist is for tickets not yet on sale: it emails everyone the moment they open, which suits a conference releasing its second tranche of delegate places.
A Capacity Checklist to Run Before Registration Opens
Write down the venue's maximum for the whole event and enter it as the event-wide capacity.
List every pass (delegate, speaker, exhibitor staff, sponsor, press, student) and give each ticket type its own capacity.
For each bookable session, decide the room size, then subtract the places you will include with ticket types, and set the capacity from what remains.
Set the booking cut-off per session, remembering it applies in checkout, the app and the portal alike.
Run a test registration as a delegate with a clash on purpose, and confirm the second session is refused.
On the check-in link, open the session door and confirm the running count shows the capacity you set.
If your door team has not used the check-in link before, the page on check-in and session scanning shows what the staff screen looks like and how the four-digit PIN works.
