Event Vault vs Whova

Event Vault is built for in-person conferences, congresses and summits: associations, scientific and medical congresses, AGMs and member assemblies. It covers that whole job, including a full speaker workspace, formal votes with proxies, abstracts and e-posters, badge print stations at the desk, and connectors and an open API for the systems you already run.

Whova serves a wider market: any event type, virtual and hybrid included.

The commercial terms differ as well:

• The price is published. Whova’s pricing page is a quote-request form with no numbers on it.
• No platform fee on ticket sales. You pay Stripe’s processing fee and the money goes into your own Stripe account. Whova’s published registration fee is 3.0% + $0.99 per paid ticket, on top of card processing.
• The app can carry your name. Whova states on its own website: “Whova is not a white-label app.”
• Event data is stored in the EU. Sign-in accounts are the exception, processed in the US by Firebase Authentication. Whova’s servers are in the USA.

Verified against Whova’s own pricing, registration, FAQ and security pages on 3 November 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.

Capterra, TrustRadius, GetApp and SoftwareAdvice all list Whova as “contact vendor for pricing”. Vendr, which publishes median contract values for thousands of software vendors, has a Whova listing with no figure on it. You won’t get a number until you’re on a call.

A worked example

The ticket fee is the one number Whova does publish, so that part can be worked out. Take 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 a separate product without the attendee app.

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 there on Stripe’s normal payout schedule. Event Vault takes no fee on ticket sales and never holds the money: no reserve, no hold, no percentage. You pay your payment processor’s standard rate and nothing else. Refunds, partial refunds, discount codes, add-ons, per-product tax rates and a live financial report all run from the console.

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

Whova: a registration fee, and two payout choices

Whova charges a registration fee on paid tickets. Free tickets carry no fee, however many you issue.

Whova’s own pages disagree on the number. Its registration pages state 3% + $0.99 per ticket. A 2023 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. 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.”

Budget on 3% + $0.99, and get the figure for your own country and currency in writing before you sign. Payment processing is separate and stacks on top.

Where your money sits

Whova markets an instant payout, and the claim holds if you have connected your own Stripe account: “Once a ticket is sold, the funds are immediately deposited into your 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. Whova does not publish its timing on any public page, so expect to ask.

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

Attendee experience

Organiser console

Sponsors and exhibitors

Technical and compliance

Counted row by row, the two are close. Whova is broader on registration, marketing, virtual events and the call for papers. Event Vault goes deeper on speakers, formal votes, branding and integrations.

This is where Event Vault pulls ahead for a congress. 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 you three views of the same speaker list. The profile view holds what attendees see, plus a pipeline stage on every card, running Invited → Confirmed → Contract Sent → Contract Signed → Materials Received → Briefed → Attended, with a count at each stage and a note only your team can read. The logistics view has 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. The deliverables view covers headshot, bio, slide deck, AV requirements, recording consent and e-posters, each filterable by what has not arrived yet. On the day, speakers open 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. 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 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, and an unscheduled column to park sessions in. Changes stage until you save, so you can rearrange a whole day and discard it. It flags speaker double-bookings before your 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. When it’s time, a moderator closes the question on a countdown the whole room watches. Whova’s polling pages describe none of this.

An API you can hand to an AI assistant. API keys are scoped per event and per object type, with read or write access, and the console gives you a one-click prompt to paste into an AI assistant so it can tag sessions or tidy speaker bios in bulk. Every write can run as a dry run first, so you see what the assistant would change before it changes anything. Keys expire in as little as an hour and revoke instantly.

Your programme without the app. The €250 Lineup tier runs the planning side: the speaker pipeline, deliverables chasing, the session board and travel and hospitality. It then pushes the finished schedule, speakers and sponsors 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. If you want the app later, you upgrade the same event and the €250 counts toward it.

Whova’s integrations page names no integrations, but its own blog does: a native HubSpot integration, a daily Eventbrite sync, a Cvent connection, association-management systems such as WildApricot, MemberClicks, iMIS and Neon CRM, and a Zapier app. There is no native Salesforce integration and no public API.

Connecting to the systems you already run is normal work for us.

Registration platforms, synced every hour. Connect your Aanmelder or Salesforce account once, and each 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 anything is written. An import never overwrites what a guest edited themselves, and a removal limit stops a mistake on the platform side from emptying your guest list.

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. The same goes for a programme or abstract book that already lives on your own website or in a submission system: it gets imported and kept in step.

Salesforce, built against your setup. The connector maps your own fields. Where an organisation’s Salesforce is customised beyond that, the integration gets written against that instance. The same approach covers other long-standing internal systems, as long as there is a way to get data out of them.

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. Attendees still find the ticket in the app and the guest portal.

Streaming and transcription, linked in. No video is hosted here. 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 bought sits next to the in-person programme.

The REST API is on every event plan. It covers guests, tickets, speakers, sessions, sponsors, abstracts, venue maps, polls, Q&A, gamification and event settings, with bulk import. No edition gate, no per-integration fee.

Custom importers and integrations are quoted per project, with the scope agreed up front. Tick “Integrations” or “Custom development” on the quote form and describe what you need.

Four situations where Whova is 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 programme with two real audiences, Whova’s built-in stack is the better tool.
• You need abstract submission and review, certificates or judged posters. Whova has call-for-papers submission and review, certificates of attendance, signed release and consent forms, and poster competitions. Event Vault shows the accepted abstracts and e-posters in the app and on your website, but has no submission, review, judging or certificates. You’d run those elsewhere and import the results, which Event Vault does in one go.
• You want email marketing and the event website from the same vendor. Whova adds email campaigns and retargeting, a website builder, a self-service check-in kiosk and exhibitor booth reservation. Event Vault sends transactional invitations and puts its widgets on the site you already have.
• Your procurement requires SOC 2. Whova holds SOC 2 Type 2 and publishes a PCI DSS attestation. Event Vault holds no certifications, because the audit cost isn’t viable for a company our size today, and a security questionnaire will stop there.

Whova averages 4.8 across roughly 4,400 G2 and Capterra reviews. Reviewers like its agenda, networking and reliability. The common complaints are notification overload and Whova marketing to your attendees inside your own event app.

Choose Whova if your programme is substantially virtual or hybrid, you need abstract submission, review or certificates, you want email marketing and the event website from the same vendor, or your procurement requires SOC 2. Budget for a quote and a per-ticket registration fee.

Choose Event Vault if you’re running an in-person conference, congress or summit, anywhere in the world. You get the speaker operations, planning board, formal votes and abstracts that kind of event needs. You know the price before you talk to anyone, every cent of your ticket revenue lands in your own Stripe account, and the app can go into the stores under your organisation’s name. The person who built the product answers your email, at hours set by your event.

Whova is broader. Event Vault goes deeper where a congress spends its time, and costs less to run. 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 quickest way to decide is to try it. Book a walkthrough, or start building your event and judge it against your own programme. There’s no credit card and nothing to pay until you take it live.