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Chobble Tickets vs BookitBee

BookitBee is a UK-based ticketing platform. This page compares it to Chobble Tickets.

Open source & cheaper BookitBee alternative

Chobble Tickets is a white label ticketing platform made in the UK by a community interest company. Its source code is published under the AGPL-3.0-only licence, so anyone can read it, fork it, or run their own copy. BookitBee is closed source and does not publish its code.

BookitBee charges from 3.5% per ticket, with a £1 minimum and a £19.95 cap. Chobble Tickets charges £50/year or £5/month, or £25/year for charities on the annual plan, and takes no percentage of ticket sales.

Pricing comparison

BookitBee charges per ticket sold, starting from 3.5% per ticket (up to 6.5% for higher-tier features), with a minimum fee of £1 and a cap of £19.95 per ticket. For high-volume events those fees add up quickly.

Chobble Tickets charges a flat £50/year or £5/month (£25/year for charities on the annual plan) with no per-ticket fees or percentage cuts, which works out significantly cheaper for most event organisers.

Interactive cost calculator

Drag the sliders to see how costs compare at different volumes:

Total takings £2,000.00
Chobble Tickets BookitBee
Annual fee £50.00 £0.00
Platform fees £0.00 £0.00
Payment processing £0.00 £0.00
Total cost per year £0.00 £0.00
Cost per ticket £0.00 £0.00

"Your share" assumes the organiser pays the fees out of the ticket price. Where a platform lets the organiser add its fees on top, the buyer pays them and the organiser keeps more than the figure shown. These figures exclude VAT and cover paid tickets. Several platforms charge nothing for free tickets, and the notes below record that where it is published.

BookitBee fees: from 3.5% per ticket (up to 6.5% for advanced features), min £1, max £19.95 cap, plus Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p). Chobble Tickets: £50/year or £5/month flat + Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p). Source: bookitbee.com/pricing (March 2026).

Feature comparison

BookitBee and Chobble Tickets both handle event ticketing, but they focus on different things. Here is what each offers that the other doesn't:

Both sites share some features

  • Online ticket sales with Stripe payment processing
  • Apple Pay and Google Pay at checkout (via Stripe)
  • QR code scanning for check-in at the door
  • Email confirmations to attendees after booking
  • Event capacity limits
  • Free event support with no payment setup required
  • Refund processing from the admin panel
  • Custom questions at checkout
  • Multiple ticket types per event: both platforms let you create VIP, early bird, group, and standard tiers with different prices

BookitBee has features Chobble Tickets doesn't

  • Social Group Deals - a viral marketing mechanic where buyers share a unique link, and once enough friends purchase, the original buyer gets a free ticket. BookitBee report this drives up to 50% of sales at some events
  • Reserved seating with seat map builder - create interactive venue maps where attendees pick their own seats, tables, or zones, with a best-available auto-assignment option
  • Payment plans - collect instalment payments over time for higher-priced events, with renewal tracking and failed-payment handling. Chobble Tickets takes a deposit and the balance later, but does not split a price into a run of instalments
  • Renewable membership system - multi-tier memberships with pro-rata mid-year additions, self-service upgrades/downgrades, cancellations, and members-only event gating
  • Cross-selling other events during checkout - offer your other events inline during the ticket purchase flow. Chobble Tickets sells merchandise, parking and similar extras as add-ons, but does not offer another event at checkout
  • Box office POS - a web-based point-of-sale app for on-the-door sales and scanning, purpose-built for their platform
  • 11 languages and 30+ currencies - built-in internationalisation for international events
  • White-label branding - fully customisable booking journeys branded to the organiser, not BookitBee
  • PayPal and managed payments - accept payments via PayPal in addition to Stripe, or use BookitBee's managed payment service (LIVE IT Payments) without setting up your own account
  • Invite-only events - restrict bookings by email address or domain
  • Custom registration questions with more field types - free text, date selection, and other field types beyond multiple choice (Chobble supports multiple-choice and free-text custom questions, but BookitBee may still offer more field types)
  • Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, and Tag Manager - built-in tracking and conversion attribution
  • Mailchimp and Slack integrations - connect to your existing marketing and communication tools
  • Real-time sales dashboard - live analytics showing ticket sales, revenue, and attendee demographics

Chobble Tickets has features BookitBee doesn't

  • Encryption at rest - attendee data is encrypted at rest with hybrid RSA-OAEP + AES-256-GCM
  • Promo codes, discounts, and add-ons create promo codes, discount codes, surcharges, and opt-in add-ons with stock limits and a live running total
  • Open source - the complete product source is published under AGPL-3.0-only
  • Self-hosting option - run the platform on selected infrastructure without a Chobble software licence fee
  • Flat pricing - £50/year or £5/month with no per-ticket platform fee, compared to BookitBee's 3.5-6.5% per ticket
  • Apple & Google Wallet tickets - attendees can add tickets to their phone wallet
  • ICS calendar feeds - subscribers get automatic calendar updates
  • RSS feeds - syndicate your events to feed readers
  • Tiered ticket types via groups - create VIP, early bird, and other tiers using event groups with a shared capacity cap (max attendees per group)
  • Pay-what-you-want pricing - let attendees choose their own price
  • Daily/recurring events - per-date capacity with calendar picker and holiday blackouts
  • Custom questions - add multiple-choice and free-text questions to events and collect structured answers at checkout, with answers visible across the admin interface, CSV exports, and webhooks
  • Public & admin API - RESTful JSON API for building custom integrations, plus authenticated admin API with full event CRUD via API keys
  • Webhooks - outbound POST on every registration for custom integrations
  • Event groups - organise related events into collections for multi-event bookings with a single checkout
  • Custom email providers - use Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, or Mailgun so emails come from your domain
  • Customisable email templates - full control over confirmation emails with Liquid syntax for a fully white-label experience
  • Custom domain - get a yourname.tix.chobble.net subdomain instantly, or point your own domain whenever you are ready
  • Public-facing website and CMS a homepage, content pages, news posts, and a contact form with spam protection, edited from the admin panel in Markdown with custom CSS. BookitBee provides event pages but not a composable public website
  • Embeddable widget - drop an iframe into your website
  • No marketing to your attendees - your audience stays yours
  • Community Interest Company - run by a CIC, with profits reinvested rather than distributed to shareholders

When BookitBee might be better

  • You want Social Group Deals to drive viral ticket sales
  • You need reserved seating with a seat map builder
  • You need payment plans or instalment collection for expensive events
  • You want a membership system with tiered subscriptions
  • You need your other events offered to buyers during checkout
  • You want white-label branding on the booking journey
  • You need multi-language (11 languages) or multi-currency (30+) support
  • You want PayPal as a payment option alongside Stripe
  • You prefer a box office POS for on-the-door sales
  • You have very low volume and prefer paying per ticket over a flat fee

When Chobble Tickets is the better choice

  • You want predictable, flat-rate pricing with no per-ticket platform fees
  • Privacy and encryption matter to you
  • You value open source and the ability to self-host
  • You're a community group, charity, or school (£25/year)
  • You want Apple/Google Wallet, calendar feeds, or a public API
  • You don't want a platform marketing to your attendees
  • You're selling enough tickets that percentage fees add up quickly

Who owns BookitBee?

BookitBee operates under the legal name Live It Group Ltd (Companies House #08432364), incorporated in 2013 and renamed from Bookitbee Limited in 2017. It was co-founded by Kenton Ward and Frank Di Mauro, who met at boarding school. Di Mauro resigned as a director in March 2024. The company has received investment from Foresight Group, Jenson Funding Partners, ARC InterCapital, and Scottish Enterprise, totalling approximately $5.3 million, but remains an independent private company with no corporate parent. It has a small team of around 8–15 employees.

Chobble Tickets is run by one person as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a UK legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit. All of Chobble's code is public under AGPLv3, and the platform can be self-hosted by anyone without depending on Chobble as a company.

Pricing sources

The pricing information on this page was verified in March 2026. Fees may change. Check the links below for the latest figures.