Events Manager vs Time.ly vs Eventin: Battle among The Best Event Plugins for WordPress in 2023
Dibya Kanti Basak
44 minutes read 
Eventin, Events Manager, Time.ly – All of these plugins are well known in the WordPress industry because of their extraordinary service. But which one of these is the best event plugin for WordPress in 2023? That is what we will find out today.
We will check out the overviews of each of these plugins, then compare them based on the comparison metrics listed down, and finally choose which one is the champion.
Comparison Metrics for Choosing The Best Event Plugins for WordPress
It’s not an everyday task to choose the best event plugins for WordPress. In order to make this comparison clear for you, We have chosen six important metrics by which we will filter down the best plugin for you.
The metrics are –
- Features
- Integrations
- Price
- Beginner Friendliness,
- User Interface and User Experience,
- Simplicity of Usage
With these metrics, it will be easier to round up the results and pick the winner among these three plugins and you will have a clear understanding of your needs and choose the right one for you.
Plugin Overviews
Before we dive into the head-to-head comparison, let’s recall a little bit about what these plugins offer and what might convince someone to get these plugins for them.
Events Manager
Events Manager is one of the OGs in event management WordPress plugins. It is a feature-packed WordPress events management plugin that will give you a lot of flexibility from the backend of your website.
The free version of this plugin has almost all the basic features that you would need to start your event management business. You can create events, add event tags & categories, add locations, create recurring events, and manage bookings.
Essential Events Manager Features to Streamline Your Operations
- Custom post types
- Recurring Events
- Frontend submission and management
- Recurring event limits
- Create and edit locations
- Google maps integration
- BuddyPress integration
- PayPal, Stripe, and WooCommerce payment system
- Zoom Meeting/Webinar Integration
Price: Pro version starts from $89
Time.ly
Another very easy-to-use WordPress event manager plugin here is Time.ly. Standing as an all-in-one event solution, it is compatible with all WordPress themes out of the box, so you won’t run into any problems using it.
It is also a very scalable and lightweight plugin, even though Timely offers a combo of modern design with a range of powerful features. It contains just enough features to get you started on your job, without being overly feature-rich. Time.ly is a very simple user interface and is excellent for beginners. Thus, you won’t experience any problems at first.
The popular features of Timely to streamline your events:
- Eye-catchy & embeddable online event calendar for events.
- Easy to create 3 different types of events, schedule and publish them anytime with recurring events option.
- Responsive and customizable themes, colors & fonts to design your calendar to showcase the audience.
- Import and export events with ICS / CSV files.
- Integrate all the events with iCal, Outlook and Google Calendars.
- Media library to support media upload.
- Create color-coded events based on category.
- Add event images and fill up all the necessary event details including text, images, videos, links, tables etc.
- Added social share buttons on every event calendar.
- Duplicate events and Filter events based on tags, organizers, venues etc.
- 7+ multi-language support and Auto Time zone detection.
- SEO-optimized events and wp calendar.
Price: It’s Free, and the Premium Plans require booking a meeting.
Eventin
Eventin is a WordPress-based Event Manager, Event Calendar, RSVP, and Event Tickets plugin. Eventin aims to make event management as smooth as possible and has lots of features to make that happen.
Having 18 integrations, 10+ multi-event widgets, 5+ speaker widgets, 3+ single-event widgets, 7+ Elementor widgets, 4 modules, and 2 addons, this event plugin for WordPress is an all-in-one solution for you.
You can create events from frontend and backend, sell tickets, verify attendees, and provide a certificate to the attendees for their encouragement. You can also add schema markup to enhance the reachability of your events.
Essential Eventin Features to Streamline Your Operations
- Multi-event and Single Event Page
- Recurring Events
- Frontend Event Submission
- RSVP
- Zoom Integration for Arranging Virtual and Hybrid Events
- QR Code for attendee ticket verification
- Event schema markup for Google Rich Results
- Multi-Vendor Marketplace
- PDF Certificate builder
- Attendee & RSVP Analytics
- Shortcodes
- Manual attendee registration
- BuddyBoss Integration for building online community
- Stripe and WooCommerce Payment
Price: Pro Starts from $69
Events Manager vs Time.ly vs Eventin: Head-to-Head Comparison
Here we’ll check how each of these WordPress event plugins performs based on our selected comparison metrics.
Beginner Friendliness
Our first metric or category was beginner friendliness. Here, we will check how much easy it is for a newcomer to get familiar with all the basic features of each of these plugins. The winner will be picked depending on the simplicity of use of these plugins.
Events Manager
Events Manager is the kind of plugin that can be easily used and maintained even by the person who is technically challenged. No matter what level of technical knowledge you have, you can use this plugin right from the get-go. The plugin is that simple!
Aside from the naming, a new WordPress user will find it very easy to navigate through the plugin.
Time.ly
After observing the initial setup process, you can pretty much use most of the basic functionalities of this plugin, for free. You can easily create events with all the event details and use color code to categorize each of your events.
That makes things look easy from the start, and the product journey becomes very smooth.
Eventin
Eventin is very beginner-friendly because of its trendy and self-explanatory UI/UX. All the important features are categorized as per the user’s need. A beginner user can easily navigate through those features and in a short time can get a good idea of what each of those features is for.
The shortcode builder is right there in the left sidebar. So if a beginner WordPress user doesn’t know how to operate through all the features, he/she can easily generate a shortcode and start the work.
Winner: Time.ly
User Interface and User Experience
In this section, we will check how good the UI and UX are for each of these plugins. We will check how much convenience each of these plugins offers and how easy it is to operate with those convenient features.
Events Manager
The Events Manager’s UI is a little bit generic. By generic, I mean that the UI is just like a regular WordPress plugin. Although the UI isn’t that special, the UX is very good because of the simplicity of the UI.
The user can do almost everything the plugin offers by navigating through the left sidebar. Users might get a little bit overwhelmed by seeing the Settings menu.
Although the options in the settings menu are categorized but are not organized.
Time.ly
Time.ly has a great UI that makes it easy to create and sort events faster. You can easily customize the themes and personalize your calendar on the WordPress website. Everything you need to make it easy is on the left navigation bar and users can access all the functionalities by navigating through that sidebar.
A good thing that they’ve done is that they have added links to their Help Center, FAQ section, and Video tutorials on the settings page.
Eventin
Eventin’s UI (User Interface) is quite intuitive. Each and every option and feature are put in place in such a way that a user won’t feel confused about what each of the options or features does.
The basic options are on the top bar where you can navigate among 4 options and the other features are at the left navigation bar. This makes it easier for the user to navigate through each feature of the plugin.
Both the frontend and backend are visually pleasing and a visually pleasing UI can make the user’s experience much more fun. Everything is shown nicely on the demo page if any user wants to see what the plugin will look like before purchase.
Winner: Eventin
Simplicity of Usage
This section is almost similar to the first section but here we will check how easy it is to learn the use of each of these plugins.
Events Manager
If there were ever an award for simplicity, the Events Manager would win that award. No extra gimmicky features whatsoever! You just simply go to the plugin dashboard and get started with your work.
Time.ly
Overall, time.ly is really easy to use. The user does not get any additional features. However, the issue lies in the fact that several crucial functions were maintained as premium add-ons to keep the free version too basic.
Eventin
Eventin has a lot of features. Although all of them are brought in nicely for the user to easily understand. But it would be easier for the user if they checked the documentation first. That will make the user experience better.
Winner: Events Manager
Features
We know that all of these plugins have their unique features and that is why we’ve chosen only those features which are essential for an event manager to run his/her events completely.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of all the three plugins’ features.
| Features | Events Manager | Time.ly | Eventin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multiple Event Template | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Event Tags | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Frontend Event Submission | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| QR Code & Scanner | No | Yes | Yes |
| Analytical Report | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-Vendor Marketplace | No | No | Yes |
| Recurring Event | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| RSVP | No | Yes | Yes |
| Event Schema Markup | No | Yes | Yes |
| Attendee Management | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile App | No | No | No |
| PDF Certificate Builder | No | No | Yes |
| Shortcodes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Importing Events Data | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Add-ons | 09 | 10 | 06 |
In this comparison table, we’ve listed a total of 16 features. Among those 15 features, Events Manager has 9 of them, time.ly has 11, and Eventin has 13 of them.
So, if you judge by the availability of features, Eventin wins this round.
Winner: Eventin
Integration
In the WordPress industry, features aren’t everything. Integrations can help customers run their operations in a very smooth and familiar way. For that reason, we’ve listed out 15 important and popular integrations and did a side-by-side comparison of the three plugins.
| Integration | Events Manager | Time.ly | Eventin |
|---|---|---|---|
| BuddyBoss | No | No | Yes |
| BuddyPress | Yes | No | No |
| Dokan | No | No | Yes |
| Zoom | Yes | Paid Add-on | Yes |
| Google Calendar | Yes | Paid Add-on | Yes |
| Google Meet | Yes | Paid Add-on | Yes |
| Google Map | Yes | Paid Add-on | Yes |
| Google Analytics | No | No | No |
| CRM Tools | No | No | Yes |
| Divi Builder | No | No | Yes |
| Bricks Builder | No | No | Yes |
| Oxygen Builder | No | No | Yes |
| Stripe | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| WooCommerce | Yes | No | Yes |
| Paypal | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Among the 15 integrations we’ve listed out here, Events Manager has 8 of them, time.ly doesn’t offer any of them included in the plugin, you have to get a separate paid add-on for 4 of them, and Eventin has 12 of the integrations.
So, judging by the numbers, again, Eventin is the winner for this stage.
Winner: Eventin
Price
No matter how many features or integrations a plugin has, if it can not fit your budget, there’s no use for it. So in this round, we’ll look at the pricing range of each of these plugins.
Events Manager
| Events Manager Pro – 1 Site | $89 |
| Events Manager Pro – 3 Sites | $150 |
| Events Manager Pro – 5 Sites | $200 |
| Events Manager Pro – 10 Sites | $350 |
| Events Manager Pro – Unlimited Sites | $599 |
Time.ly
| Time.ly Starter | $99/year |
| Time.ly Pro | $299/year |
| Time.ly Ultimate | $599/year |
Eventin
| Plan Type | Standard | Premium | Agency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yearly | $89 | $169 | $289 |
| Lifetime | $169 | $289 | $519 |
As we can see here, among the starter packs of these plugins, Eventin is the cheapest. So, if you’re on a tight budget or looking for a solution that can be economical for you, Eventin has got you covered.
Winner: Eventin
Final Verdict
If we look at the overall score now, we’ll see that Eventin has won in three categories and both Events Manager and Time.ly won 1 category each. From this score, we can say that The best event plugin for WordPress among these three plugins is Eventin!
This does not mean that the other two are bad plugins. Both Events Manager and Time.ly are great event management plugins. Actually most of the time it all depends on the user. If the user feels comfortable with any other plugin, then to that user, that plugin is the best.
The Winner: Eventin! 🎉
Conclusion
If we sum up the whole blog, the gist is, that Eventin will give you a better user experience with more features at a lesser price than the other two plugins, Events Manager is great if you like a simple experience, and Time.ly can be a great choice for you if you are willing to pay for extra add-ons.
If you feel that this comparison should be done on more metrics, then please share those in the comment section and let us hear your thoughts.
If you think that this blog is useful or like it very much, please share it on your favorite social media platform and let your friends know about these great plugins.
