Event Vault vs Cvent

Event Vault is built for in-person conferences, congresses and summits: associations, scientific and medical congresses, AGMs and member assemblies. You get a native attendee app, the organiser console and the work around them: speaker logistics, abstracts and e-posters, formal votes with proxies, and badge printing at the desk. It costs €500 to €1,000 plus about €1 per attendee, reconciled after the event to who turned up. There is no minimum commitment, no auto-renewal, and nothing held back for a higher edition. It launches the same day. Ticket sales carry no platform fee, only Stripe’s processing fee, and the money goes straight into your own Stripe account. A branded app under your organisation’s name is €1,000 plus a one-time €600 setup.

Cvent is the enterprise suite. Founded in 1999 and owned by Blackstone since 2023, it reports 5,500+ staff and is a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Event Marketing and Management Platforms for the third year running. It does more than Event Vault, and its price and contract terms are written for enterprise procurement.

A congress that uses Cvent for the app, the programme and check-in pays for the rest of the suite as well. Before you sign, read three clauses in Cvent’s published contract terms. We quote them below: how a “Registrant” is counted for billing, what happens to unused registrant commitments, and what happens to your branded app when the contract ends.

Verified against Cvent’s own pricing page, Event Cloud Terms of Use and Trust Center on 3 November 2026, with cost ranges attributed to Vendr’s benchmark data. Confirm all commercial terms directly with Cvent.

Cvent’s pricing page carries no figures. Every call to action is “Get pricing.” What it does show is the structure: two editions, Professional and Enterprise, with Registration, Attendee Hub and OnArrival licensed as separate solutions.

SSO, MFA, API access and budget management are Enterprise-tier features. They are not in Professional.

What buyers report paying

Vendr, a procurement marketplace that brokers software contracts, publishes the following based on 200 tracked Cvent purchases (figures as listed in November 2026):

Vendr sells procurement services, so treat these as third-party benchmarks, not Cvent’s official prices. They come from anonymised contracts. Vendr also reports an average saving of 20% on negotiated deals, so the first number Cvent quotes is not the last one.

The numbers Cvent does publish

Cvent’s Event Cloud Terms of Use contain hard figures that most buyers never read:

And the overage rates, verbatim from the same document:

• $0.25 per contact, per year above your allowance
• $0.05 per email above your allowance
• $250 per 5GB block of additional storage
• $25 per chargeback, reversal or payment dispute, where Cvent is your payment processor
• 3–5% handling charge if you require special invoicing arrangements
• 2% per month, or the maximum rate allowed by law, on late payment

Where an Order Form doesn’t specify an overage rate, the terms bill at “Cvent’s then-current rates”. Overages are uncapped unless you negotiate a cap.

For a congress organiser this is the clause that matters most. It comes from Cvent’s own Event Cloud Terms:

“A Registrant is defined as a person registering via a registration process created within the Cvent system, even if submitted manually through the back end… Guests registered under a Registrant will count as a Registrant for billing purposes. Each registration will count as a Registrant for billing purposes from the point of submission, not from the point of approval or confirmation. If a person cancels, the initial registration still counts as a Registrant for billing purposes.”

So you are billed for:

• people who registered and then cancelled
• applications you rejected or never approved
• accompanying guests on a delegate’s registration
• records your own team typed in through the back end

And on minimum commitments:

“the number of Registrants listed under minimum usage fee in the Order Form is the minimum number of Registrants Customer agrees to use and pay for per annum. Should Customer use less than this minimum number, fees due under the Order Form will not be reduced… unused registrants will not roll over to another term year.”

So the minimum is a floor, not a credit. If you commit to 5,000 registrants and run 3,500, you pay for 5,000 and lose the difference.

Event Vault works the other way round. The attendee number on your plan is an estimate. After your event it is reconciled to the actual number of attendees in your app, up or down. If fewer people came than you expected, you pay less. There is no minimum commitment, nothing to roll over, and a cancellation costs you nothing.

Cvent’s model suits an enterprise with predictable annual volume and a procurement team to negotiate the floor. It is a poor fit for an association congress whose attendance swings 30% year to year.

Cvent has more features overall. These tables show the ones a congress uses.

Attendee experience

What your delegates use day to day is comparable. Cvent’s app has more at the edges, and costs many times more.

Organiser capability

Venue sourcing, room blocks, abstract review, CE credits and budget workflows are covered under Where Cvent Is the Better Choice, below.

Technical and compliance

Four parts of running a congress that Cvent either doesn’t document or charges more for.

Speaker operations, visas included. Cvent’s Speaker Resource Center collects tasks, headshots, bios, slides and travel details from speakers. Event Vault gives the organiser the whole speaker job in three views. The profile view shows what attendees see, plus a pipeline stage on every card (Invited → Confirmed → Contract Sent → Contract Signed → Materials Received → Briefed → Attended), with counts per stage and a note only your team reads. The logistics view holds passport and nationality details behind a GDPR consent gate, visa status, inbound and outbound flights, ground transfers, hotel, dietary and accessibility needs, honorarium, per diem and emergency contact. The deliverables view tracks headshot, bio, slide deck, AV requirements, recording consent and e-posters, each filterable by what’s still outstanding. On the day, speakers use the Speaker Portal in the app to say they’re on site and ready for their session, and your team sees it on the session page. For a congress with sixty international speakers, that is the difference between a spreadsheet and a system.

A planning board you can think in. Day columns against a time axis, blocks sized by duration, side-by-side track lanes, snapping from five minutes to two hours, an unscheduled tray. Changes stage until you save, so you can restructure an entire day and discard it if it doesn’t work. Speaker double-bookings are flagged before the programme goes out.

Formal votes, with proxies. For an AGM or a members’ assembly, a vote can be restricted to a whitelist of eligible members, prepared before anyone registers. A member who can’t attend hands their ballot to a proxy, from the app or arranged by you in the console. A member who turns up can still vote in person, and the count stays one vote per member. A moderator closes the question on a countdown the whole room watches. Cvent’s live-polling documentation describes neither a voter whitelist nor proxies.

The whole product on both event plans. The REST API, badge designer, print stations, abstracts, formal voting, analytics, ticketing and web widgets are included on both event plans. Badge printing needs no rented printer, and the free public Badge Maker runs in a browser with no account at all.

And a way in for €250. If you don’t need an attendee app, Lineup is sold standalone at €250 per event. You get the full planning workflow: the invited-to-attended speaker pipeline, deliverables chasing, the planning board, and travel and hospitality, plus schedule, speaker and sponsor widgets embedded in your existing site, themed to your colours, with a printable full-programme layout. Build it for free and pay when you publish. If you want the app later, you upgrade the same event and the €250 counts toward it.

Cvent will do more. Event Vault will do the parts a congress lives on, today, for roughly a twentieth of the median contract.

Cvent’s answer to integration is a marketplace and a developer hub. The catch is the shelf. API access lives in the Enterprise edition, and work outside the catalogue runs through professional services at $150 to $300 an hour.

Event Vault has no marketplace. It has two connectors that cover the common case, and a person who will write the importer for the rest.

Registration platforms, synced every hour. Aanmelder and Salesforce connect from the console. Add your account once, and every event imports its guests and tickets from it every hour, with the platform’s own QR codes on the tickets. A preview shows what an import would change before it writes anything, guests’ own edits are never overwritten, and a removal limit stops a mistake on the platform side from emptying your guest list.

Legacy data, imported as it is. Association records are rarely tidy: a membership database grown over fifteen years, exports with columns nobody remembers naming, a registration platform with its own idea of what a delegate record contains. We build the importer against your export format, so your team keeps working in the system it knows and nobody re-keys a list by hand. A programme or abstract book that already lives on your website or in a submission system is imported and kept in step the same way.

Salesforce, wired to your instance. The connector maps your own fields. If your Salesforce is customised beyond that, we build the integration against your instance. Most established internal systems can be wired up the same way if they expose data at all.

Your entry system, your QR codes. If the venue runs its own access control, a ticket can carry that system’s QR code exactly as it expects it, and attendees still find it in the app and the guest portal.

Streaming and transcription, linked in. Event Vault hosts no video. Embedded web pages and videos play in place in the app and on the published widgets, so the streaming platform or AI transcription service you already pay for appears beside the in-person programme. You keep the tool you chose and the attendee sees one event.

The REST API is on every event plan. Guests, tickets, speakers, sessions, sponsors, abstracts, venue maps, polls, Q&A, gamification and event settings, with bulk import and dry runs. Keys are scoped per event and per object type, and can expire in as little as an hour. No edition gate.

Bespoke work is scoped and quoted per project before it starts. Tick “Integrations” or “Custom development” on the quote form and describe what you need.

Cvent is the right call in five cases:

• You need hotel room blocks or housing. Passkey connects to hotel reservation systems and reports pickup and attrition in real time. Event Vault has no housing module.
• You need venue sourcing. Nearly 340,000 venues actively use Cvent’s marketplace, processing over $20 billion of sourcing a year. Event Vault doesn’t source venues.
• You need abstract submission and review, CEU or CME credit tracking, or certificates. Cvent has all three. Event Vault shows the accepted abstracts and e-posters but does not run the call for papers. For an accredited medical congress this alone can decide it.
• You need complex registration, approval workflows or budget governance. Multi-path registration, contact-type logic, approval chains, Meeting Request Forms and spend tracking. Event Vault has one registration flow with custom fields.
• Your procurement demands certifications or accessibility documentation. Cvent holds ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 1 and 2 Type II and PCI DSS Level 1, publishes 18 VPATs and offers pre-completed SIG and CAIQ questionnaires. Event Vault holds no certifications, because the cost of audits isn’t viable for a company our size today, and a security questionnaire will stop there.

Cvent also runs virtual, hybrid and webinar programmes, contracts through local entities across Europe, Asia and Australia, offers 24/7 support in 12 languages and publishes 99.97% uptime. At CONNECT in July 2026 it announced more than 70 product releases, 34 of them AI features, backed by a $1 billion multi-year technology budget.

Choose Cvent if your programme depends on room blocks, venue sourcing, abstract review, accreditation, approval workflows or virtual formats, and you have an events team, a procurement process and a budget in the tens of thousands. If your security or accessibility requirements are formal, Cvent meets them and Event Vault doesn’t.

Choose Event Vault if your congress needs a strong attendee app, a capable organiser console and the speaker, voting and badge work around them. If you’ve been billed for registrants who cancelled, or watched your renewal drift up every year, Event Vault was built for you.

Try this: write down the Cvent modules you used last year. If venue sourcing, Passkey, abstracts and budget management aren’t on that list, you’re paying for a suite to use an app.

Ask for references while you’re at it. Pick any customer from the list on our homepage and we’ll introduce you.

Book a walkthrough, or start building your event and see how much of Cvent you would miss. It costs nothing until you take it live.