Best WordPress Event Ticketing Plugins With Zero Commission
Sell a £30 ticket on Eventbrite and roughly £4.00 does not reach you: a 3.7% plus $1.79 service fee per ticket and a 2.9% payment processing fee per order. Sell five hundred of them and that is around £2,000 gone. This is the arithmetic that sends event organisers to WordPress, and it is sound arithmetic, with one wrinkle almost nobody mentions.
The wrinkle is that “zero commission” is not automatic on WordPress either. The most-installed free ticketing plugin applies a 2% application fee through its own payment layer, waived only when you hold a paid licence. This article covers what each option genuinely costs, where the break-even falls, and what you take on by leaving a platform.
Verified August 2026. Prices confirmed against vendor pages.
What you are actually escaping
Eventbrite charges organisers nothing for free events, which is worth saying because it makes the platform a perfectly reasonable choice for a community group running free meetups. Paid events carry the fees above, which you may absorb or pass to attendees. Passing them on is not free either; it raises your headline price against competitors and shows up at checkout where abandonment happens.
Three costs survive any move to WordPress and should be in every comparison. Payment processing is roughly 2.9% plus a fixed amount with Stripe or PayPal and is unavoidable wherever you sell. Your own time configuring, testing, and supporting the checkout is real, and platforms are absorbing it today. And discovery: a marketplace shows your event to people who were not looking for you, which is worth something on a public event and nothing on a members-only one.
What you escape is the per-ticket cut, which is the cost that scales with success and the reason the maths turns decisively at volume.
The 6 options compared
1. Event Tickets, the free plugin
The obvious starting point at over 90,000 active installations, handling RSVPs and paid tickets through its own Tickets Commerce layer with Stripe, PayPal and Paystack. Free to install, and the place the hidden number lives.
Tickets Commerce applies a 2% application fee on Stripe and Square, waived with a valid Event Tickets Plus licence. On £10,000 of ticket sales that is £200 a year on top of payment processing, and it is charged whether you sell one ticket or a thousand. It is not hidden exactly, but it sits in documentation rather than on the plugin page, and it inverts the usual free-versus-paid calculation: past a certain volume the licence is cheaper than the free version. Work out your expected annual sales and multiply by 2% before assuming free is free.
- Cost: Free, plus a 2% Tickets Commerce application fee
- Commission: 2% via Stripe and Square unless you hold a Plus licence
- Best for: RSVPs, free events, and low ticket volumes
- Watch out for: The 2% makes the paid licence cheaper above ~£13,000 of sales
2. Tickera
The cleanest zero-commission position in the category, stated without qualification: Tickera takes nothing from any ticket sale on any plan. Standard is $149 a year, renewing at $99; the Bundle is $199 a year, renewing at $149, and includes all 25 premium add-ons; a lifetime licence is $399 once.
Two structural details make it unusually good value. All plans cover unlimited sites, which is close to unheard of here and turns the lifetime licence into a serious proposition for anyone running events for more than one organisation. And the Bundle includes seating charts, a WooCommerce bridge and custom forms rather than selling them separately, which is where competitors recover the difference. Nineteen payment gateways, PDF tickets, and free mobile check-in apps come with the core plugin. Only your payment processor’s fees apply.
- Cost: $149/yr Standard, $199/yr Bundle, $399 lifetime
- Commission: Zero, explicitly, on every plan
- Best for: Serious ticket volume, and anyone with several sites
- Watch out for: First-year price is higher than the renewal
3. FooEvents
Built on WooCommerce, which is the deciding factor: if you already run a store, tickets become products and everything you know about orders, coupons, taxes and reporting applies unchanged. Bundles run Basic at $169 a year, Bookings at $199, Premium at $249, and Point of Sale at $399, with no per-ticket commission.
The licence is per domain, which is the term to note against Tickera’s unlimited sites and matters most to agencies and multi-venue operators. The Point of Sale bundle is the outlier worth understanding: it exists for selling at the door, and if you run events where a meaningful share of tickets are bought on the night, that capability is worth more than the price difference. A 14-day money-back guarantee applies.
- Cost: $169 Basic, $249 Premium, $399 Point of Sale, a year
- Commission: None
- Best for: Existing WooCommerce stores, and door sales
- Watch out for: One licence per domain
4. The Events Calendar paid tiers
The commercial packages from the same team as the free Event Tickets plugin, now sold as Essentials at $259 a year, Pro at $399, and Elite at $599. Pro is the tier that explicitly removes ticket commission fees; Elite adds email marketing and custom seating maps.
These are the most expensive options here and the most complete calendar-plus-ticketing suites, which is the trade. If your site is fundamentally an events calendar, with recurring listings, venues, organisers and filtering, and ticketing is one function within that, this is the ecosystem built for it. If you simply sell tickets to a handful of events a year, you are paying for a calendar. Note that the 2% fee on the free plugin means the step from free to paid is smaller in real terms than the headline price suggests once your sales are substantial.
- Cost: $259 Essentials, $399 Pro, $599 Elite, a year
- Commission: Removed from Pro upwards
- Best for: Sites that are genuinely event calendars
- Watch out for: Expensive if you only need ticketing
5. WP Event Manager
A free core plugin on WordPress.org with paid bundles from $99 a year for a single site, scaling through 3, 5, 10 and unlimited site licences. The cheapest paid entry point in this comparison by a clear margin.
Its model is modular, with bundles collecting twenty to thirty add-ons around event management, professional features, or virtual events. That suits an organisation whose requirements are broad but shallow, listings, registrations, calendars, basic selling, rather than deep in any one area. At $99 it is worth evaluating before spending two or three times as much elsewhere, with the caveat that you should verify your specific payment and ticketing requirements are in the bundle you are pricing rather than in the next one up.
- Cost: Free core; bundles from $99 a year, single site
- Commission: None
- Best for: Broad requirements on a modest budget
- Watch out for: Confirm which bundle holds the feature you need
6. Staying on Eventbrite
The option this category exists to avoid, and the right answer more often than the framing admits. There are no fees for free events, no subscription, and nothing to configure, maintain, or fix at ten at night before a sale opens.
Run the numbers honestly. At 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket and 2.9% per order, a community group selling 200 tickets at £15 pays roughly £400 a year, which is less than a Tickera Bundle plus the hours to run it. The equation turns when volume rises or ticket prices do, because platform fees scale and a licence does not. It turns further if you value owning your attendee data, which platforms hold and you cannot fully export. Discovery is the counterweight: if a real share of your audience finds you through the marketplace, leaving costs you sales that no fee saving replaces.
- Cost: 3.7% + $1.79 per ticket, 2.9% per order; free events free
- Commission: Yes, and it scales with your success
- Best for: Free events, low volume, and audiences who find you there
- Watch out for: You do not own the attendee relationship
Comparison table
| Option | Annual cost | Commission | Sites | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Event Tickets free | $0 | 2% application fee | Unlimited | RSVPs and low volume |
| Tickera | $149, or $199 Bundle | Zero | Unlimited | Volume and multi-site |
| FooEvents | $169 to $399 | None | Per domain | WooCommerce stores |
| The Events Calendar | $259 to $599 | None from Pro up | Tier-dependent | Full calendar sites |
| WP Event Manager | From $99 | None | 1 to unlimited | Broad, modest budget |
| Eventbrite | $0 subscription | 3.7% + $1.79/ticket | Not applicable | Free and small events |
Where the break-even sits
Take a £20 ticket. On Eventbrite the service fee is 3.7% plus a fixed $1.79, so roughly £2.10 per ticket, before the 2.9% processing that you would pay anywhere. Against a $149 Tickera licence at about £120, the licence pays for itself at fewer than 60 tickets a year.
That number moves in ways worth understanding rather than memorising:
- Cheap tickets favour self-hosting sooner. The fixed $1.79 per ticket is brutal on a £5 ticket, where it is over a third of the price, and trivial on a £200 one.
- Expensive tickets favour it too, via the percentage. At £200 the 3.7% alone is £7.40 a ticket, so a hundred tickets funds any licence here twice over.
- Free events tilt the other way entirely. Eventbrite charges nothing, so unless you want the data or the branding there is no fee to escape.
- The 2% on Event Tickets free crosses over around £13,000 of annual sales, at which point a $259 licence costs less than the fee it removes.
What the arithmetic omits is your time. Budget a day for setup and testing, and accept that you now own the checkout on the night tickets go on sale. That is a real cost, it is paid in stress rather than money, and it is the reason a low-volume organiser is often right to stay put.
Related guides
Frequently asked questions
Does zero commission mean no fees at all?
No. Payment processing, typically around 2.9% plus a fixed amount with Stripe or PayPal, applies wherever you sell. Zero commission means the plugin vendor takes nothing on top.
Is the free Event Tickets plugin really free?
To install, yes. Selling through Tickets Commerce carries a 2% application fee on Stripe and Square unless you hold an Event Tickets Plus licence, which waives it. For RSVPs and free events there is nothing to pay.
Can I still check people in at the door?
Yes. Tickera includes free mobile check-in apps with the core plugin, and the other paid options offer scanning in some form. Test it on your actual venue’s connectivity before the day, since a door queue is a poor place to discover the signal is weak.
What happens if my site goes down during a sale?
You lose sales, and this is the genuine risk of self-hosting. A ticket release concentrates traffic into a few minutes. Check your hosting can take it, and consider a caching layer that does not break the checkout.
Which is best for multiple venues or clients?
Tickera, on unlimited sites across all plans, or its $399 lifetime licence. FooEvents licenses per domain, and The Events Calendar’s tiers vary, so count your sites before comparing headline prices.
Do I lose discovery by leaving a marketplace?
Some, and you can measure it. Check where your existing attendees came from before deciding. For a members’ organisation or a known venue the answer is usually almost none; for a first-time public event it can be most of them.
The verdict
For serious ticket volume: Tickera, at $149 a year or $399 for life, with genuinely zero commission and unlimited sites. It is the clearest statement of the thing this category promises.
If you already run WooCommerce: FooEvents from $169, so tickets become products and your existing orders, coupons and tax setup carry over untouched.
If your site is really a calendar: The Events Calendar Pro at $399, which removes ticket commission and gives you the listings infrastructure the cheaper options do not.
And if you run free events or sell fewer than sixty tickets a year: stay on Eventbrite. There are no fees on free events, nothing to maintain, and the discovery is worth something. Move when the fees exceed a licence, not before, and check the 2% on Tickets Commerce before assuming the free plugin is the cheap route.
