MEC for looks, or one plugin for the sign-up flow?

What Modern Events Calendar is, and who it suits

Modern Events Calendar, usually called MEC, is a WordPress events plugin from Webnus. Its pitch is visual range. The vendor’s product page lists a very large number of layouts, including agenda, carousel, grid, list, masonry, monthly, slider, tile, timeline, timetable, weekly and yearly styles.

It also has a long list of things around the calendar. The vendor lists a free Lite edition and a Pro edition, with Pro adding advanced booking and ticketing, appointments and location layouts. Add-ons cover tickets and invoices, seat selection, Zoom and Webex, and single-event builders for Elementor and Divi.

It suits a site where the calendar is a design feature, such as a venue, a festival or an agency portfolio, and where someone will enjoy picking and tuning a skin. If that is you, the rest of this page is mostly about whether you need to leave at all.

Packaging, as we found it

Packaging matters here, because the free edition and where it comes from have changed. The wordpress.org listing for the Lite edition is closed and says it is not available for download. The vendor’s own page points to a download from its own site.

That is not a problem in itself. It does mean updates come from the vendor, not the plugin directory, so know how your site is told about new versions before you rely on it.

On what each edition holds, we read the vendor’s page. It lists single, multi-day and recurring events, several views, and community event submission under Lite. It lists advanced booking and ticketing, appointments and map layouts under Pro. Editions change, so check the vendor’s page for the current split before you plan around any one line.

The real difference: looks first, or flow first

MEC puts its weight on presentation. You pick from a gallery of layouts and tune each one. That is the right design for a site that sells the experience of the page.

Eventonomy puts its weight on what happens after someone finds an event. A visitor RSVPs, the plugin checks capacity, spills overflow to a waitlist, sends a confirmation and sends reminders. A member submits an event, an approver reviews it, it goes live and the organizer manages attendees. Those are the pieces we made complete before adding more views.

Two sites, two answers

Picture a music venue. The calendar is the front page, the posters matter, and visitors browse by week or by genre. Here a gallery of layouts earns its keep, and MEC is a sensible choice.

Now picture a running club, a church, a coding meetup or a school. The calendar is a list people glance at on the way to the sign-up. What matters is that the Thursday session fills at twenty, the twenty-first person lands on a waitlist, and everyone gets a reminder. Skins are a distraction. That is the site Eventonomy is built for.

Many sites are a mix, which is why the next step is to test rather than guess.

Questions to ask on a trial

• Can a visitor go from the calendar to a confirmed place in as few steps as you want?
• What does the organizer see after the event is full?
• How does a member fix a typo in their own event without asking you?
• What does the calendar look like at 390 pixels wide, and does it still read?
• Which of these did you have to buy a separate piece for?

So the question is where your effort goes. If most of your time goes to making the calendar look right, MEC. If most of it goes to registrations, capacity and people submitting events, Eventonomy.

Running an event in Eventonomy, step by step

1. Create the event in the front-end editor or the admin, with a venue and an organizer from the shared catalog. Free.
2. Set recurrence. Daily, weekly and monthly series are free. Yearly and ordinal rules such as the second Saturday are Pro.
3. Choose the registration mode: RSVP on the page, an external link, or none. Free.
4. Set capacity. A full event moves new responses to the waitlist, and a free RSVP event promotes the next person automatically. Free.
5. Reminders: one a day before and one an hour before, with no setup. Free. Pro lets you replace the two defaults with your own list of reminder times. SMS through Twilio is Pro.
6. Check-in at the door is Pro. The ticket QR opens a link that a signed-in staff member scans with the phone camera; the check-in block also accepts a USB scanner, a pasted code or a name search.

You can cancel or restore one date in a series. Moving one date to another day is not supported.

Selling tickets, and who gets paid

MEC lists booking in Pro with PayPal, Stripe and WooCommerce, plus ticket, invoice and seat add-ons. Eventonomy Pro lists Stripe, PayPal and a WooCommerce bridge that uses your store’s gateways. Neither takes a cut of your sales.

What Eventonomy Pro adds is the checkout detail: coupons, early-bird and tiered prices, tax and booking fees applied in a set order, and refunds that release stock and void the ticket. Refunds from our screens are always the full order. A partial refund made inside the gateway is recorded against the order, but the ticket stays valid.

The waitlist on a sold-out paid event works differently from a free one. People can join without paying, but a freed seat is not offered to them automatically, since that would admit someone who has not paid. The organizer admits them.

If you need seat maps, MEC lists a seat add-on and we do not. That alone decides some projects. Likewise, if you take bookings by time slot, like a clinic or a consultancy, look at its appointments and at Amelia before you look at us.

Letting members submit events

Eventonomy includes a front-end editor and a Manage Events page, created when you activate. A role setting decides who may create events, and approval mode holds new submissions as pending until a reviewer publishes them. Members can report a problem event, which emails you and the event’s author.

MEC lists community submission in its free Lite edition on the vendor page we read, so submission alone is not a reason to move. The difference to test is the day-to-day: what an organizer sees after the event is created, how they email registrants, and how they export a list. Try both with a test member account.

Set the rules that suit your site. Decide whether new members need an account first, using the single “Do attendees need an account?” setting. Decide whether a new organizer’s first event waits for review, using approval mode. Then walk through it as a member would, on a phone, from the sign-up page to a published event. A flow that feels fine to an admin can feel long to a first-time submitter, and a test account finds that out in ten minutes.

What it costs to run each

Both run on your server, so hosting, backups and updates are yours either way.

Licences

MEC splits its offer into editions and add-ons, so your bill depends on which pieces you use, such as tickets, invoices and seats. Eventonomy splits it into a free plugin and one optional Pro licence. For each, list the features you use today, then check the vendors’ current pages to see which edition holds them. We deliberately give no prices here, because both sides change.

Upkeep and skills

MEC’s many options mean more settings to learn and more to re-check after an update. Eventonomy has fewer layout controls and relies on the editor for placement, so there is less to configure but also less to tweak. If a designer on your team tunes skins happily, count that skill as a point for MEC.

Attendee data and privacy

RSVPs and orders live in Eventonomy’s own tables. The WordPress personal data tools can export a person’s RSVPs and orders, and erase anonymizes RSVPs while keeping the seat and retaining order financial records. Event emails carry a one-click unsubscribe. A private event is link-only: it is not listed anywhere, but anyone with the link can view and RSVP.

Whatever you choose, test an export and an erase request before launch.

Moving over from MEC

We do not have a Modern Events Calendar importer, and we will not pretend we do. Moving is manual, in one of three ways.

1. Rebuild by hand. For a small calendar this is an afternoon.
2. Export and import. If your MEC edition lets you export events as CSV or ICS, the free Eventonomy importer takes both files, with a scan before it writes anything, redirects for imported addresses and an undo. Check the vendor’s site for its export options.
3. Script it. A developer can read your MEC data and post it to the Eventonomy REST API.

Bookings, tickets and payment records do not come across any route. Export them separately and keep them.

What you rebuild

• Every calendar page, since skins and shortcodes have no equivalent. Place the calendar or events-list block and set the default view under Appearance.
• Custom fields, if you used them heavily. Venues and organizers come from a shared catalog; extra fields need a plan.
• Ticket types, prices and payment settings, set up again under Pro if you sell.
• Email wording. Pro has custom email templates; the free plugin sends branded confirmations.
• Any Zoom or Webex links, which become a join link on each virtual event, shown to registrants near the start time.

Allow time for the pages. The data is the easy part.

Launch checklist

Before you switch

1. Back up and clone to staging.
2. Export events from MEC in whatever format your edition offers.
3. Install Eventonomy, run setup and choose the account policy.
4. Import the file, read the scan, then run it for real.
5. Rebuild the calendar pages with blocks and compare them with your MEC pages at phone width.

Test, then clean up

1. Switch on custom registration questions if you need them; they ship off.
2. If you sell tickets, add Pro, connect a gateway, buy a ticket and refund it.
3. Redirect old MEC event URLs yourself, since only imported addresses are covered.
4. Keep MEC installed but inactive until you are sure.

How it fits with your other plugins

Eventonomy is one of several separate, optional plugins from the same team. They run on one WordPress site and one login.

Two connections are real. Eventonomy Pro ships the BuddyPress integration: an events tab on groups and profiles, activity posts and notifications. BuddyNext Pro ships the BuddyNext bridge, with RSVP buttons and a headcount on the feed card, and that needs only the free Eventonomy plugin.

Jetonomy, Learnomy, Listora, WP Career Board, WP Sell Services and WB Gamification are our forum, course, directory, job-board, services and points-and-badges plugins. They run on the same site. We do not claim an integration with any of them. BuddyX Pro and Reign are community themes it can sit under.

A hosted events platform is one bill and charges a fee per ticket. These are separate plugins you install, host and update, with no per-ticket fee from us.

What Eventonomy does not do for you

• No large library of skins and layouts.
• No seat selection and no appointment slots.
• No single-event builder for Elementor or Divi.
• No Zoom or Webex module.
• No Meetup sync, and no MEC importer.
• No bundled mobile app.

Other alternatives worth a look

• The Events Calendar is the safe, widely supported choice with a large add-on range.
• EventON wins on distinctive design and a compact calendar.
• Events Manager wins on multisite and a long record.
• WP Event Manager suits listing-style sites with front-end submission.
• Amelia is better when the job is appointment booking.
• Eventbrite wins when you want its audience more than your own site.

The table version is at Eventonomy vs Modern Events Calendar.

Who should stay with MEC

Stay if skins and layouts are the point, if you use its seat or appointment features, or if your pages are built around its Elementor or Divi modules. Stay if the site looks right and sign-ups are not a pain.

Move if your real work is registrations, capacity and member submissions and the skins are mostly unused. Read Free vs Pro and how RSVPs work, then test one event end to end on staging.