Report:

Magic Quadrant for Event Technology Platforms

Top Vendor Products for Event Technology Platforms in 2024

• Bizzabo
• Cvent
• RainFocus

Event Technology Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

• Bizzabo - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • On-site engagement tracking: Advanced on-site tracking functionality is provided through the Bluetooth-enabled Klik technology. Attendee engagement, such as session attendance, booth participation and networking engagement, can be tracked through strategically placed location beacons.
  • Vertical offerings: Bizzabo offers an industry-agnostic product while providing an industry-specific focus with supporting functionality and established partnerships within the government, technology, and financial services verticals. For example, its partnership with SendGrid provides domain authentication for email to adhere to firewall and security policies in the government sector.
  • Thought leadership: Customers indicate they look to Bizzabo for thought leadership and event best practices. The State of In-Person B2B Conferences report and Event Experience podcast provide ongoing thought leadership on event marketing to customers and prospects alike.

  Cons:

  • Attendee support: Event Experience OS standard attendee support is limited to chat support for in-person events. Attendee support is not included for virtual events and only available via live chat for an additional fee.
  • Change in target market: Bizzabo has a significant portion of its customer base in the midmarket, but the company is shifting to focus on large enterprises. This change may impact feasibility of purchase for smaller organizations, which should review product capabilities and pricing to determine fit.
  • Custom reports and dashboards: Self-service customized reports are limited to using filters available in Bizzabo. For customization beyond filters, users must make a request to Bizzabo's customer support.


• Cvent - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Reporting and analytics: Cvent offers standard event, administration and contact reports out of the box, along with exhibitor reports. Any dashboard or report can be customized, and year-over-year reporting is available. Engagement scoring is available in usage dashboards and includes attendee, poll engagement, gamification, session attendance and participation, and attendees can then be stack-ranked to prioritize follow-up.
  • In-person event thought leadership: Cvent has a competitive advantage in enabling in-person first-event models due to its 25-year history serving this use case. Its thought leadership program includes multiple 'For Dummies' books on event technology, and its Cvent Academy training serves approximately 86,000 industry participants.
  • Ease of use: Gartner Peer Insights users cite the ease of use as a key factor in Cvent's ability to enable users. Customers appreciate its ability to centralize all events in a single platform.

  Cons:

  • Mobile application/mobile experience: Cvent recently launched its proprietary mobile application, Attendee Hub; however, it lacks advanced functionality to engage attendees post event. Postevent host-to-attendee communications are delivered via email, and attendees must shift to social media channels to network with other attendees after an event concludes.
  • Geographic strategy: Cvent is available globally; however, 90% of its customers are in North America. It goes to market via a direct sales force, primarily in the United States and with support for EMEA customers mainly through its partner network.
  • Cost: Some Gartner Peer Insights users note the higher cost of Cvent; its modular packaging and pricing require add-on modules to receive the full suite of capabilities to support large-scale end-to-end events. For example, call-for-presentations management requires the Cvent Abstract Management solution.


• RainFocus - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Attendee data profile: RainFocus' global attendee profile collects data for attendees across multiple events and can be used to conduct attendee engagement scoring to determine trends within attendee data and surface insights to marketing and sales teams.
  • Enterprise focus: RainFocus has higher-than-average customer retention and growth, compared to other vendors in this research, within a predominantly enterprise customer base. Its robust set of capabilities that support multiple event types for sophisticated event marketers is ideally suited to large enterprises.
  • Customer satisfaction: RainFocus maintains a high level of customer satisfaction due its services and platform usability.

  Cons:

  • Mobile application/mobile experience: Customers cite gaps in mobile functionality. Its mobile application requires a separate build-out from the related event.
  • Pricing: RainFocus' packaging complexity includes extensive add-on modules, such as lead management, one-to-one meetings and integrations. In addition, its pricing model is based on the number of registrants, and its customers cite concerns around affordability.
  • Travel and venue management: RainFocus customers cite not having native capabilities for travel or venue management as a gap in the platform. Venue management is available only via third-party integrations to Groups360 today.


• RingCentral - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Attendee management configurations: RingCentral enables customers to build advanced attendee registration paths using ticket types and supports multiple ticket pricing levels and discounting. It also supports group registrations by enabling registrants to add more than one ticket type to a cart.
  • Agency network: Certified agency partners are available to clients who need extra support making their events a truly unique experience. This network of 125+ partners is certified on RingCentral Events and can help to design and produce events using the platform.
  • Pricing model: RingCentral is priced as one license for an unlimited number of events across all use cases with check-in and badge printing included. Its pricing model is based on 'attendee bands' which allow for each event to be conducted up to the maximum attendee level.

  Cons:

  • Reporting: Attendance and engagement reporting can be viewed using the existing templates and then downloaded to a CSV file for sharing. Users must rely on marketing automation integrations to develop customized or cross-event reporting, as these capabilities are not offered in the platform.
  • In-person capabilities: On-site capabilities to create stand-alone in-person events without a virtual event experience have been made available in the last 12 months. However, advanced functionalities, such as call for papers, a content repository to aid in agenda management, and venue sourcing, are not available in this offering.
  • Support: RingCentral does not offer 24/7 online support or call center support. Outside of its support hours, ticket submission is required with a 12-hour response time.


• Splash - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Content management: Content can be shared across multiple events in an 'always on' format. Splash support for postevent content management includes housing all content in a central location or event-specific hub, which includes access to replays and enables attendees to download content, as well.
  • Pricing model: Splash offers an annual subscription model based on number of users, including an unlimited number of events, attendees, integrations and contact storage. Its Enterprise package includes event approvals and workflows and a single builder license. Host licenses for event hosts do not include design capabilities and can be added along with additional builder licenses, if needed.
  • Onboarding and configuration: Splash customers are impressed with onboarding and ease of configuration. Its standard onboarding and implementation support includes a team to create users, roles and groups within the platform, build the customers' vanity URLs and configure the virtual platform, Splash Studio and Brand Library on behalf of customers.

  Cons:

  • Exhibitor capabilities: Currently, sponsor management is not offered natively and requires third-party support for lead capture and tradeshow floor support. To access the event guest lists and analytics, sponsors and exhibitors must be added as collaborators to event pages.
  • Customer support: Splash's standard plan offers 24/7 online-only support via its help center, with limited technical support hours and no call center. Access to in-person event support or a dedicated virtual support representative is available only for an additional cost.
  • Geographic strategy: Splash has limited support and direct sales outside of the United States, with less support in EMEA compared to the vendors in this research. The platform's admin interface is in English only.


• vFairs - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Attendee experience management: The vFairs platform supports ongoing engagement and networking capabilities for attendees and event hosts. Event hosts can enable integrated social media walls, and repurpose content with the webinar summary and chapterization tool.
  • Vertical strategy: Vertical-specific capabilities include streamlined recruitment and career/job fair enhancements and services for HR, abstract automation workflows for education, and e-commerce and advertising modules for sales and marketing.
  • Customer support: Every customer package includes a dedicated customer support team as a standard offering with unlimited hours. Customers report being impressed with support offerings; standard support includes a dedicated project manager on standby for customer and speaker assistance, 'done for you' or 'done by you' support models, weekly event progress and milestone reports, and training.

  Cons:

  • Cross-event content sharing: The functionality for multiple-event content sharing is not available. Event admins are required to upload content handouts and files and also insert replay URLs for each event session of every event.
  • Customer retention rate: vFairs' customer retention rate is lower than most vendors in this research. Many customers use vFairs for single events only, and only a small percentage of customers are in multiyear agreements, contributing to its low customer retention rate.
  • Admin interface language support: The vFairs platform admin interface is available only in English out of the box. This may be a barrier for event admins based outside of English speaking regions.


• 6Connex - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Vertical strategy: 6Connex has a diverse client base. Recent solution enhancements address specific vertical needs, including a learning module for the education vertical and video room technology for life sciences.
  • Global strategy: 6Connex's platform supports 30 different languages. Additionally, 6Connex's go-to-market efforts include regional partners and marketing programs. Services and support offered directly from 6Connex are delivered from worldwide, remote staff in addition to partners.
  • Attendee ticketing and payment processing: 6Connex's platform supports flexibility in ticket configurability and payment options including Stripe, traditional bank transfers, invoicing and konbini (convenience store) payments to support the Japanese market. Further, 6Connex offers multicurrency support.

  Cons:

  • Packaging: 6Connex offers multiple pricing in Launch, Soar and Rise packaging along with its Eventory and immersive capabilities. While these technologies are integrated, packaging complexity is an issue, as some capabilities differ. Event marketers should define their business requirements to ensure right-size packaging.
  • Customer churn: 6Connex offers shorter licensing terms and single-event packaging options. Despite the flexibility, it has a higher customer churn rate than other vendors evaluated in this report.
  • Customer support: 6Connex standard support includes 24/7 support via email only. Additional fees are required for 24/7 support via phone or on-site support. Event organizers should consider user behavior and support preferences when evaluating 6Connex.


• Brandlive - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Creative services: Brandlive Studios is its in-house creative services agency available to customers for an annual subscription fee. It supports complete end-to-end development of virtual event content and provides on-site personnel and equipment to record or stream live to support in-person events.
  • Pricing model: Brandlive's pricing is clear and simple. It's offered in two packages with unlimited admin users: a standard package for self-serve and a premium package for fully produced events. Additional options for each are available based on the number of events and number of attendees.
  • Event production innovation: Brandlive supports high-quality broadcast events with extensive 'run of show' capabilities to prebuild an entire show from start to finish using its Greenroom capabilities. Users can build a show board and schedule rehearsals directly from the platform. Event marketers can progress a show manually or via autoplay and can provide live direction to presenters via Brandlive's Greenroom functionality.

  Cons:

  • Custom reporting and analytics: The platform lacks customized reports and dashboards beyond provided filters for events and sessions. In addition, filters aren't available for audience segments or types of events, and dashboard updates are not in real time.
  • Geographic strategy: With its focus on customers in North America and the European Union, partner support for global organizations is lacking as compared to other vendors in this research. Implementation and platform partners are available only in these two regions. Language translation is not native to the platform; it's available through Google Translate only.
  • Market awareness: Brandlive's market awareness is limited and is below average across the vendors in this research. as shown by the Gartner Customer Interest Indicator, which includes Gartner Peer Insights.


• Cisco - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Security and compliance capabilities: Cisco includes support for several ISO standards, SOC 2 Type II, CSA STAR Level 2, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. Its incident response program aligns with NIST 800-61 guidelines and includes a dedicated incident response team with forensic analysts.
  • Customer feedback collection: Cisco has implemented multiple ways of capturing customer feedback about the functionality directly. Customers can request and vote on new features, and additional input is received via customer-facing teams and customer surveys.
  • Pricing model: For customers looking to evaluate Webex Events, Cisco offers a Webex Events free bundle that enables event marketers to leverage many of the capabilities to host a single event for up to 100 attendees. In addition, the Webex pro bundle is priced based on the number of attendees across all events, rather than the number of registrants.

  Cons:

  • Marketing technology integrations: Webex Events lacks the breadth of prebuilt integrations offered by other vendors evaluated. For example, bidirectional integrations require professional services, and it does not currently have a public API.
  • Cross-event and customized reports: Webex Events does not offer registration or engagement reporting across multiple events with the platform, and customized reports and dashboards are also unavailable. Users who seek these capabilities must export the reports from Webex Events for analysis.
  • Product innovation: Roadmap plans show continued gaps in advanced or innovative platform enhancements, such as AI-based capabilities, as compared to other vendors evaluated in this research.


• EventMobi - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Attendee management: EventMobi supports complex attendee registration processing, including conditional fields such as food allergies, privacy policy opt-in, and the option for attendees to book hotels. Payment processing capabilities include support for 20 payment gateways and multiple payment methods, such as credit cards, direct debits and wire transfers.
  • Pricing simplicity: For smaller event budgets, it offers an annual event contract with limited capabilities based on the number of events and attendees per event. For larger, more sophisticated event strategies, it offers an unlimited events annual contract that is priced based on the number of users.
  • Onboarding and configuration: EventMobi customers are impressed with the ease of configuration and onboarding, its self-service model enables customers to onboard quickly, and customers can configure the platform using preexisting data populated from Excel. For customers that need support, it offers 24/7 email chat and phone in addition to its unique offering of on-site support for virtual events added for an additional fee.

  Cons:

  • Admin role-based experiences: EventMobi's current role-based experiences lack sophistication. Users are assigned to an 'organization' or group, but data details cannot be excluded from view within the organization. Therefore, users have access to all data in their assigned organization. Event marketers in companies with strict data privacy and compliance should evaluate its capabilities to ensure alignment with business requirements.
  • Vertical strategy: EventMobi's focus is to develop product integration for associations and nonprofits; support for other vertical-specific product enhancements are not currently offered.
  • AI innovation: EventMobi customers cite a gap in current AI functionality. The EventMobi platform does not currently offer AI-driven content creation, as compared to other vendors evaluated.


• Kaltura - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Technology partnerships: Kaltura Events offers integrations with common marketing automation platforms and offers a robust partner marketplace providing access to further capabilities, such as social media and virtual reality.
  • Event-centric marketing strategy: To bring their event platform to market, Kaltura employs a marketing strategy with a strong event component across third-party events, hosted virtual events, and a flagship virtual event. This approach allows event marketers to learn from Kaltura's examples.
  • Sponsor management: Kaltura Events offers lead reports, branded virtual booths and video players, and virtual rooms for event sponsors. These capabilities are designed to help sponsors generate leads, drive awareness, and network with event attendees.

  Cons:

  • In-person event capabilities: Kaltura Events supports both virtual and in-person events. However, most platform capabilities focus on virtual events. Capabilities for in-person events are less comprehensive than other vendors evaluated in this research.
  • Attendee support: Support for event attendees consists of a help page; support via email and chat is offered only as an add-on service. Event organizers with limited budgets should prepare to offer attendee support directly.
  • Vertical strategy: The Kaltura Events platform supports specialized capabilities for the education sector but not other verticals. Event organizers outside of the education sector should evaluate whether vertical-specific requirements can be met with Kaltura Events.


• Stova - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Automated speaker submissions: Stova's abstract module tool helps event organizers in issuing calls for presentations with multilingual user and content submission support. The branded portal enables admins to create submission groups, customize forms, establish triggers for emails, and create sessions from abstracts or link to existing sessions with autopopulated data.
  • Market responsiveness: Stova sources most of its roadmap features based on customer feedback, including a client advisory council and postevent feedback meetings. Its high customer satisfaction is evidenced by a higher-than-average customer retention rate.
  • Marketing and thought leadership: Customers say they have learned best practices and obtained thought leadership from Stova. The insights obtained focus on new customer engagement and acquisition to help increase event marketers' ability to plan and host engaging events.

  Cons:

  • Product packaging: Stova's recent merging of Aventri and MeetingPlay has led to a complex set of offerings that buyers will need to navigate to align with business requirements. Stova offers several annual packages, including Core, Core Plus, Elevate, Epic and Tier 1, based on event size and requirements, number of users and feature set.
  • Partner program: Stova lacks a formal support presence via partners to address regional needs. In addition, it lacks vertical-specific partnership programs. Event marketers with specific geographical or vertical-based needs should evaluate Stova's ability to meet their requirements.
  • Mobile application: Stova's mobile application requires a separate setup for content to be pulled from the event to the mobile application, and it requires manual entry to add exhibitors and sessions to locations.


• Zoom - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Application marketplace: Zoom Events offers customers a marketplace of prebuilt applications that provide integrations to standard marketing technology (martech) tools like CRM and marketing automation platforms, as well as engagement capabilities to enhance the event experience. Zoom integrates with the Meta Quest virtual reality device to provide immersive experiences during virtual events.
  • Geographic strategy: Zoom Events supports captioning in 37 languages, and attendees can easily select their preferred language regardless of the host settings. Its sales team has a global presence, it offers regional pricing, and global support includes local language support.
  • Security and data storage: Customers cite Zoom's security features as a strength. Zoom Events provides security certifications beyond the standard SOC 2 and ISO 27001, such as DOD iL4, FedRAMP Moderate and StateRAMP, and offers data storage options from colocation to cloud storage to fit a dynamic set of storage needs.

  Cons:

  • Reporting: Registration and payment reports can be downloaded and shared manually for a single event. However, cross-event reporting to compare the performance of multiple events and automated delivery of reports on a schedule are not currently available.
  • Support: Customer support for clients is provided via access to the knowledge base, online community and learning center. Technical support via chat is available for attendees through the virtual lobby; otherwise, hands-on support during a live event requires additional investment.
  • In-person capabilities: Zoom Events support for fully in-person events is limited. For example, it does not natively support venue management, ticketing and check-in out of the box. Event hosts that require a single technology for in-person events without a virtual component should be aware that complete support will require additional technologies.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Event Technology Platforms, 18 March 2024, ID G00790255

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