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, 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

Every plan is on the pricing page, and the event plans include 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 two event plans, Instant Event and Custom, differ only by event size, included support time, and whether you get your own branded app. Lineup is the single exception and a deliberate one: it is a planning and publishing product, covering the full speaker pipeline, deliverables, the session board and logistics, plus widgets on your own site with no attendee app, rather than a cut-down version of the platform.

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 reaches your cash flow as well as 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 here: 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 fee sits 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 get their own section below.

Commercial, technical and compliance

Feature-count comparisons flatter the bigger vendor, so here are 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 covering headshot, bio, slide deck, AV requirements and recording consent, each filterable by what has not arrived yet. 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 both event plans, 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 speakers and your programme, as a product in its own right. The €250 Lineup tier runs the whole planning side, covering the invited-to-attended speaker pipeline, deliverables chasing, a drag-and-drop session board that flags double-booked speakers, and travel and hospitality, then pushes the finished schedule, speakers and sponsors straight into your existing site, themed to your colours, with a printable full-programme layout. No app, no per-attendee charge, free to build until you publish, and upgradeable to a full event later.

One price with nothing modular. Everything above is on both event plans, which differ only by event size, included support time and whether you want your own branded app.

We can’t tell you what Whova connects to. Its integrations page did not render a list we could verify, so anything we said about its catalogue would be guesswork.

What we can describe is our own side of it. Connecting to the systems you already run is the normal case here, not a special project.

Legacy data, imported as it is. Congress data arrives messy. A membership list maintained since 2010, an export with column headings nobody can explain, a registration system whose idea of a delegate record is entirely its own. The importer gets written to fit what you already have, and your team carries on using the system it knows.

Salesforce, built against your setup. Heavily customised Salesforce operations get an integration written specifically for them; a connector that assumes a standard org would fit nobody. The same approach covers other internal systems that have been in place a long time, as long as there is a way to get data out of them.

Streaming and transcription, linked in. No video is hosted here. What we have done on past events is embed whatever streaming platform or AI transcription service the client had already bought, so it shows up next to the in-person programme in the app and on the published widgets.

The REST API is on every event 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.

Any of this gets quoted per project, with the scope agreed up front. Tick “Integrations” or “Custom development” on the quote form and describe what you need.

Three situations where Whova is straightforwardly the better call.

• 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.

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 more 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.

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. Any customer on our homepage list is fair game, and you pick which ones.

The fastest way to settle it is to see the thing. Book a walkthrough or start building your event — no credit card, nothing to pay until you take it live — and judge it against your own programme.