Tickera sells tickets. Do you run events?

What Tickera is, and who it suits

Tickera is a WordPress plugin for selling event tickets from your own site. Its site describes multiple ticket types, custom attendee fields, a drag-and-drop designer for PDF tickets, and QR codes or barcodes on each ticket. Payments go to your own gateway accounts, and the vendor says it takes no commission.

Around that core sits a set of add-ons. Its site lists a seating add-on for reserved seats, a bridge to sell tickets through WooCommerce, a custom forms add-on and a Stripe Connect add-on. It also lists scanning apps for iOS and Android that work offline after a sync, and a web app that turns a browser into a check-in desk.

It suits an organizer whose business is the door: concerts, conferences with a sales page, anything with a seat map or a queue to get in. There is a free plugin on the WordPress directory, with a premium version above it.

The real difference: selling versus running

A ticketing plugin asks one question: who has paid and who is in the room. Everything is built to answer it quickly. An events plugin asks a wider one: what is on, when, who is coming, and what happens next week.

Think of the events you run in a year. Some are paid concerts. Many more are free talks, classes, practice nights and member evenings. For those, the ticket is a formality and the real work is the calendar, the series and the headcount.

Eventonomy is built for the second shape. A paid ticket is something an event can have, not the reason the plugin exists. If your whole calendar is paid, Tickera’s focus will serve you well. If most of it is free, you are carrying a sales machine to host a book club.

How an event runs in Eventonomy

Here is one monthly talk, from first draft to the door.

1. Create the event. Title, date, venue and organizer, saved in a shared catalog. Free.
2. Repeat it. Monthly, with an interval. Each date shows on the calendar, and one RSVP covers the series. Rules like the second Thursday are Pro.
3. Open sign-up. Visitors RSVP and add guests. Guests need no account unless you require one. Free.
4. Cap the room. Past capacity, people join the waitlist and are promoted in order on free RSVP events. Free.
5. Add a price when you need one. Add a paid ticket type for one event and switch on a gateway. Pro.
6. Remind and admit. Reminders go a day and an hour before, free. Door check-in, as described above, is Pro.

You can cancel or restore one date in a series. You cannot move one date to a new time on its own.

Check-in, stated exactly

Check-in is Pro only. Every ticket carries a QR code, and the code holds a link on your site. A signed-in staff member opens the phone’s own camera app, points it at the code, and taps the link. The attendee is checked in, and a second scan shows “Already checked in”.

The check-in block, for a desk or a hardware reader, takes a USB scanner, a pasted code, or a search by name or email. It does not read a code through the browser camera, and we do not ship a dedicated scanning app. A refunded ticket is refused at the door.

Only the event’s own organizer or a site manager can admit people. The link needs your site reachable from the phone, so check the venue’s signal before an event. That is a plainer system than offline scanning apps, and some door teams will want more.

There is no offline mode. If the venue network drops, the scanner stops, and you fall back to the printed or on-screen guest list. Plan for that if your venue has poor signal.

Reminders and emails

Reminders are free and need no setup, and Pro lets you pick the timing and send by SMS through Twilio. Confirmation emails go out on registration, and an organizer can email everyone registered for an event from the attendee panel. Ticket buyers get an order confirmation with their QR codes and an invoice link.

What the buyer sees depends on the account setting. By default a new email gets an account created, which the buyer can untick. You can switch to guest-only checkout or require a login. A buyer who is not signed in on return still gets a private order page with every ticket.

When tickets alone fall short

A ticketing plugin treats each event as a product with a stock count. That works until the questions change. Someone asks what is on next month, which dates are left in a series. Then you need a calendar, a series and a people list, not a sales report.

Eventonomy answers those from the same record. An event has its dates and its attendees, and a person’s RSVPs sit with their account. A tickets-first plugin can be extended toward that, but it will always feel like an extension.

Selling tickets: what Pro adds and who pays what

You can define free, donation and paid ticket types in the free plugin, but paid checkout needs Pro. A paid event on a free-only site says online sales are not available yet instead of showing a dead button.

Pro takes payment through Stripe and PayPal, or through your WooCommerce checkout, using the methods you have set up there. The buyer is sent to a hosted payment page and returned to a confirmation. Order totals are worked out on the server from the stored ticket price, so a tampered request cannot lower it.

On top of checkout, Pro adds coupons, early-bird and tiered pricing, tax and booking fees, PDF invoices and full-order refunds. The tickets themselves are QR codes in the confirmation email, on the order page and in the buyer’s dashboard. We do not have a ticket designer, and a PDF here is an invoice rather than an admission ticket.

What it means for fees

We take nothing per ticket. You pay your gateway and your Pro licence. Tickera says it takes no commission either, with gateway fees applying, so on fees the two are alike and the choice comes down to features.

Capacity and ticket types

Each ticket type has its own name, price, capacity, minimum and maximum per order, and an optional sale window. That is enough for an early-bird tier, a general tier and a free guest ticket on one event. A buyer who orders three seats gets three separate tickets, each with its own code.

When every tier is gone, the sold-out event offers a waitlist for a name and an email. Nothing is charged and no ticket is issued. Because a freed paid seat cannot safely go to someone who has not paid, you admit waitlisted people yourself.

Letting hosts submit events

Tickera’s strength is selling for one organizer. Eventonomy also covers a site where many people list events. The free plugin includes a member dashboard where a host creates, edits and duplicates events and manages registrations without seeing wp-admin.

You set the minimum role, cap events per person and switch on approval so submitted events wait for you. Approving or rejecting sends the host an email. Pro adds an earnings screen for each host and, if you want it, a platform fee and payouts.

If you run a venue with visiting promoters or a local events site, this is the difference between you entering every listing and them doing it. We did not find a host-facing submission flow listed on Tickera’s site, so ask the vendor if you need one.

What each costs to run

Both plugins run on your own hosting, so you carry hosting, updates and backups. Tickera’s site lists paid plans and a bundle of add-ons, and its wordpress.org listing is for a free plugin with a premium version. Compare what you need against what each plan includes, since add-ons for seating or scanning may sit in higher plans.

Eventonomy’s core is free, and Pro is a paid yearly licence. We do not quote a figure here; the store shows the current one. See Free vs Pro for what moves behind the licence.

Plan for the day-to-day too. Someone must test the gateway after a plugin update, watch the mail log, and keep the licence current. Add the cost of skills. A ticketing plugin with many add-ons asks you to learn the ones you use. A lighter plugin asks you to learn fewer screens and accept fewer options.

Attendee data and privacy

Registrations and orders sit in your own WordPress database, in the plugin’s own tables. Attendees export to CSV from the admin screen. Organizers can export their own event’s list from the front end, and a registration question adds a column to the file.

Personal data requests go through the standard WordPress export and erase tools. A person’s RSVPs and orders are included in an export. An erase anonymizes the RSVPs and keeps order records the tax rules require.

Wiping everything on uninstall is an opt-in setting, off by default. Unsubscribe links on emails are honored afterwards.

Moving over from Tickera

There is no importer for Tickera. The one-click importers read The Events Calendar, EventON, Events Manager, WP Event Manager and Sugar Calendar, and we accept CSV and iCalendar files. For Tickera the move is manual.

Choose from these:

• Rebuild. For a handful of upcoming events, retype them. It takes an afternoon.
• CSV. Export event details to a spreadsheet and import in the free plan. Only a title is required.
• A developer script. Someone can create events through the REST API. That is custom work.

Sold tickets, orders and check-in history do not come across. Keep Tickera running, or at least its data, for events that have already sold tickets, and do not move a live sale mid-way.

A launch checklist

1. Finish any event that is already selling tickets in Tickera.
2. Install Eventonomy on a staging copy and rebuild your next events.
3. Decide whether buyers need an account, can be guests, or must log in.
4. Connect a gateway in Pro and run a test purchase and a full refund.
5. Print or display a test ticket and scan it with a staff phone.
6. Test a USB scanner if your desk uses one.
7. Check the mobile layout at phone width.
8. Switch the live pages over only when a real event is ready to use them.

Alongside the rest of your site

Eventonomy is one of several separate, optional plugins from one team, running on the same WordPress site and login. You install and update each yourself.

Two connections are confirmed. The BuddyPress connection ships in Eventonomy Pro and adds events to groups and profiles. The BuddyNext connection ships in BuddyNext Pro, needs only free Eventonomy, and puts an RSVP button and a live headcount on the feed card. The ecosystem page has the detail.

The rest run on the same site without any integration claim from us: Jetonomy for forums and Q&A, Learnomy for courses, Listora for directories, WP Career Board for jobs, WP Sell Services for a services marketplace, WB Gamification for points and badges, and the BuddyX Pro and Reign themes.

For a ticketing site, the practical point is that tickets, a forum for ticket holders and a members area can share a login without a hosted service in the middle. You decide how much of that you need, and you can ignore all of it at the start.

None of these is required, and Eventonomy works on a site that has only WordPress, a theme and itself. Add a sister product only when you can name the job it will do, and test each addition on staging first.

A hosted ticketing service is one account and one fee per ticket. These are separate plugins you host and update, and in exchange every table is yours.

Other alternatives worth a look

• Event Espresso is a registration system with deep forms and group orders.
• Eventbrite wins when you need strangers to find a public event and want payments handled.
• Amelia is the pick if your events sit beside staff appointments.
• The Events Calendar is calendar-first, with a large ecosystem around it.
• Events Manager covers events and bookings in one free plugin.
• Modern Events Calendar offers many layouts and booking options.

What Eventonomy does not do, and who should stay

We have no seating charts and no ticket designer. We do not ship scanning apps, and check-in is the phone camera link described above. We do not import from Tickera. A ticketed event’s waitlist is not promoted automatically, and Pro refunds are whole-order.

Stay with Tickera if tickets are the job, if you sell reserved seats, or if your door team depends on offline scanning apps. Those are real strengths, and a calendar plugin should not talk you out of them.

Try Eventonomy if ticketing is only part of the picture. Start with the event tickets page, and read the check-in guide before you decide how your door will run.