Elevent alternatives: the festival website and app, not just the ticket engine

Elevent calls itself multi-event ticketing: a cloud platform for multi-day, multi-venue events with membership, a shopping cart for tickets, memberships and add-ons, on-site tools for printing and badges, audience analytics, and a white-label website or WordPress plugin to embed it. It serves cinemas, film institutes, festivals, performing arts and attractions, and shows the Seattle International Film Festival, VIFF and the Palm Springs International Film Society among its customers. It does not publish prices.

Elevent's own pitch is to stay out of the way so the event is identified with the organiser, not the ticketing platform. That suits a festival with a strong web team of its own. The reason festivals look for an Elevent alternative is usually scope: they want the festival website, a programme built around sections and strands, the branded app and the ticketing as one product from one supplier, with a price they can see before the first call.

A festival's audience does not experience a ticket engine. It experiences the announcement, the programme, the film page, the pass, the app on the day and the door. When those come from different suppliers, the festival pays for the seams: an agency to keep the site in step with the ticketing, a separate app project, and a programme structure reinvented each edition.

Filmgrail ships them as one product. Sections and strands are first-class content in the CMS. Passes are sold before the programme exists and redeemed later. Industry screenings stay off public sale while accredited guests can still book them. The apps run on the same content as the site. And the whole thing rolls forward to next year without a rebuild.

It also comes with a price you can put in a budget before the first call. For the wider market, see film festival ticketing platforms compared.

Festivals already running their public edition on Filmgrail include the Bergen International Film Festival, Norway's largest film festival with over 120 documentary and fiction films a year, and the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund, which runs a public programme and the New Nordic Films industry market in the same week from one system. Haugesund's main venue, Edda Kino, runs on the same platform all year, so the festival and the cinema share one infrastructure.

Because the public edition is where a festival earns its audience, and it deserves a website and app that are unmistakably yours: sections and strands as first-class content, passes sold before the programme exists and redeemed later, industry accreditation beside public sale, and a site built to stay up the hour the programme drops. The edition rolls forward every year as content, not as a new build.

A mid-size international festival pays about $5,000 a year, flat, with no per-ticket fees, and smaller festivals pay less (see pricing). If we already integrate your ticketing and payment provider you can be live in a few weeks; a provider we have not connected before takes about a month.

See it before you talk to anyone: build your festival's prototype in 30 seconds — your own festival site and festival back office, from your current address. Then book a festival demo against your real programme, and read how the festival platform works.