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Sep 10, 2024
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Jan 6, 2025
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- Create event listings on your website.
- Build a calendar for your events to display dates and details.
- Sell tickets for your events systematically.
- Efficiently manage the frontend and back end of your website.
- Add filters and customization on your website.
- Manage registration and attendee record management and other event management-related requirements.
1. Introduction to The Events Calendar and WP Event Manager
The Events Calendar is one of the most leading WordPress plugins available in the market today that helps you build events calendar, ticketing and offers other event management tools to streamline the process. However, it has often been criticized due to its complex usage, weak support and other plugin related issues. On the other hand, being one of the strongest The Events Calendar Competitor WP Event Manager beats the plugin in almost every aspect. It is a compact WordPress event management plugin that is used to create an attractive events website with mainly event listing, registration, ticket selling and many such facilities to amp up your overall event management experience. On top of that, it offers a fully-functional mobile application with exclusive features.2. Comparison Based on Performance
The performance of a WordPress plugin is judged based on various areas like its loading time, responsiveness, space consumption, the ability to handle requests per second and more. The coding structure of The Events Calendar plugin is complex and often makes it difficult for users to handle it correctly without assistance. Moreover, it also occupies more space on your device than the WP Event Manager plugin and also takes longer to load than its competitor. The developers in WP Event Managers have designed the plugin keeping the size of a website and its elements in mind which directly influence the performance and scalability of the plugin. When it comes to performance and scalability, WP Event Manager wins the race due to its versatility and flexibility. It requires less codes than The Events Calendar. Besides this, It occupies almost four times less space compared to The Events Calendar and contains fewer files to operate.To get a quick look at The Events Calendar and WP Event Manager comparison, check out the following video.
3. Comparison Based on Plugin Features
It is an undeniable fact that both the plugins are enriched with powerful features to enhance users’ event Management experience. However, WP Event Manager is a leader in this game of features as it not only offers more features than The Events Calendar but also offers major features for free which are otherwise paid in other plugins.4. Comparison Based on Developer Friendliness
The Events Calendar and WP Event Manager both claim to be developer-friendly plugins. However, the users of the The Events Calendar plugin often complain about the daily and monthly view of the plugin. On the other hand WP Event Manager’s calendar views are well-projected, wisely-coded and released keeping global standards in mind. This certainly makes it more productive and convenient for users. Secondly, both the plugins promise to offer high-quality displays and views. WP Event Manager provides you the facility to customize templates as per your preferences as it is known for its personalization and customization options. However, if we talk about the The Events Calendar, the customization options and control features are limited with:- Partial template overrides.
- Complicated codes.
- Template tags, hooks and filters.
- Careful documentation.
- A list of free extensions.
- Improper folder structure.
In contrast, WP Event Manager offers superior control and a pool of tools for customization including:
- Event submission forms.
- Form field editors.
- Upcoming event widgets.
- Past event widgets.
- Featured events widget.
- Easy event classification.
- Fully responsive.
5. Comparison Based on SEO Friendliness
WP Event Manager is designed in such a way that it helps your website secure a prominent position on Google search results so that your events website can easily be found in Google search results. It lets you add event tags and helps categorize events to make it easy for Google to understand. Being an SEO friendly WordPress Plugin, WP Event Manager offers you the following benefits:- Boosts your brand credibility.
- Increases and attracts organic traffic.
- Makes your website more comfortable to navigate through for visitors.
6. Comparison Based on Woocommerce Support
The Events Calendar offers WooCommerce support with certain limitations. It has built its own ticketing system through WooCommerce which means the users do not have much freedom of customization without the help of The Events Calendar. However, when it comes to WP Event Manager, they sell their addons as WooCommerce products which makes it easy for users to make customizations directly without any help. WP Event Manager is highly compatible with WooCommerce which offers users the facility to Sell Tickets and handle transactions through WooCommerce. Besides this, it also allows users to receive payments for paid listings. The biggest advantage of using WooCommerce is that it offers more than 100 payment options making it easy for users to receive payments smoothly.7. Comparison Based on The Addons Offered by The Plugins
The Events Calendar offers a limited number of addons whereas the WP Event Manager is way ahead of its competitors with 37 powerful, feature-packed addons:- Events lists.
- Registration data.
- Event Custom fields.
- Organizers details.
- Venue details.
- Manage Event Teams Assigned to Each Event.
- Manage Attendee Details, attendance and more.
- Fast track event analysis, reporting and get a complete view.
- Fetch attendee details and event details right from the dashboard.
- Collect all the ticket details within the app - no more manual correspondence.
- Send Mailing Reminders directly from the app.
- Manage attendee arrival and check-in details right from the app.
8. Comparison Based on Support
WP Event Manager offers support mainly in two ways. It has a knowledge section on its official website to guide users on the usage of their plugins. It is specially for the free plugin users. The knowledge base section contains all the necessary information that is enough to help users understand the mechanism. For the paid users, they have an entire support team to solve all their queries related to the usage of the plugin.
The Events Calendar also offers a knowledge base section along with a support team. However their support quality has often been questioned by their customers due to the complicated process.
9. Comparison based on reviews
The Events Calendar Client Review: A terrible plugin. Bloats your sites, endless addons that don’t work well together and constant error upon error after updating it. Layouts breaking etc, I could go on. Just avoid. Overall I thought this plugin would meet my needs. I purchased the premium version. Then i realized it doesn’t display prices correctly and when i submit a ticket the response is. Thanks this is logged but we dont have a timeframe to implement this fix. it displays prices as €170,00 and i need to replace the comma with a decimal point. Standard stuff in woocomerce. I really find this poor for a premium plugin. You would think a premium plugin would offer fixes in a reasonable time frame.WP Event Manager review:
WP Event Manager has received positive reviews from most of its users which can be found in popular review platforms like Glassdoor, WordPress, Capterra and more. Here is the most prominent review from the founder of Vintage Land Phillip Dane.
10. Comparison Based on Pricing structure
While making a competitive study between The Events Calendar and WP Event Manager, we found that both the plugins offer their add-ons in bundles but yes the difference becomes prominent when it comes to affordability. The Events Calendar’s add-on bundles start from $219 onwards whereas the WP Event Manager has kept its starting price as low as $99. WP Event Manager has introduced four new add-on bundles named:- Event Manager plus: This bundle contains all the feature add-ons including Calendar, Google Maps and iCal.
- Event Manager Pro: it includes all the addons of the Event Manager plugin bundle along with ticket selling add-ons including Sell Tickets, Registrations and Stripe Split Payment.
- Virtual Event Manager pro: it contains all the addons of the Event Manager Pro bundle along with virtual addons including Speaker and Schedule, Expo Networking and Zoom.
- All Events Manager Pro: It contains all the addons of the Virtual Event Manager pro along with marketing add-ons including Zoho CRM, Mailchimp and Sendinblue.
- It does not offer certain basic customization options like shortcode generator.
- Most customization relies on advanced web development knowledge which is often difficult for average users.
11. Comparison based on themes
Users often struggle to find the right theme for their events website which will be compatible with the plugins they use. When it comes to the users of The Events Calendar, they need to test the compatibility of their plugin with their themes which could be a time-consuming and tiring process. However, WP Event Manager has found the best solution to the theme-plugin compatibility issue by offering a set of premium WordPress event themes that are perfectly compatible with all the plugins they have.
The themes are responsive, SEO-friendly, and customizable. They support WooCommerce to help you sell tickets efficiently.