Event Vault vs Whova

Whova is a mature, broad, well-supported platform with a very large install base. It covers virtually every event type, including virtual and hybrid, and it has a deep feature set that reaches well beyond what Event Vault does. Attendees generally like it: it holds roughly 4.8 out of 5 across thousands of reviews on G2 and Capterra, and its agenda, networking and lead-retrieval tools are consistently praised. If you are running a large multi-format event programme and you want a big, established vendor, Whova is a defensible choice.

Event Vault is narrower on purpose. It is built for in-person conferences, congresses and summits between roughly 150 and 10,000 attendees, and it competes on four things Whova structurally cannot match:

• You can see the price before you talk to anyone. Whova’s pricing page is a quote-request form with no numbers on it.
• Event Vault charges nothing on ticket sales. Whova’s published registration fee is 3.0% + $0.99 per paid ticket, on top of card processing.
• Your ticket money goes straight into your own Stripe account. Whova’s instant-payout promise depends on you connecting your own Stripe; it does not publish the timing for organisers who don’t.
• Event Vault can publish a fully branded app under your organisation’s name. Whova states plainly on its own website: “Whova is not a white-label app.”

Everything below is sourced, dated, and links back to primary material wherever possible.

Verified against Whova’s own pricing page, help centre and security page on 7 August 2026. Whova revises these pages; always confirm current terms directly.

Event Vault publishes its prices

Three plans, all on the pricing page, all including every feature and unlimited organisers:

The attendee number is an estimate. After your event it is reconciled to the real count in your app, up or down.

Whova does not

Whova’s pricing page contains no figures at all. It is a form that asks for your event format, duration, attendee band and annual event volume, and returns a quote. Even the trial is gated behind a booked 20-minute demo.

This isn’t just our reading of it. Capterra, TrustRadius, GetApp and SoftwareAdvice all list Whova as “contact vendor for pricing,” and Vendr, a SaaS price-benchmarking marketplace that publishes median contract values for thousands of vendors, carries a Whova listing with no median and no average contract value at all. If a procurement benchmarking service can’t establish a number, you won’t either until you’re on a call.

We’re deliberately not quoting a figure someone else paid. Several are circulating, and we couldn’t trace any of them back to a source we’d be willing to stand behind. What we can say is that Event Vault’s number is on our website and Whova’s isn’t.

A worked example

Where the difference is calculable is the ticketing fee, because Whova publishes that one. A 500-delegate congress selling tickets at €300:

Whova states its registration fee in US dollars; $0.99 is shown here as roughly €0.90 for illustration. Event Vault figures are its published list prices.

The add-on question

Whova’s model is à-la-carte. GetApp’s aggregated review summary bears that out: some buyers like the flexibility, others report the extras adding up. A senior IT manager wrote on G2 in March 2026: “The add-ons are expensive, after the basics, the items you really need are $$$.” Premium support is a separately purchasable tier above a basic package.

Event Vault has no tiers of features. The plans differ only by attendee capacity, included support time, and whether you get your own branded app.

One widely-circulated claim about Whova charging $2,000 for unlimited document uploads traces back to a single unsourced sentence on a competitor’s blog. We could not corroborate it, so we do not repeat it.

This is the sharpest difference between the two platforms, and it is worth understanding in detail because it affects your cash flow, not just your budget.

Event Vault: zero platform fee, money direct to you

Event Vault connects to your own Stripe account via Stripe Connect. Ticket revenue lands in your account, on Stripe’s normal payout schedule, and Event Vault never holds a cent of it. There is no Event Vault fee on ticket sales, only your payment processor’s standard rate. Refunds, partial refunds, discount codes, add-ons, per-product tax rates and a live financial report all run from the console.

Ticketing is also entirely optional. If you already sell tickets elsewhere, import your guest list by CSV or push it through the API instead.

Whova: a registration fee, and two payout choices

Whova charges a registration fee on paid tickets. Free tickets carry no fee, and there is no limit on how many of those you issue — a fair and useful policy.

There is an oddity worth flagging honestly: Whova’s own pages disagree on the number. Its marketing material states 3.0% + $0.99 per ticket. A 2024 Whova blog post that is still live says 2.5% + $0.99, and a comparison page’s own worked example ($13.49 on a $500 ticket) is arithmetically a 2.5% calculation. Meanwhile Whova’s help centre declines to state a figure at all: “The Whova Registration Fee and Stripe processing fee are subjective based on your country and currency configuration. For clarification, please refer to your Payout section under the tickets tab.”

So the honest position is: the fee is somewhere between 2.5% and 3.0% plus $0.99, it appears to have risen, and Whova will not confirm it in writing before you are a customer.

Payment processing is separate and stacks on top.

Where your money sits

Whova markets an instant payout, and the claim holds up with one caveat: “Once a ticket is sold, the funds are immediately deposited into your Stripe account” — provided you have connected your own Stripe account. One detail to watch if you do. Whova creates a new Stripe Standard sub-account, and that sub-account defaults to manual payouts, so organisers who never change the setting will find their money sitting in Stripe instead of arriving in their bank.

Organisers who don’t connect their own Stripe are paid through Whova’s managed payout process instead. Whova does not publish the timing of that process on any public page, so budget on the assumption that you’ll need to ask.

With Event Vault the question doesn’t arise. It is your Stripe account, connected via Stripe Connect, and Event Vault has no access to the funds at any point, no reserve, no hold, no percentage.

Attendee experience

Organiser console

Sponsors and exhibitors

Whova additionally offers an exhibitor self-service portal, booth reservation at registration, abstract management, a judged poster gallery, certificates and e-signature waivers. Event Vault has none of these. They are covered properly in the section below rather than buried in a table.

Commercial, technical and compliance

Feature-count comparisons flatter the bigger vendor, so it’s worth naming the places where the smaller one is simply better. These aren’t things Whova does less well. They’re things it doesn’t do.

A real speaker operations workspace. Every congress organiser knows the speaker admin is the job that eats the month before the event: chasing headshots, tracking who has signed, working out whose visa letter still hasn’t gone out. Event Vault gives each speaker four tabs. A public profile. A private logistics tab with passport and nationality details behind a GDPR consent gate, visa status, inbound and outbound flights, ground transfers, hotel, dietary and accessibility needs, honorarium and emergency contact. A lifecycle pipeline running Invited → Confirmed → Contract Sent → Contract Signed → Materials Received → Briefed → Attended, with live counts at each stage. And a deliverables tab tracking headshot, bio, slide deck, AV requirements and recording consent, each filterable by what’s still missing. Whova has a Speaker Center where speakers upload their own bio. That is not the same job.

A planning board that catches your mistakes. The schedule builder is a proper drag-and-drop board: day columns against a time axis, blocks sized by duration, side-by-side track lanes, snapping from five minutes to two hours, an unscheduled column to park sessions in. Changes stage until you save, so you can rearrange a whole day and discard it. And it flags speaker double-bookings automatically, before your programme goes out.

Badge design that costs nothing. Full badge designer on every plan, no printer rental, no per-badge fee, output as a print-ready PDF for any office printer. Single-sided, double-sided, tent-fold or vertical-fold, with templates for Conference, Speaker, Exhibitor, VIP, Crew and Networking. There’s also a free public Badge Maker that runs in the browser with no account at all.

An API built for the AI era. Scoped, expiring API keys, issued per event, per object type, with read or write granularity, and a one-click prompt you can paste into an AI assistant to have it tag sessions or tidy speaker bios in bulk. Keys expire in as little as an hour and revoke instantly.

Your programme on your own website, as a product in its own right. The publishing widgets push your schedule, speakers and sponsors straight into your existing site, themed to your colours, with a printable full-programme layout. If that’s genuinely all you need, there’s a €100 Web Programme tier with no app and no per-attendee charge, and you can upgrade to a full event later.

One price with nothing modular. Everything above is on every plan. Plans differ only by attendee capacity, included support time and whether you want your own branded app.

Most platforms in this market want to be the whole stack. Event Vault takes the opposite position: if you already run a registration system, a CRM, a streaming provider or a transcription tool, and your team knows it, the sensible move is to connect to it rather than ask you to abandon it.

Custom importers for the systems you already use. Association and congress data is rarely tidy. Membership databases built up over fifteen years, exports with columns nobody remembers naming, registration platforms with their own idea of what a delegate record looks like. Rather than making your team re-key it, we build an importer against your format so the data syncs across and your people keep working where they always have.

Custom Salesforce integrations. For clients running heavily customised Salesforce operations we’ve built bespoke integrations rather than handing over a generic connector that fits nobody. The same applies to other established internal systems: if it can expose data, it can usually be wired up.

Hybrid, streaming and AI tooling, integrated rather than rebuilt. Event Vault doesn’t host video, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. What we have done on previous events is link and embed the tools clients were already paying for: external streaming platforms alongside the in-person programme, AI transcription running against sessions, and other third-party services surfaced inside the app and the published web widgets. You keep the tool you chose; the attendee sees one coherent event.

A REST API on every plan. Guests, tickets, speakers, sessions and sponsors, with scoped keys issued per event and per object type, expiring in as little as an hour. No edition gate, no per-integration fee.

Custom development and integration work is scoped and quoted per project, so it’s an honest conversation rather than a line item you discover later. Tick “Integrations” or “Custom development” on the quote form and describe what you need.

For context: Whova’s integrations page did not render a list we could verify, so we can’t tell you what it connects to, let alone what bespoke work is possible.

Four situations where Whova is straightforwardly the better call, and we’d say so on a call rather than waste your time.

• Your programme is substantially virtual or hybrid. Event Vault hosts no video of its own. We have wired external streaming and transcription tools into the app and the published widgets on previous events, and for a mainly in-person congress with a streamed keynote that works well. For a genuinely two-audience programme, Whova’s built-in stack is the better tool.
• You need abstract management, certificates or judged posters. Whova has call-for-papers submission and review, certificates of attendance, e-signature waivers and a poster gallery with judging. Event Vault has none of them, so you’d run those elsewhere and import the results.
• Your procurement requires SOC 2. Whova holds SOC 2 Type 2 and publishes a PCI DSS attestation. Event Vault holds no certifications, and a security questionnaire will stop there.

And credit where it’s due: Whova’s 4.8 average across roughly 4,400 G2 and Capterra reviews is real, and the praise for its agenda, networking and reliability is consistent and specific. The criticisms are equally consistent, mostly notification overload and Whova marketing to your attendees inside your own event app, but those are irritations rather than capability gaps.

Choose Whova if your programme includes virtual or hybrid sessions, you need abstract management or accreditation certificates, your procurement process requires SOC 2, or you simply prefer a large vendor with tens of thousands of events behind it, and quote-based pricing with a per-ticket registration fee isn’t a problem for your budget.

Choose Event Vault if you’re running an in-person conference, congress or summit anywhere in the world, you want to know your cost before you talk to a salesperson, you’d rather keep every cent of your ticket revenue in your own bank account, you want your app in the stores under your organisation’s name, and you’d rather have the person who builds the product answer your email, at hours that match your event rather than someone else’s office calendar.

The honest summary: Whova is broader. Event Vault is cheaper, more transparent, faster to stand up, deeper where congress organisers actually spend their time, and yours to brand. Breadth is only worth paying for if you use it.

Ask for references, too. We’ll put you in touch with any customer on the list, not a curated shortlist of three.

The fastest way to settle it is to see the thing. Book a walkthrough or create a free demo event, no credit card, no time limit, and judge it against your own programme.