1. Home
  2. Compared To
  3. Open Source & Flat Fee Ticketpass Alternative | Chobble Tickets

Chobble Tickets vs Ticketpass

Ticketpass is a UK ticketing platform that donates up to half of its booking fee to charity projects. This page compares it to Chobble Tickets on pricing, features and data handling.

Open source & flat fee Ticketpass alternative

Ticketpass charges for each paid ticket sold and gives part of that charge to a charity the organiser or the attendee chooses. Free events cost nothing to list.

Chobble Tickets charges £50/year or £5/month for managed hosting and adds no per-ticket platform fee. Its source code is published under the AGPL-3.0-only licence, so anyone can read it, fork it, or run their own copy. Ticketpass does not publish its source code.

Pricing comparison

Paid tickets on Ticketpass carry two separate charges at the same published rate: a booking fee and a service fee. Both exclude VAT. The Essentials plan lists a booking fee of 1.9% + £0.20 and a service fee of 1.9% + £0.20, so the combined charge is 3.8% + £0.40 per paid ticket. The Pro plan lists 3.5% + £0.35 twice, a combined 7% + £0.70. Enterprise pricing is quoted on request.

Ticketpass says card processing is covered inside the booking fee, so there is no separate payment-provider charge. The organiser can absorb the fees or add them to the ticket price so the buyer pays them.

Chobble Tickets charges a flat £50/year or £5/month, or £25/year for charities, community groups, artists and musicians. Ticket income goes straight to the organiser's own Stripe, Square or SumUp account, and that provider charges its normal processing rate, typically 1.5% + 20p on a UK card.

On a £15 ticket, the Essentials charge is about £0.97 and the Pro charge is about £1.75. Across 500 tickets that is about £485 on Essentials or about £875 on Pro. An organiser who absorbs the charges pays that amount, and an organiser who passes them on adds it to what attendees pay. The same 500 tickets on Chobble Tickets cost £50 in hosting, or £25 at the community rate, plus processing paid to the organiser's own payment provider.

Interactive cost calculator

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

Total takings £2,000.00
Chobble Tickets Ticketpass (Essentials)
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.

Ticketpass Essentials fees: a booking fee of 1.9% + £0.20 and a separate service fee of 1.9% + £0.20 on each paid ticket, so 3.8% + 40p in total (excl. VAT). Card processing is covered inside the booking fee. Free events are free, and up to 50% of the booking fee is donated to a chosen charity project. Chobble Tickets: £50/year or £5/month flat (£25/year for community groups, charities and schools) + Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p). Source: ticketpass.org/pricing (July 2026).

Where the donation comes from

Ticketpass calls its donation pledge Give Back 50. It donates up to 50% of its booking fee, and the organiser or the attendee picks the charity project. The service fee is not part of the pledge. Ticketpass says the donation is sent after the event has finished and refunds have settled, in the next quarterly payment cycle.

The Ticketpass terms and conditions state that the pledge "is not a binding contractual obligation but a commitment in line with Ticketpass's ethos of social responsibility". They also reserve the right to withhold, suspend or cancel a donation in defined circumstances, such as a project no longer operating.

The money donated is part of the fee charged on the ticket. On an Essentials £15 ticket the booking fee is about £0.49, so the donation is up to about £0.24. The rest of the £0.97 charge is outside the pledge and covers card processing and whatever else Ticketpass spends it on. Across 500 tickets that is up to about £121 donated out of about £485 charged.

Chobble Tickets does not add a charge to tickets, so no part of a ticket price is directed to a charity by Chobble. Chobble CIC donates 10% of its own income to the Against Malaria Foundation, funded from the hosting fee organisers pay. The guide to donation and profit pledges explains how to read pledges of this kind on any platform.

Feature comparison

Both platforms share some features

  • Online ticket sales with card payment processing
  • Unlimited events, free or paid, in one account
  • Multiple ticket types per event
  • Recurring events
  • QR code scanning for check-in at the door
  • Email confirmations to attendees after booking
  • Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes
  • Printable tickets as well as phone tickets
  • Event capacity limits
  • Free event support with no payment setup required
  • Age restrictions on tickets
  • Unlisted, private events
  • Attendee lists and the ability to contact attendees
  • Discount codes
  • Donations collected alongside tickets
  • Door sales
  • Refunds from the admin panel
  • Team members with permissions
  • Custom checkout questions (Ticketpass Pro plan and above; included on Chobble Tickets)

Ticketpass has features Chobble Tickets doesn't

  • Charity donation from the booking fee - up to half the booking fee goes to a project the organiser or attendee selects, which Chobble cannot match because it takes no fee from tickets
  • Consumer marketplace - events are listed on ticketpass.org for buyers to browse, which can bring sales from people who were not looking for that organiser. Chobble does not run a marketplace
  • Native iOS and Android scanning apps - Chobble has a web-based scanner that runs in a phone browser but no native app
  • Reserved seating - seat maps and seat selection at checkout (Ticketpass Pro plan and above). Chobble supports general admission only
  • Face-value resale marketplace - attendees who cannot attend can resell a ticket through Ticketpass at face value
  • Waiting lists for sold-out events (Ticketpass Pro plan and above)
  • Memberships and season passes with paid subscriptions (Ticketpass Pro plan and above)
  • Invite previous attendees to a new event from inside the platform (Ticketpass Pro plan and above)
  • Managing multiple organiser accounts from one place (Ticketpass Pro plan and above)
  • 135 currencies at checkout, so one account can sell in several at once. A Chobble site picks its country and currency during setup and sells in that one
  • Live streaming and video on demand (Ticketpass Enterprise plan)
  • Box office hardware and ticket printers, with onsite support, staff training and a dedicated account manager (Ticketpass Enterprise plan)
  • Payouts before the event (Ticketpass Enterprise plan)
  • Email marketing integrations (Ticketpass Enterprise plan)

Chobble Tickets has features Ticketpass doesn't

  • Encryption at rest - attendee personal data is stored scrambled, so someone reading the database directly cannot read names or contact details. Only a user the organiser has authorised can unlock it. Ticketpass does not document how it stores attendee data at rest
  • Open source - the complete product source is published under AGPL-3.0-only with no proprietary feature tier. Ticketpass is closed source
  • Self-hosting option - run the platform on selected infrastructure without a Chobble software licence fee. Ticketpass is hosted-only
  • Flat pricing - £50/year or £5/month covers every current Chobble feature, whatever the ticket price or sales volume
  • Payments straight to the organiser's own account - Stripe, Square or SumUp, with no waiting for a platform payout
  • Custom domain - point your own domain at your ticket site with TLS handled for you. Ticketpass lists an ethicalticketing.org domain on its Enterprise plan
  • Public-facing website and CMS - a homepage, content pages, news posts and a contact form with spam protection, edited in Markdown with custom CSS. Ticketpass provides event pages and an organiser profile inside its marketplace
  • Admin API and public API on every plan
  • Webhooks - outbound POST on every registration
  • Subscribable ICS calendar feeds and RSS feeds
  • Custom email providers - Resend, Postmark, SendGrid or Mailgun, so confirmations come from your own domain
  • 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
  • Parent/child listings and listing groups with shared capacity caps
  • Daily listings with holiday blackouts and a calendar picker
  • Buying without an account - Ticketpass requires ticket buyers to sign up before they can complete a booking
  • Community Interest Company - Chobble CIC is a UK legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit

Data ownership

Ticketpass stores attendee data on its servers, where Ticketpass staff can read it. Buyers must create a Ticketpass account before completing a booking, so the platform holds a relationship with every attendee. The Ticketpass privacy policy says it may contact users with marketing about Ticketpass and specially selected parties, in line with the marketing preferences the user has set. It names Stripe as the payment processor and Fanex Group Ltd as the operating company.

With Chobble Tickets, attendee data is encrypted at rest with the site's public key and can be decrypted only by an authorised keyed user. The product is published under AGPL-3.0-only, so it can run on infrastructure the organiser selects. Chobble does not run a marketplace and does not send marketing to attendees.

When Ticketpass might be the better choice

  • You want a share of the ticket charge to go to a charity project you or your attendees pick
  • You want your events listed on a consumer marketplace
  • You need reserved seating with a seat picker
  • You need native iOS and Android scanning apps
  • You want waiting lists, memberships or season passes
  • You want a face-value resale route for attendees who cannot come
  • You sell in several currencies from one account
  • You need live streaming, box office hardware or onsite event support
  • You sell few tickets a year and prefer paying per ticket to paying an annual fee

When Chobble Tickets is the better choice

  • You want a platform price that stays the same as ticket prices and sales volume grow, with payment processing the only cost that scales
  • You want attendee data encrypted at rest
  • You want ticket income paid straight into your own Stripe, Square or SumUp account
  • You want your own domain and a full public website rather than a marketplace profile
  • You are a charity, community group, artist or musician (£25/year)
  • You value open source code and the ability to self-host without a Chobble software licence fee
  • You do not want your attendees asked to create an account with a ticketing platform
  • You want API access and white-label email without moving to a higher tier

Platforms change hands, and terms change with them

The service an organiser signs up to is the service as it stands that day. Owners, prices, licences and policies can all change afterwards, and several documented examples sit elsewhere on this site.

  • Ticketpass itself changed operator. Its terms record that on 9 October 2025 Fanex Group Ltd acquired the assets and business operations of Ticketpass Limited.
  • Cal.com moved its production codebase closed source on 14 April 2026, after building its reputation as the open source alternative to Calendly. A separate community version continues under the MIT licence.
  • tickts states on its own site that it plans to add sponsorship and advertising on category and venue pages once it reaches audience scale.
  • Dandelion publishes its code under the Functional Source License, which blocks competing commercial services for two years before Apache 2.0 applies.

What limits a change is the structure underneath it. Ticketpass is operated by Fanex Group Ltd, a private limited company registered in England (company number 16765338). Its entry on the register of people with significant control records one person holding 75% or more of the shares and voting rights, with the right to appoint and remove directors.

That majority shareholder is the executive chairman of the investment firm Liberté Capital, whose published profile describes a career in international banking and finance. Ticketpass's own terms describe the Give Back 50 pledge as a commitment rather than a binding obligation, and the sources reviewed on 27 July 2026 did not document a charitable, co-operative or certified structure.

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, and control cannot be acquired by purchasing a stake.

Under section 53 of the Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community Enterprise) Act 2004, a CIC can stop being a CIC only by dissolving or by becoming a charity, so it cannot convert into an ordinary company. Assets cannot be transferred out below market value except to another asset-locked body, and the CIC Regulator reviews the annual community interest report.

None of that stops Chobble changing its own prices or policies. What it changes is the exit: there is no stake to sell and no way to convert the company into one that pays out. The code is published under AGPLv3, so an organiser who dislikes a future change can run the same product themselves.

Pricing sources

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