The Battle for the Best Ticket Selling Platform

There are over 1,000 top contenders in the world of event ticketing platforms - surely, there is one that outweighs the rest. 

In this article, we highlight some of the top players in the game, including ourselves, Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, and StubHub. 

The “Best” Ticketing Platforms

As we previously mentioned there are more than 1,000 top contenders in this industry and all claim to solve a problem the other cannot, while some, are the “best” because they’ve been around the longest and are well-known amongst the average consumer.

In this guide we’ll be taking a look at the top 4 ticketing platforms:

• TicketMaster
• Eventbrite
• StubHub
• Freshtix

While these competitors have many things in common, they also offer an array of options that truly set them apart. Let's take a look.

TicketMaster

When it comes down to brand recognition alone - at one point or another in your life you’ve probably heard of TicketMaster and that’s all for very good reasons. 

TicketMaster has spent years promoting a solid product with expanding features that have made it into the awesome product it is today. 

Truthfully, TicketMaster is one of the best alternative ticket-selling platforms on the market, but it misses the mark to be the “best” in our opinion and this is for a few reasons, really. 

PRO: Ever-expanding list of unique features for an easier buying experience

TicketMaster has been around longer than many others on our list today, and with their years of experience in this industry, they’ve developed a massive team of developers and marketing professionals who create products on a daily basis to consistently improve on the sales experience for customers and ticket sellers-alike. 

One of the best features recently introduced that benefits sellers and buyers is the TicketMaster Smart Queue system which makes buying tickets for high-volume shows much easier, by offering genuine access to real people, and not bots. 

CON: It’s built with buyers in mind first, not the sellers.

While TicketMaster has really good tools for sellers, it’s not evident anywhere from their homepage or from quick navigational searches on their site. It’s actually harder to find how to sell tickets with TicketMaster than it is to buy tickets. Of course, there should be a happy medium when it comes to a ticketing approach such as these sites, but TicketMaster just misses that mark.

With that out the way, Ticketmaster is great for those that have a larger following already and can leverage their status with Ticketmaster for better rates and promotional offers. Ticketmaster is NOT for smaller ticketer sellers or localized events.

Eventbrite

Another top player in the event ticketing world is Eventbrite. Eventbrite was founded in 2006 and has been consistently improving as a ticketing platform. Unlike TicketMaster, Eventbrite's main focus is the event creator (ticket seller) which places it higher in the list, just above TicketMaster.

PRO: Offers one of the most robust event creation tools in the industry and makes the event organizers the main focus (over the buyers)

Eventbrite is great when it comes to their 50/50 approach of “our platform has the traffic, you build the events.” In other words, Eventbrite does a great job of giving you natural traffic to your events, while you just need to focus on building your events and promoting them through your own means. 

What we like about Eventbrite is its branding ability and event page builder. Simply put, it’s professional and well-put together. 

Eventbrite truly is one of the best out there for easy access, quick ticket sales, and superb event creation.

CON: The fees can be astronomical and oftentimes, downright unfair

The biggest thing that holds back Eventbrite is the fees and pricing model associated with it. A while back we did a deep comparison between FreshTix and EventBrite and what we found was that EventBrite offers a fee per ticket at 3.7% + $1.79 and has a payment processing fee of 2.9%.

CON: Little to no support

Another downside of Eventbrite is that customer service is almost non-existent. It’s limited to online help through their help center only. There is no dedicated resource to reach out to in emergency situations and as you know in the world of event organization, fires and emergencies ALWAYS happen at the wrong times.

Eventbrite is great for first-time ticket sellers looking for a quick and easy way to sell tickets online and gain a natural traffic boost from the highly authoritative site.

StubHub

As a loyalist amongst the better for the people, I can strongly say to avoid StubHub. StubHub offers insanely high fees, with little support in the event-building department.

StubHub tends to put “resale” of tickets higher on their priority list over selling your own tickets, which, in practice, works great for them but for you the event organizer, it's more trouble than it’s worth.

Okay, bias aside, StubHub is still a great choice for many. It won’t get a list of pros and cons here, simply because event management and ticket sales are not its forte.  Again, it’s resale tickets.

If you need a quick and easy ticket platform to just sell non-branded tickets, you can’t go wrong with StubHub.

Freshtix

Without offering too much bias, we’ll keep our views of ourselves as neutral as possible - but truth be told, we do offer one of the best solutions on the market. If you want a TLDR that’s not biased, we’re stacked pretty evenly against Eventbrite but offer just a little bit more than them and others when it comes to white-labeling, branding, and reduced fees.

Freshtix does a lot more than just traditional ticketing:

• Mobile tickets
• Price-per-seat features
• Seat charts
• VIP & add-on packages
• Branded landing pages 
• Custom tickets
• Custom dashboards with real-time Google Analytics 
• SEO-optimized landing pages
• Access to mobile scanners and point-of-sale systems 
• Integrates with all major social media platforms
• Custom emailing solution for custom ticket funnels and upsells 
• Venue customizer and manager 
• Dedicated marketing support
• Fraud protection and booking protection

And the list can just go on. We’ve refined what we do and continue to do so with the power of our community. We take feedback seriously and implement the most favored requests.

With that out of the way, with hundreds of pros, we’re going to give you one (well two) of our favorite things we can offer you: Customer service and putting you first.

Pro: Puts the seller first and has 24/7 dedicated live support

FreshTix offers a 24/7 support solution to ensure that you always have access to someone for real time support. Another pro is that we put the sellers first in our business model. 

Our approach has allowed us to build some amazing systems for ticket sellers that benefits the buyers in the long run. 

We offer several innovative solutions with that in mind - such as a 100% branded event landing page, customizable tickets, partnerships with EventWristbands.com and so much more.

FreshTix is the best option for those looking to have a branded ticketing solution while offering their customers the most seamless experience possible.

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