Eventive alternatives: a festival platform that is your own brand

Eventive describes itself as a platform for independent cinema that combines ticketing, pass management, audience data, membership, digital promotions, streaming, online film guides and balloting, for film festivals, arthouse cinemas and distributors. Its site names AFI, Fantastic Fest, Heartland Film Festival, Mountainfilm and the International Documentary Association among its users. The platform is free to use; ticketing carries a published fee of 5% + $0.99 per paid credit-card item, which organisers can pass to buyers, and virtual screenings start at a $975 annual activation fee.

That model is attractive for a festival that wants to start selling tomorrow at no fixed cost. Festivals go looking for an Eventive alternative when the public edition becomes the brand: when the programme deserves a real festival website rather than a hosted film guide, when sections, strands, guests and an industry programme need their own structure, and when a percentage of every ticket starts to look like a large number on a growing festival's budget.

Eventive's own pricing makes the arithmetic easy. At 5% + $0.99 per paid item, a festival that sells 20,000 paid tickets at an average of $12 generates about $31,800 in ticketing fees in a single edition. Eventive lets you pass those fees to buyers, which keeps them off your budget but adds them to your audience's basket, at the moment you most want them to add one more screening.

Filmgrail is priced as a flat annual subscription sized to the edition, so the cost does not rise with your success, and the extra screening a pass holder books costs you nothing more. For a festival still selling a few hundred tickets, a per-ticket model may well be cheaper; for a festival that has grown, it rarely is.

The other difference is ownership of the surface. On Filmgrail the programme lives on your festival website, in your CMS, with film pages structured for search, and in branded apps that carry your identity from announcement to closing night. See the Filmgrail vs Eventive comparison for the side-by-side, and the wider 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.