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Chobble Tickets vs EventPrime

EventPrime is a WordPress plugin that adds an events calendar, bookings and ticket sales to an existing WordPress site. Chobble Tickets is a standalone ticketing platform. This page compares them on pricing, features and data handling.

Open source & standalone EventPrime alternative

EventPrime is published by Metagauss Inc. The free core plugin is on WordPress.org, and paid features are sold as separate extensions or in plan bundles. Running it needs a WordPress site, hosting for that site, and updates for the plugin and each extension.

Chobble Tickets is a standalone platform. You sign up at tix.chobble.com or self-host the code, and a public website and CMS is included, so on managed hosting there is nothing to install.

Which one fits depends on whether ticketing should sit inside a WordPress site you already run, or work as its own product.

Pricing comparison

EventPrime plan prices are one-off payments that include one year of updates and support. The prices below were checked on the EventPrime plans page on 27 July 2026. Approximate pounds use the rate on that date.

Free - $0, the core plugin plus the free extensions (Import Export, WooCommerce Integration, Zapier, Elementor, HoneyPot Security, Demo Data)

Essential - $69 single site (approx. £51), $129 unlimited sites (approx. £96). Adds attendee lists, advanced checkout fields, guest bookings, Mailchimp and MailPoet, hCaptcha, social sharing, a countdown timer and the event list widget.

Professional - $99 single site (approx. £73), $189 unlimited sites (approx. £140). Adds Event Tickets, Stripe Payments, Square Payments, WooCommerce Checkout, discount coupons, invoices, sponsors, live seating, group booking, Zoom and Turnstile.

Business - listed at $179 single site (approx. £133) and $349 unlimited sites (approx. £258), advertised at $119 and $229 during a sale on the date of review. Adds the advanced seat plan builder, RSVP, offline payments, advanced reports, admin bookings, reviews and ratings, attendee check-in, Twilio text notifications, reminder emails, waiting lists, map view, multi-session events, attendee certificates, event materials and printable programmes.

Extensions can also be bought individually, from $29.95 for items such as Guest Bookings or Attendee Check In up to $99.95 for the Advanced Seat Plan Builder.

EventPrime takes no per-ticket fee and no commission. On top of the licence you pay your own payment gateway (for example Stripe at 1.5% + 20p in the UK) and WordPress hosting, typically £5 to £25 a month.

Chobble Tickets costs a flat £50/year or £5/month, or £25/year for charities, community groups, artists and musicians, with no per-ticket platform fee. Ticket income goes straight to the organiser's own Stripe, Square or SumUp account, which charges its normal processing rate.

The calculator below treats the EventPrime licence as renewed each year, because a lapsed licence stops receiving updates, including security fixes. An organiser who buys once and never renews pays the licence price in year one and nothing after that, so their cost in later years is the WordPress hosting and payment processing alone.

The calculator counts the licence and payment processing only. WordPress hosting is not in the totals, so an organiser who does not already run a WordPress site should add £60 to £300 a year to the EventPrime figures.

Interactive cost calculator

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

Total takings £2,000.00
Chobble Tickets EventPrime (Professional)
Annual fee £50.00 £73.00
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.

EventPrime Professional: $99 (approx. £73) for a single site, or $189 (approx. £140) for unlimited sites, paid once. The tier adds Event Tickets, Stripe Payments, Square Payments, live seating, coupons and invoices. The licence is paid once and includes 12 months of support and updates; this calculator assumes it is renewed each year, because a lapsed licence stops receiving updates including security fixes. No per-ticket fees. Payment processing is handled by your own gateway (e.g. Stripe 1.5% + 20p in the UK). Running EventPrime also requires a WordPress site, which has its own hosting costs (typically £5-£25/month). Chobble Tickets: £50/year or £5/month flat (£25/year for community groups, charities and schools) + Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p). Source: theeventprime.com/all-extensions (July 2026).

What the licence covers

The Metagauss terms say support and updates last one year from purchase. After that you can keep using the version you have, or renew to keep receiving updates and support. Security fixes therefore stop arriving on an unrenewed licence.

The unlimited-sites tiers carry a fair usage policy. Automatic access covers up to 20 websites, and further sites need a manual request that Metagauss can decline.

Refunds are only given if negotiated before purchase or requested within 24 hours of it. Metagauss also states that prices can change without notice.

Chobble Tickets does not use per-site licensing, and updates and support continue for as long as you are a customer. Managed hosting is charged per site, so £50/year covers one hosted ticketing site and a second site is a second payment. The AGPL-3.0-only code can be self-hosted on any number of sites without a Chobble licence fee.

Feature comparison

EventPrime features are split across plans, so a Free or Essential licence covers much less than the Business plan. Ticket generation, Stripe and Square payments start at the Professional plan, and attendee check-in starts at the Business plan.

Both platforms share some features

  • No commission or per-ticket platform fees
  • Unlimited events, free or paid
  • Multiple ticket types per event with capacity limits
  • Recurring and multi-day events
  • Discount codes and conditional offers
  • Custom checkout questions
  • Printable tickets attendees can download
  • Attendee lists and CSV export
  • Customisable confirmation emails
  • Booking cancellations and refunds through the payment provider
  • Stripe and Square card payments
  • QR code check-in at the door (EventPrime Business plan; included on Chobble Tickets)

EventPrime has features Chobble Tickets doesn't

  • Runs inside WordPress - events, venues, performers and organisers are WordPress posts and taxonomies, so they sit in the admin and theme you already use
  • Calendar views - month, week, day and agenda calendars, plus grid, masonry, stacked row and slider event views
  • Reserved seating - the Live Seating extension adds a seat picker, and the Business plan adds a seat map builder with shapes, rotation and per-seat amenities
  • Venue, performer and organiser records with their own public pages
  • RSVP invitations with guest lists and invite tracking (Business plan)
  • Waiting lists for sold-out events (Business plan)
  • Multi-session events with per-session times, venues and performers (Business plan)
  • Attendee certificates sent automatically after a booking or event (Business plan)
  • Event materials and downloads restricted to people who booked or checked in (Business plan)
  • Printable event programmes as HTML or branded PDF (Business plan)
  • PDF invoices emailed with booking details (Professional plan)
  • Reviews, ratings and attendee feedback on event pages (Business plan)
  • SMS notifications through Twilio (Business plan). Chobble Tickets texts attendees from your own Android phone and number instead. Chobble adds no charge per message, and each text uses that phone's own mobile plan
  • Mailchimp and MailPoet list integration for the organiser's own mailing lists (Essential plan)
  • Zoom webinar integration for selling access to online sessions (Professional plan)
  • WooCommerce checkout so any WooCommerce-compatible gateway can take the payment (Professional plan)
  • Offline payments with bookings held until money is collected (Business plan)
  • Zapier and Elementor integrations (free extensions)
  • Frontend event submission so other users can propose events
  • Wishlists where visitors save events to their account
  • Any other WordPress plugin can be added to the same site

Chobble Tickets has features EventPrime doesn't

  • No WordPress required - Chobble Tickets runs on its own, so there is no WordPress site, theme or plugin stack to install, update and secure
  • Encryption at rest - attendee personal data is stored scrambled, so someone who reaches the database still cannot read names or contact details without the site's private key. EventPrime stores bookings as ordinary WordPress posts in the site database
  • Open source with no paid tier - the complete product is published under AGPL-3.0-only. EventPrime's core is GPLv2 or later, but its paid extensions are sold separately and their source is not published
  • Every feature on one price - check-in, seating aside, reporting, payments and API access are all included, rather than split across Essential, Professional and Business plans
  • A public website and CMS without WordPress - a homepage, content pages, news posts and a contact form with spam protection, edited in Markdown with custom CSS. EventPrime's public pages come from the WordPress site it is installed on, so the site, theme and CMS are the organiser's to run
  • Apple & Google Wallet passes
  • Admin API and public API on every plan
  • Webhooks - outbound POST on every registration
  • ICS calendar feeds and RSS feeds that subscribers keep in sync automatically
  • Custom email providers built in - pick Resend, Postmark, SendGrid or Mailgun in the admin so confirmations come from your own domain. An EventPrime site can do this too, by installing and configuring a separate WordPress mail plugin
  • Liquid email templates - control the subject, HTML and text of confirmation emails
  • Pay-what-you-want pricing - buyers enter their own price above a minimum
  • Promo codes, discounts and add-ons with stock limits and a live running total
  • Parent/child listings and listing groups with shared capacity caps
  • Daily listings with holiday blackouts and a calendar picker
  • Embeddable ticket widget - an iframe that shows your events on any other website
  • Activity logs - an audit trail of admin actions and booking activity
  • SumUp payments alongside Stripe and Square
  • Community Interest Company - Chobble CIC is a UK legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit

Setup and hosting

EventPrime is a plugin, not a hosted service. To sell tickets with it you need a WordPress site you host, the core plugin, the extensions or plan that covers the features you want, a payment gateway configured on the site, and ongoing updates for all of it.

That suits an organiser who already runs WordPress, because events live in the admin they use every day and attendee records stay in their own database.

Chobble Tickets hosted is the other trade-off. You sign up, log in and create an event, with no WordPress, no plugin updates and no server to patch. Attendee personal data is encrypted at rest, and the code can be self-hosted on infrastructure you select without a Chobble licence fee.

Data and attendee privacy

By default neither product sends attendee data to a third-party marketing database. EventPrime stores bookings in the organiser's own WordPress database, and Metagauss says it emails customers about updates, promotions and new features, with an opt-out. Those emails go to the licence holder, not to attendees.

Organisers can change that by choice on either product. EventPrime's Mailchimp and MailPoet extensions subscribe attendees to the organiser's own lists, which sends their contact details to those services. Chobble Tickets sends confirmation emails through the email provider the organiser configures. In both cases the organiser picks the third party and the data goes to the organiser's own account with it.

EventPrime's security is the security of the WordPress site it sits on. The booking records share a database with every other plugin and theme installed there, so a compromise elsewhere on the site can expose them.

Chobble Tickets encrypts attendee personal data with the site's public key. Reading it needs the credentials of an authorised keyed user. Chobble does not run a marketplace and does not email attendees about other organisers' events.

Two published sources disagree on payments

The WordPress.org listing for the free core plugin says it accepts payments for bookings through PayPal and Stripe. The EventPrime plans page sells Stripe Payments as a $39.95 extension included from the Professional plan, and Square Payments as a $29.95 extension.

Confirm which gateways a free install can use before choosing a plan.

When EventPrime might be the better choice

  • You already run a WordPress site and want events inside it
  • You want a calendar view of events on your own site
  • You need reserved seating with a seat map builder
  • You want venue, performer and organiser pages
  • You need RSVP invitations, waiting lists or multi-session agendas
  • You want attendee certificates, event materials or printed programmes
  • You need a payment gateway that Stripe, Square and SumUp do not cover and can route checkout through WooCommerce
  • You are happy to run WordPress updates and plugin updates yourself
  • You would rather pay once for a licence than pay a yearly hosting fee

When Chobble Tickets is the better choice

  • You do not want to run a WordPress site to sell tickets
  • You want attendee data encrypted at rest
  • You want every feature at one price rather than split across plans
  • You want a flat £50/year or £5/month, or £25/year as a charity, community group, artist or musician
  • You want ticket income paid straight into your own Stripe, Square or SumUp account
  • You value open source code with no paid extensions, and the ability to self-host without a Chobble licence fee
  • You want API access, webhooks and white-label email without a higher tier
  • You want support and updates to continue for as long as you are a customer, rather than for twelve months from purchase

Who builds EventPrime?

EventPrime is published by Metagauss Inc., which also sells the RegistrationMagic and ProfileGrid WordPress plugins. The free core plugin is listed on WordPress.org, where its current install count and rating are published. The Metagauss terms and conditions state that the agreement is governed by the law of the Province of Ontario, Canada.

Chobble Tickets is run by one person as a Community Interest Company (CIC), registered as Chobble CIC, company number 17050113, in Prestwich, Manchester. It is limited by guarantee and has no share capital, so there are no shares to buy and no dividends to pay. Under section 53 of the Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community Enterprise) Act 2004, a CIC can stop being a CIC only by dissolving or becoming a charity.

Pricing sources

The pricing and feature information on this page was verified on 27 July 2026. Prices and plan contents may change. Check the links below for the latest figures.