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Chobble Tickets vs TicketSource

TicketSource is a UK ticketing platform, running from Penarth in Wales since 2004 and widely used by amateur theatre, schools and village halls. This page compares it to Chobble Tickets.

Open source & flat fee TicketSource 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. TicketSource does not publish its source code.

TicketSource costs the organiser nothing to open an account. It is paid from a booking fee on each paid online booking: 7% plus VAT with TicketSource payment processing, or 4.5% plus VAT if you connect your own Stripe account. Chobble Tickets charges £50/year or £5/month whatever the volume, and adds no fee to any booking.

Pricing comparison

TicketSource has no subscription, no contract and no feature tiers. Every account gets every feature, and the money comes from the booking fee on paid online bookings.

With TicketSource payment processing, the booking fee is 7% plus VAT per paid booking, with a minimum of £0.25 plus VAT. Card processing is included in that fee. With your own Stripe account connected, the booking fee drops to 4.5% plus VAT per paid booking and Stripe charges you separately for card processing.

Registered charities pay a reduced rate: 6.5% plus VAT with TicketSource processing, or 4% plus VAT via Stripe. Free events carry no booking fee up to a total of 1,000 tickets, above which TicketSource asks organisers to get in touch. Bookings the organiser records in-house (cash, cheque, complimentary, and card payments taken through the organiser's own Stripe Terminal) carry no booking fee at all.

The fee is charged per booking, not per ticket, so a customer buying four tickets in one transaction is charged once. Buyers who choose posted tickets pay £2.50 delivery, and buyers are offered paid refund protection from a third party, XCover, at checkout.

Chobble Tickets is a flat £50/year or £5/month, with no per-ticket platform fees. Community groups, charities, artists and musicians pay £25/year. Payment processing is charged by your own Stripe, Square, or SumUp account.

On the TicketSource own-Stripe rate, both platforms leave you paying Stripe separately, so the comparison is 5.4% including VAT against £50 a year: the two cross over at around £930 of annual ticket sales. The 7% route includes card processing in the fee, so the fair comparison there is against £50 plus your own processing charges. At £15 a ticket and Stripe's 1.5% + 20p, that crossover is around 60 tickets, or about £900 of sales a year. Cheaper tickets cross over later, because the fixed 20p is a bigger share of each sale.

Interactive cost calculator

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

Total takings £2,000.00
Chobble Tickets TicketSource
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.

TicketSource booking fee with TicketSource payment processing: 7% per paid booking excluding VAT, minimum £0.25, with card processing included in the fee. The fee is charged per booking, so a multi-ticket booking is charged once and the real cost of one order can be lower than this per-ticket estimate. Registered charities pay 6.5%. Free events carry no fee up to 1,000 tickets. Chobble Tickets: £50/year or £5/month flat + Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p). Source: ticketsource.co.uk/pricing (July 2026).

When you get your money

This is one of the larger differences between the two platforms.

With TicketSource payment processing, ticket income is held in a segregated account until your event has finished. TicketSource emails a statement on the Monday after the event run and transfers the money to your bank account about three working days later. You need a UK bank account to be paid for a UK event.

Connecting your own Stripe account changes this: buyers pay Stripe directly, and TicketSource says the money reaches your bank on a seven-day rolling basis instead of after the event.

Chobble Tickets never holds ticket money. Buyers pay your own Stripe, Square, or SumUp account, so payouts follow that provider's schedule from the first sale onwards.

Feature comparison

TicketSource has been running since 2004 and handles ticketing for around 90,000 events a year. It has a broader feature set than Chobble Tickets in several areas. Here's the breakdown:

Both platforms share some features

  • Online ticket sales with card payments
  • Stripe as a payment option, paying the organiser directly
  • Free events with no payment setup required
  • Event capacity limits
  • QR codes on every ticket, and scanning for check-in at the door
  • A door list for checking attendees in by hand
  • Email confirmations to attendees after booking
  • Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes
  • Discount and promo codes
  • Extras sold alongside tickets (sundry items in TicketSource, add-ons in Chobble Tickets)
  • Custom questions on the booking form
  • Multiple admin users with different permissions
  • Timed-entry sessions as well as general admission
  • Branding on your booking pages with your own colours, images and custom CSS
  • An embeddable ticket widget for your own website
  • An API for reading and syncing event data
  • CSV export of your customer and booking data
  • Refunds processed from the admin panel
  • Recording bookings taken in person, without a platform fee

TicketSource has features Chobble Tickets doesn't

  • Allocated seating - a seating plan designer where you recreate your venue, mark aisles or tables, and let customers pick their own seats. Online and in-house sales draw on the same plan
  • Telephone box office - TicketSource staff answer booking calls from your customers and take orders on your behalf, at no charge to the organiser
  • Posted tickets - TicketSource prints and posts card tickets to buyers who want them, for a £2.50 delivery fee
  • In-house thermal ticket printing - print perforated card tickets on a connected thermal printer using free Print Server software for Windows
  • Offline ticket scanning - a Windows scanning app that downloads the booking list in advance, so the door works without an internet connection
  • Waiting lists - record interest from customers when an event sells out
  • Self-service refunds and exchanges - a Manage My Bookings portal where customers cancel or exchange their own tickets under a policy you set
  • Automatic rules-based discounts - volume rules such as three tickets for the price of two, applied automatically at checkout
  • Event listings with an audience - events appear on the TicketSource What's On listings, which the site says draw over 500,000 visitors a month
  • Direct marketing integrations - built-in connectors for Mailchimp and Brevo (Chobble Tickets connects to these tools through webhooks or Zapier)
  • Arts Council England reporting - direct data export to the Illuminate platform and The Audience Agency, which National Portfolio Organisations need for their funding agreements
  • WordPress plugin - an official plugin for embedding ticket pages in WordPress sites
  • Refund protection at checkout - buyers can add third-party cover from XCover
  • Gift Aid on donations - registered charities can reclaim Gift Aid on donations taken at checkout
  • Booking pages in other languages - buyers can switch language using Google Translate, from a default and a set of translations you choose
  • Held ticket income - if you have no card processing of your own, TicketSource can take the money for you and pay it over after the event

Chobble Tickets has features TicketSource doesn't

  • Open source - the complete product source is published under AGPL-3.0-only
  • Self-hosting option - run the platform on your own infrastructure without a Chobble software licence fee
  • Encryption at rest - attendee data is encrypted, and only the keys held by your own administrator accounts, plus the optional recovery account you can enable, unlock it
  • Flat pricing - £50/year or £5/month whatever you sell, with no booking fee on any ticket
  • Your own custom domain - your ticket pages run on your own web address, included in the price. TicketSource does not document a custom-domain option, and its ticket shop pages are served from TicketSource domains
  • Public-facing website and CMS - a homepage, content pages, news posts, and a contact form with spam protection, edited from the admin panel with Markdown and custom CSS
  • Custom email providers - use Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, or Mailgun so confirmations come from your domain
  • Liquid email templates - full control over the wording and layout of every email
  • SMS messages - text attendees about their booking
  • Deposits and balance payments - take a deposit now and the balance later
  • Pay-what-you-want pricing - let buyers enter their own price above a minimum, with no cut taken from the extra
  • Subscribable calendar and RSS feeds - one feed listing all your events, so subscribers see new ones automatically
  • Admin API - authenticated API with API keys for creating, editing and deleting events
  • Webhooks - real-time notifications to your own systems as bookings happen
  • Square and SumUp as payment providers alongside Stripe
  • Complete database backups and event setup export you can move to another Chobble Tickets host
  • Community Interest Company - run by a CIC, a UK legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit

Data ownership

TicketSource is clearer about attendee data than most commercial platforms. Its terms say customer data generated by your event is owned by you as the data controller, and its customer privacy policy says TicketSource does not use buyer contact details for marketing and does not sell them to third parties. Data is stored on servers in the United Kingdom, and the company is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office. Buyers can be asked at checkout whether they want to join your mailing list.

The data is still held on TicketSource's servers, readable by TicketSource staff, in a proprietary system you cannot run yourself. TicketSource deletes buyer records after a year, and deletes the data in accounts that have not been logged into for two years. Accounts that have taken online bookings must stay open for nine months after the last transaction.

With Chobble Tickets, attendee data is encrypted at rest. Only the keys held by your own administrator accounts, and the optional recovery account you can enable, unlock it. The platform is open source under AGPLv3, so you can self-host it and stop depending on Chobble as your host. If Chobble Tickets stopped operating tomorrow, you could run the same code on your own server.

When TicketSource might be the better choice

  • You run a seated venue and need customers to choose their own seats
  • You sell a small enough number of tickets that the booking fee costs less than the yearly Chobble Tickets price and your own processing charges, which is under about £900 of sales a year at £15 a ticket
  • You want the booking fee passed to ticket buyers rather than paying a fee yourself
  • You want someone else to answer booking calls from your customers
  • You need posted card tickets, or thermal tickets printed at your own box office
  • You need to scan tickets at a venue with no internet connection
  • You want customers to cancel or exchange their own bookings
  • You are an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and need audience data sent to Illuminate
  • You have no card processing of your own and want the platform to collect the money for you

When Chobble Tickets is the better choice

  • You sell more than about £900 of tickets a year at £15 a ticket, where the booking fee costs more than the flat price
  • You want a price that does not change with ticket volume or value
  • You want payouts to start as tickets sell, on your payment provider's own schedule, rather than after the event
  • You want your ticket pages on your own domain and your own website
  • Encryption and data privacy matter to you
  • You value open source and the ability to self-host
  • You want Square or SumUp rather than only Stripe
  • You want deposits, SMS messages, or calendar feeds

Who owns TicketSource?

TicketSource Limited is a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 05043301, incorporated in February 2004. It still operates from Penarth in south Wales, where its founder Simon Wilsher started it, and its privacy policy also records a United States address. It is a member of STAR, the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers. No ownership or investor structure beyond the Companies House record was documented in the sources reviewed.

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 checked on 28 July 2026 against the live TicketSource pricing page and its published terms. Fees may change. Check the links below for the latest figures.