Two Event Plugins we Use in Arts Cubed Site Builds

Eventin vs. The Events Calendar: Which WordPress Events Plugin is Right for You?

When planning to host events on your WordPress website, choosing the right events management plugin is crucial. At Arts Cubed, we have used The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe for more than 10 years, but recently we’ve been exploring a new contender, Eventin by ThemeWinter. Both of these popular and powerful plugins stand out as top recommendations. Both offer robust features, but they cater to slightly different needs and offer distinct affordances, and when needs are complex, the price differential can be the deciding factor.

Let’s contrast these two plugins to help you decide which one best suits your personal or organizational goals.

The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe

The Events Calendar is one of the most widely used and well-established event management plugins for WordPress. We can’t argue that it offers a solid, reliable foundation for listing and managing events. We do find it sometimes has a financial and resource burden that is too high to be justified in selected user-cases.

Core Affordances

• Robust Stability and Wide Adoption: The plugin is mature, well-tested, and benefits from a massive user base, leading to excellent community support and compatibility with a vast range of WordPress themes and other plugins. Many applications have integration modules to include The Events Calendar.
• Intuitive User Interface: The backend is designed for ease of use, making it straightforward for most users to create and manage events.
• Scalability via Premium Add-ons: While the free version is functional and a good choice if it meets your needs out of the box, the picture becomes muddy when you need more. Only when you embrace its premium suite are you able to access all the functionality many users require. This includes Events Calendar Pro, which adds recurring events, advanced widgets, and location search, and Ticket Commerce, which allows for ticket sales and RSVP functionality directly through your site. It also requires another premium add-on if you wish to use the Elementor Editor to position and edit event listings throughout your site.
• Developer-Friendly: It offers extensive documentation and hooks, making it highly customizable for developers who need to tailor the functionality to specific requirements.

Eventin by ThemeWinter

Eventin is a newer, feature-rich alternative that is a more “all-in-one” solution, as it comes bundled with advanced ticketing and speaker management features that require multiple add-ons in The Events Calendar.

Core Affordances

• Integrated Zoom and Ticket Management: A significant affordance of Eventin, that first led to our adopting the plugin on one of our site builds, is its built-in integration with Zoom, and Add-On integration with Google Meet, making it a strong choice for hosting and managing virtual events. The plugin also provides native ticketing and multi-vendor options without requiring separate add-ons.
• Focus on Speaker and Schedule Management: Eventin excels in handling complex event structures like conferences or multi-day festivals. As noted in a comprehensive review, the speaker and schedule management features are standout strengths, making it easy to create detailed agendas and speaker profiles. This is ideal for planning and promoting conferences, symposiums or staff training events. A deeper look into Eventin’s features and performance can be found in this review: https://wpsimplehacks.com/eventin-a-comprehensive-review/
• Modern and Attractive Front-end Design: The plugin offers several modern design layouts and templates right out of the box, often requiring less custom styling than its competitors. It is notable however at this point in time, the ability to edit some layouts in Elementor is not yet available although the developers tell us that it is coming.
• Multi-vendor Capabilities: For event marketplaces or sites where multiple organizers sell tickets, Eventin offers robust multi-vendor support, allowing different users to manage their own events and ticket sales. This is useful for co-productions.

Feature Comparison Table

This table outlines key differences in the core functionality and approach of both plugins:

Performance, SEO, and Cost Considerations

Performance (Page Load Speed)

In general, “all-in-one” solutions like Eventin, which bundle many features into a single plugin, can sometimes have a greater initial impact on page load speed compared to a modular setup like The Events Calendar’s free core. However, once The Events Calendar starts adding multiple premium add-ons (like Pro, Tickets Commerce, and Virtual Events) to achieve feature parity, the combined load of these separate plugins can often equal or surpass the load of a single, well-optimized bundled plugin, and this has been our experience. The actual performance impact will depend heavily on your specific server, caching setup, and theme. In our experience at Arts Cubed, unless we restrict The Events Calendar to its’ basic module, Eventin outperforms it on speed tests.

SEO and Google Search Console

Both plugins are generally good at implementing structured data for events, which is crucial for SEO and getting your events listed with rich results in Google Search.

• The Events Calendar is highly mature and reliably outputs the necessary schema markup for Google’s Event rich snippets, ensuring good Google Search Console results for events. It has however a long been known for creating SEO challenges, and the solutions are complex for the average user.
• Eventin also implements structured data effectively. Because it bundles features, it tends to make complex details (like speaker and venue info) readily available for schema markup. So far we have not seen the same level of Google Console problems we have been forced to troubleshoot with The Events Calendar.

Cost Comparison for Full Feature Parity

We found the price/feature comparison at https://themewinter.com/eventin/eventin-vs-others/ convincing.  While prices vary with sales and packages, we were able to meet all of one client’s needs with a single Eventin Pro licence at $79/year as opposed to an approximately $500 cost for the features she required in order to host recurring online Zoom workshops with RSVP registration.  

Eventin positions itself as an “all-in-one” solution, bundling features that The Events Calendar often 

Making the Choice

While we are more often opting for Eventin, choosing between Eventin and The Events Calendar depends heavily on your specific needs:

Choose The Events Calendar If:

• You prioritize stability, compatibility, and a massive support ecosystem.
• You are running a simple, standard event listing and only need basic event management.
• You are hosting multiple ticketed events where cost is less of an issue to reliability and support.
• You prefer a modular approach, where you only purchase the add-ons you absolutely need (e.g., just Pro for recurring events, and skipping ticketing).
• You or your developer needs a highly customizable and well-documented API.

Choose Eventin If:

• You are running virtual events and need immediate, built-in Zoom integration.

• You are running recurring events. 

• You are organizing conferences, festivals, or complex multi-day events that require detailed speaker and schedule management.
• You want a single plugin that handles ticketing, recurring events, and multi-vendor functionality out of the box.
• You prefer a modern, pre-designed calendar look with less need for custom CSS and you want Elementor compatibility out of the box.

Both plugins are excellent choices, but Eventin offers a more integrated, feature-packed experience for conference and virtual event organizers, often at a more straightforward code industry standard for sheer architecture. Consider your event type, budget for add-ons, and technical requirements before making your final decision.