Leaving The Events Calendar, add-on by add-on

What The Events Calendar is, and who it suits

The Events Calendar is the plugin most people mean when they say “a WordPress events plugin”. The free version on wordpress.org gives you month, list and day views, event search, saved venues and organizers, categories and tags, Google Calendar and iCal export, REST endpoints and structured data. Its Event Tickets sibling is also free and lists RSVPs and ticket sales.

It is a very large product with a large vendor behind it. Hosts, agencies, themes and tutorials all assume it. If you are choosing for a client who will hand the site to an unknown developer in three years, that assumption has real value.

It suits a site that wants a dependable public calendar first and will add pieces only when a need appears. The model is deliberate: a free base, then paid products for each further job.

That model is also the reason people look elsewhere. This page is for the person who has already priced the pieces and wants to see the alternative laid out plainly.

Where the paywall sits

On the free side, the vendor’s wordpress.org listing for The Events Calendar names the month, list and day views, maps, venues, organizers, a CSV importer and iCal export. Event Tickets, a separate free plugin, lists RSVPs, ticket sales through its own checkout with PayPal and Stripe, and sales and attendee reports.

On the paid side, the listings and the vendor’s product pages name these pieces:

• Events Calendar Pro, which adds recurring events, extra views, shortcodes, advanced widgets and custom fields.
• Event Tickets Plus, which adds WooCommerce selling, QR check-in and custom registration fields.
• Community add-on, which lets visitors submit events from the front end for approval.
• Filter Bar, for narrowing the calendar by category, tag or custom field.
• An import service for Google Calendar, Meetup, Eventbrite and iCalendar sources.
• Promoter for attendee email, and a seating builder.

The vendor now sells most of this as annual plans that bundle several of these pieces. We did not find a waitlist on the Event Tickets listing when we checked, so ask the vendor if it matters to you.

What the same list looks like here

The free Eventonomy plugin carries recurring events (daily, weekly and monthly), RSVPs with guest counts, a waitlist, custom questions, member submission, an ICS feed, add-to-calendar and the importers. Pro adds paid tickets, coupons, tax and fees, refunds, door check-in, week and day grids, maps, SMS and a few community tools.

So the real comparison is not price against price. It is how many separate things you need to install, license and keep compatible with each other.

A useful exercise is to write down the five jobs your site must do, then mark which product does each on both sides. Count the licences. Count the renewal dates. Then ask who on your team will notice when one add-on falls behind a core update.

How an event runs in Eventonomy, step by step

Here is the sequence for a typical event, with the tier marked at each step.

1. Create the event from the front-end editor or the admin. Add a venue and an organizer from your shared catalog, or create them on the spot. Free.
2. Set recurrence if it repeats. Daily, weekly and monthly series with an interval, a count or an end date are free. Yearly rules and “second Saturday” style rules are Pro.
3. Choose how people respond: RSVP on your site, an external link, or no registration at all. Free.
4. Set capacity. When the going list is full, further responses go to a waitlist, and on a free RSVP event the next person is promoted automatically when a seat opens. Free.
5. Reminders go out a day before and an hour before with no setup. Free. Pro lets you replace the two defaults with your own list of reminder times, one or several.
6. On the day, check people in at the door. Each confirmation carries a QR code; a signed-in staff member scans it with the phone camera and the attendee is checked in. The check-in block also takes a USB scanner, a pasted code, or a name or email search. Pro.

If an event is cancelled, you can cancel or restore a single date in a series. You cannot move one date to a different day; that is a limit worth knowing about now.

Selling tickets, and who pays whom

Paid tickets are a Pro job. Pro adds itemized checkout with coupons, early-bird and tiered pricing, tax and booking fees, and refunds. Payment goes through Stripe, PayPal or a WooCommerce bridge that uses whichever gateways your WooCommerce store already has. The buyer picks a method when more than one is switched on. The Stripe and PayPal services send the buyer to the provider to pay, so card details stay with the provider.

Fees are simple. Eventonomy takes nothing from your sales. Your payment provider charges its own fees to you, as it would on any site. Refunds issued from Eventonomy are always for the full order; a partial refund made in the gateway’s own dashboard is reconciled back onto the order but leaves the ticket valid.

A sold-out paid event can still collect a waitlist: a name and an email, no charge. A freed paid seat is not offered to the waitlist automatically, because that could admit someone who has not paid. The organizer admits people by hand.

In the other direction, The Events Calendar lists ticket sales in its free Event Tickets plugin and more in its paid plugin. If you already sell through it and the setup works, that is a point in its favor.

Letting members submit events from the front end

This is where the two products differ most in packaging. Eventonomy includes a front-end editor and a Manage Events page, created at activation, where members add and edit their own events and see their attendees. It is part of the free plugin.

You decide who can create events with a role setting. If you want review first, switch on approval mode and member-submitted events wait as pending until someone with authority publishes them. Members can also report an event, which emails you and the event’s author.

On The Events Calendar, front-end submission is a separate paid add-on that the vendor lists as letting your community submit events for your approval. If member listings are the point of your site, price that add-on into the comparison.

What it costs you to run each

Neither is a hosted service, so you carry hosting and upkeep either way. The question is how many moving parts.

Plugins and updates

A fully featured Events Calendar site tends to run the calendar plus ticketing plus add-ons, each with its own release cycle and licence. A fully featured Eventonomy site is the free plugin and, if you sell tickets, Pro. Pro must be kept in step with the free plugin; it refuses to run against a version it does not understand rather than failing quietly.

Skills and time

Neither plugin needs a developer for ordinary use. Eventonomy is block-based, so a calendar page is an editor job rather than a shortcode job. If your team already knows The Events Calendar well, that knowledge is worth money, and you should count the hours of relearning against the licence savings.

Data and privacy

Eventonomy keeps events, RSVPs and orders in its own database tables on your server. It plugs into the WordPress personal data tools, so an export request returns a person’s RSVPs and orders, and an erase request anonymizes RSVPs while keeping a seat count and retains order financial records. Uninstall can remove everything, but that is off until you switch it on.

Event emails carry a one-click unsubscribe. Look at how your current plugin handles export and erasure before you move, and rehearse a request on staging.

Moving over from The Events Calendar

This one is easy because there is a free importer. Eventonomy reads your Events Calendar events, venues and organizers straight from the database, so it works even if you deactivate the plugin first. It never changes the source data.

1. Open the Tools screen in Eventonomy and choose The Events Calendar. It counts what it found.
2. Run the scan. It is a dry run over every event and lists what will change, for example events with several organizers or recurring rules it cannot translate.
3. Start the import. It runs in the background in batches, so a large calendar does not time out.
4. Check the redirects. Old event addresses are redirected with a 301 to the new pages.
5. If something looks wrong, undo the run and try again.

The same import can be run from WP-CLI. What does not come across: attendees, orders and tickets. Recurring rules that cannot be translated arrive as single events, and TEC virtual events keep their join link, shown to registrants only.

Launch checklist

Work through this on a staging copy first.

Before you switch

1. Take a full backup and clone the site to staging.
2. Install Eventonomy, run setup, and set your account policy: automatic accounts, guest, or must log in.
3. Run the importer scan, read the call-outs, then import.
4. Rebuild your calendar page with the calendar or events-list block, and check it at phone width.
5. Switch on custom registration questions if you used them before; they are off by default.

Test, then clean up

1. Add Pro and your gateway if you sell tickets, then buy a test ticket and refund it.
2. Export your old attendee and order records to CSV and store them.
3. Test an export and an erase request.
4. Deactivate The Events Calendar, confirm the redirects, and watch for 404 errors for a week.

Fitting in with the rest of your site

Eventonomy is one of several separate, optional plugins from the same team. They install on the same WordPress site and share one login, so a member does not need a second account.

Two connections are real, and they are on different sides. Eventonomy Pro ships the BuddyPress integration: an events tab in groups and on profiles, activity stream posts and notifications. The BuddyNext connection is built and shipped by BuddyNext Pro, not by us; it needs only the free Eventonomy plugin, and it puts RSVP buttons and a live headcount on the feed card. Following organizers and the discovery feed in Pro do not need BuddyPress.

The other sister products, Jetonomy for forums and Q&A, Learnomy for courses, Listora for directories, WP Career Board for jobs, WP Sell Services for a services marketplace and WB Gamification for points and badges, run on the same site. We make no integration claim for them. The BuddyX Pro and Reign themes are the same: they are community themes you can pair with it.

Weigh this against a hosted events platform. That is one bill and it takes a fee on each ticket. These are separate plugins you install, host and update yourself, and there are none of those per-ticket cuts.

What Eventonomy does not do for you

Plainly, so you can rule us out early:

• No sync from Meetup. Pro syncs an ICS URL and Eventbrite, not Meetup.
• No moving a single date in a series to another day; you can only cancel or restore it.
• No partial refund from inside Eventonomy.
• No bundled mobile app. The server side exists, the app is a separate product.
• No network-wide event sharing across a multisite network.
• No third-party ecosystem to match The Events Calendar.

Other alternatives worth a look

• Events Manager is a long-running plugin with free bookings and a mature multisite story.
• Modern Events Calendar wins when you want many calendar skins out of the box.
• EventON wins when its compact calendar look is the design you want.
• WP Event Manager suits listing-style sites where visitors submit events.
• Event Espresso is a registration-focused plugin if your main job is taking sign-ups.
• Eventbrite wins when you want a marketplace audience more than your own site.

For the two-product table, see Eventonomy vs The Events Calendar. For a wider tour of what we cover, see the features.

Who should stay with The Events Calendar

Stay if you depend on a specific add-on, if your agency supports it across many clients, or if you only need a good public calendar. Stay if a large third-party ecosystem is a requirement rather than a preference, because that is where the leader is ahead and likely to stay ahead.

Consider Eventonomy if you are paying, or about to pay, for several pieces to get recurring events, RSVPs and member submission working together. Try the importer on a staging copy. It costs nothing and the undo is built in. See Free vs Pro for the exact line between the tiers.