Event Espresso vs. Ninja Forms for Event Registration

Event Espresso is a WordPress ticketing and event registration plugin that lets you sell tickets for various types of events, collect online payments, offer discount codes to attendees, and create custom registration forms and emails.

Here’s a look at some of the standout features on offer with Event Espresso:

• It’s an easy-to-use online event registration and ticketing plugin.
• It allows you to sell multiple ticket types.
• You can register multiple attendees through group registrations and collect custom information for each attendee.
• It enables you to sell tickets for multiple dates and times for the same event.

Put simply, Event Espresso is a powerful online event registration and ticketing manager solution that helps event organizers manage event registration and attendees all from within your WordPress website. It’s an ideal tool for organizing classes, fundraisers, sporting events, workshops, conferences, training, non-profit, networking, and social events.

Ninja Forms is a WordPress form builder plugin that lets you create almost any type of form ranging from simple contact forms to file uploads, event registrations, and payments.

Here are some of the main features on offer with Ninja Forms:

• Build an unlimited number of forms, fields, actions, submissions, and emails.
• You can manage, edit, and export user-submitted forms directly from the WordPress dashboard.
• Dedicated fields for emails, dates, phone numbers, addresses, and more.

Ninja Forms is the go-to solution for anyone looking to build robust forms in WordPress. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the plugin is primarily used to build advanced contact forms with features like conditional logic. Conditional logic allows you to automatically present specific options to the user based on their input.

In this section, we’ll compare and contrast two popular event registration form solutions – Event Espresso and Ninja Forms – to help you decide which option is right for your event.

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the form registration features on offer with Event Espresso and Ninja Forms.

Event Espresso

As an event organizer, you need to collect information from your registrants so you can deliver tailored experiences. Event Espresso allows you gather all the data you need using customizable event registration forms on your event site.

With the registration form available in Event Espresso you can add specific questions and question groups to your event registration forms such as waiver acknowledgment, questions for multiple attendees, and attendee preferences (e.g. meals, allergens, etc…).

In addition to this, Event Espresso lets you change the question order via its drag-and-drop functionality.

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms lets you build almost any type of form using its pre-built templates or custom forms via a simple drag-and-drop form creator.

Here are the form templates on offer with Ninja Forms: 

• Blank forms
• Collect feedback forms
• Contact forms
• Create a post forms
• Edit user profile forms 
• Delete data request forms

You can also build forms from scratch and use various add-ons for collecting payments, building mailing lists, increasing form conversions, or connecting with different productivity tools. Ninja Forms gives you tons of field options to choose from such as email, phone, HTML, single text, address, submit, and radio button list.

Let’s take a look at how Event Espresso and Ninja Forms handle information collection.

Event Espresso

As an event manager, you gather personal information from registrants to complete their online registration process or sell tickets. You may also do this to offer a more personalized experience to your event attendees.

However, it’s your responsibility to keep their personal information secure. This is especially important if you collect data from EU residents because you’ll have to comply with GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] guidelines.

With Event Espresso, you get full control over your registrant’s data as well as GDPR compliance right out of the box. Some of GDPR compliance features on offer with Event Espresso include export or erasure of attendee’s personal information and a privacy policy page.

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms comes with a number of tools that help you make GDPR compliance simpler with your event forms. 

You can mark fields as ‘personally identifiable information’ in your event form builder. Ninja Forms also comes with a Delete Data Request action that fulfills GDPR’s The Right to Be Forgotten condition.

Event attendees will be able to request an export of their personal data using Ninja Forms’ Export Data Request form template. In addition to this, you can disable the storage of personal data or set it to expire to delete submitted data after a specific amount of time.

Let’s see how the two event registration form solutions stack up against one another based on their ticket-selling features.

Event Espresso

With Event Espresso you can create a variety of ticket options to help you maximize event attendance and collect registration fees with a variety of different payment gateway options like Stripe, PayPal and more. These ticket options include prices, ticket quantity limits, datetimes, taxable, discounts, and much more. This allows attendees to purchase tickets that best fit their needs and budget.

You can control the configuration of various options for each ticket such as price, ticket name, maximum and minimum quantity, and event dates and times.

Event Espresso displays the status of each ticket on the event details page. The available statuses include “Available”, “Not Available”, “Sold Out”, “Goes on Sale [date]”, and “Expired”.

In addition to this, Event Espresso gives you full control over how tickets are sold. It also offers multiple payment gateway options right out of the box including PayPal Express and Authorize.net; plus more than fifteen other payment integrations to choose from.  

Ninja Forms

If you want to sell tickets, you can use the Collect Payment action or the PayPal Express action in Ninja Forms. The plugin gives you three different options to collect payments i.e. fixed amount, calculation, and field.

In addition to this, it supports four payment gateways namely Recurly, Elavon, PayPal Express, and Stripe.

Let’s take a look at the attendee management features on offer with Event Espresso and Ninja Forms.

Event Espresso

Event Espresso’s Attendee Manager gives you complete control of your attendee details, lets you view attendee records and registrations, and their payment status. It also enables you to export attendee lists to CSV for generating reports.

You’ll also be able to interact with attendees individually (or collectively) and send them customizable payment reminders and receipts.

As an event manager, you need to stay informed about the number of event registrants and how much money you’ve collected. Event Espresso’s Transaction Reporting feature gives you a quick view of all of your transactions, helping you measure the success of your events with the total number of registrations and total revenue collected.

Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms lets you view and manage the information submitted by your event registrants from within your WordPress dashboard.

You can choose the number of submissions you want to see at once and the fields you’d like to display in the preview for each form. The filtering feature narrows down your search based on the date as well as a search query. In addition to this, you can delete submissions and export submissions individually or in bulk.

Ninja Forms also supports integration with a number of CRMs including Capsule, Insightly, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, OnePage, Zoho, Highrise, and PipelineDeals.

Here’s how Event Espresso and Ninja Forms compare in terms of pricing plans.

Event Espresso

Premium support license costs $79.95

• One website
• No ticketing fees or commissions
• Create unlimited events
• Set up multiple ticket types

Developer support license costs $299.95

• 5 websites
• Premium licenses features
• 35+ add-ons available for purchase

Everything support license costs $299.95

• One website
• Includes access to all of the add-on features [Discount and Promo codes Waitlists, Calendar display, multiple payment options, and more]

Ninja Forms

Personal version costs $99 per year

• One site
• Essential tools for form building
• Payment gateway (PayPal Express)
• Email marketing

Agency version costs $499 per year

• Everything in Personal version
• Unlimited sites
• CRM integrations
• Advanced analytics
• SMS and Slack notifications

Professional version costs $199 per year

• Everything in Personal version
• 20 sites
• Zapier and Webhook integrations
• Payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal Express, and Recurly)

A La Carte version costs $29-$199 per year

• 1-20 sites
• Priority support
• Features of your choice including layout and styles
• File uploads
• CRM and email marketing integrations

Event registration form solutions like Event Espresso and Ninja Forms help you collect registration information from attendees in an effective and GDPR-compliant way.

To recap:

• If you’re looking for an event-focused – event registration management solution , we recommend going with Event Espresso.
• If you’re looking for a more basic way to collect user data for events, Ninja Forms is definitely worth considering.

Between Event Espresso and Ninja Forms, which event registration form plugin are you leaning towards and why? Let us know by commenting below.