Event Ticketing Platforms Compared: Eventbrite vs Ticketmaster vs DICE vs Tixr vs Universe

Event ticketing platforms decide, before a single ticket is sold, how much of the face value an organiser keeps, who carries the fee, how fast the cash arrives and whether the platform brings an audience or just a checkout. This guide from the Kurums Startup team compares Eventbrite, Ticketmaster (including its self-service brand Universe), DICE, Tixr and Ticket Tailor on what each one does, who it suits and what it costs as published in October 2026. It belongs to the Arts & Creative Economy hub, and pairs with our analysis of ticketing economics, dynamic pricing and resale and our guide to how music festivals make money.

What does Eventbrite offer and what does it cost?

Eventbrite is the largest self-service ticketing marketplace. Organisers publish free events at no cost and pay 3.7% + $1.79 per paid ticket plus a 2.9% payment-processing fee per order, which buyers carry by default. Its value is reach: 258 million tickets issued in 2025.

The product covers event pages, ticket types, discount codes, embedded checkout, check-in apps, reporting and an attendee marketplace. According to Eventbrite’s FY2025 Form 10-K, the company hosted nearly 4.6 million free and paid events in 2025, processed more than $3.0 billion in gross ticket sales and booked net revenue of $291.8 million, down from $325.1 million in 2024. The same filing records a net loss of $10.5 million and an accumulated deficit of $841.5 million, which explains the strategic flip-flop organisers lived through: a 2023 move to charge creators upfront fees, reversed in September 2024 when Eventbrite went back to a free-to-publish model with no organiser subscription. Its paid plans today are marketing add-ons; Eventbrite Pro email marketing starts at $15 a month for up to 10,000 emails a day, and Eventbrite Ads are sold separately in selected markets.

Who it suits: workshops, conferences, comedy nights, food events, community gatherings and any organiser without a mailing list who needs the marketplace to find buyers. Pricing plans are available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland; elsewhere the fee schedule differs by country and Eventbrite publishes local tables. Limits: the per-ticket fee is proportionally heavy on cheap tickets (on a $10 ticket the $1.79 fixed component alone is 17.9%), discovery is strongest in large English-speaking cities, and organisers can absorb the fee but cannot negotiate it below the published rate unless they are large enough to reach a sales team.

For Turkish organisers, Eventbrite’s published plans do not cover Türkiye, and the local market is dominated by Biletix, which Live Nation acquired in 2006 and now runs as its Ticketmaster operation in the country, alongside Biletinial and Passo. Cross-border organisers selling to Turkish audiences usually pick a platform that settles in euros or dollars and absorb the lira conversion themselves.

How do Ticketmaster and Universe differ?

Ticketmaster is the enterprise platform inside Live Nation and prices every contract individually; Universe is its self-service brand for smaller organisers with a published 2% + $0.59 per ticket on Starter and Standard plans and custom pricing on Pro. Both are free for free events.

The scale gap with everyone else is the story. Live Nation’s full-year 2025 results report $25.2 billion of revenue, $3.08 billion of it from the ticketing segment, and 346 million fee-bearing tickets sold across concerts, sport, theatre and family entertainment, up 2% on 2024. Ticketmaster’s enterprise business is sold to venues, teams and promoters on multi-year exclusive contracts; the organiser-side fee, the consumer service fee and the rebate the venue receives are all negotiated, and none of it is published. What you get for that is the only system routinely stress-tested by on-sales of 100,000+ seats in a minute, verified-fan queues, primary-plus-resale in one basket and integrated venue access control. Since 2023 Ticketmaster has also moved most US listings to upfront all-in pricing, a change pushed by regulators and now expected by fans.

Universe, acquired by Ticketmaster in 2015 along with the festival ticketer Front Gate, is the on-ramp. It gives small organisers event pages, embedded checkout, timed entry, Stripe integration or Universe Payments, and a path into Ticketmaster’s distribution when they grow. Its pricing page lists 2% + $0.59 per ticket for the Starter and Standard tiers and excludes VAT and processing fees; if you use Universe Payments the processing is bundled, and if you connect your own Stripe account Stripe charges you directly. Registered charities can request special pricing. Limits: fee amounts vary by currency and location, the published cap wording on the pricing page is incomplete, and the Pro tier is quote-only, so anyone above hobby scale ends up in a sales conversation anyway.

What makes DICE different and what does it charge?

DICE is a mobile-first, music-led ticketing app that shows fans one all-in price, locks tickets to the buyer’s account to kill scalping, and runs a waiting list that resells returned tickets at face value. Under its published US self sign-up terms it charges a 13% service fee on face value.

Founded in London in 2014 by Phil Hutcheon, DICE raised $122 million from SoftBank Vision Fund, Tony Fadell and Xavier Niel in 2021 at a reported $400 million valuation, then another $65 million in 2023. It sold its media arm Boiler Room to Superstruct in January 2025 and, in June 2025, was acquired for an undisclosed sum by the Madrid-founded experiences platform Fever, days after reports that it had filed notice of intent to appoint administrators. Fever’s announcement states that DICE had more than 10 million monthly active fans, that ticket sales had more than doubled over the previous two years, and that it is live in the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy and Spain, working with Club Space in Miami, Sónar, Alexandra Palace and the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals.

The commercial model is unusually transparent for a music ticketer because the self sign-up terms are public. The vendor (organiser) pays DICE a 13% service fee on the face value of every paid ticket, reduced to 3% for tickets whose face value goes to a registered charity; box-office and door sales attract a 10% fee plus a 3% transaction fee on DICE terminals; free tickets carry no fee. DICE deducts its fees from sales proceeds, may hold back up to 5% of proceeds for six months as a chargeback allowance, and pays the organiser within five business days of the event, with advances available at its discretion. In practice most promoters set the fan price to include the fee, so a $40 face value becomes a $45.20 app price, and the organiser receives the $40. Larger venues negotiate caps, which the terms allow DICE to raise by up to 5% a year. Limits: eight markets only, no fee pass-through as a separate line (the all-in display is a feature, not an option), and tickets are transferable only between DICE accounts, which some corporate buyers dislike.

Who is Tixr for and why does it not publish prices?

Tixr is a Santa Monica-based commerce platform for festivals, venues, sports and brands that sells tickets, merchandise, passes and payment plans from one white-label checkout. Its fees are negotiated per client by event type, volume and service tier, and no public price list exists.

Founded by Robert Davari, Tixr positioned itself as the anti-marketplace: the organiser owns the page, the data and the customer relationship, and the platform supplies the machinery. That machinery is what justifies the enterprise sales process. Published feature pages describe official in-platform resale with organiser-set price floors and ceilings, fan payment plans that take a deposit and schedule instalments without credit checks, Tixr Studio dynamic pricing that moves prices by inventory, time window or sales velocity, a referral rewards programme, a waitlist that can pre-authorise cards against sold-out inventory, automatic listing syndication to Spotify, Songkick, Bandsintown and JamBase, and a door app with offline scanning. It opened a London office in 2024 and in June 2025 signed an exclusive multi-year global deal with the Ibiza-born party brand Zamna, while Davari was named to Pollstar’s 2026 Impact 50.

Who it suits: a festival moving $5 million or more through the box office, a venue that wants merch and F&B in the same basket, or a brand running a ticketed activation that must look like its own site. Limits: with no self-serve public pricing, a first-time organiser cannot compare costs without a sales call; organisers can settle through their own Stripe account or Tixr-managed payouts but payout timing is not published; and because Tixr is not a consumer destination app, it brings no audience of its own.

Is Ticket Tailor the cheapest option?

For organisers with their own audience, usually yes. Ticket Tailor charges a flat fee per ticket with no percentage: from £0.22 per ticket on prepaid credits or £0.60 pay-as-you-go, plus VAT, plus the card processor’s fee. Free tickets are free up to 5,000 a year.

The London-based company sells ticket credits rather than taking a cut. The minimum prepaid purchase is 100 credits, credits never expire, and a seated ticket consumes two credits. Card processing runs through your own Stripe, Square or PayPal account; Stripe’s published rates on Ticket Tailor’s page are 1.5% + £0.20 in the UK, 2.9% + $0.30 in the US and 1.5% + €0.25 in the eurozone. Registered charities get 50% off Ticket Tailor’s fees, and B Corps, PTAs and not-for-profits are offered discounts. There is no marketplace, no app and no algorithmic discovery: the product is a fast box office, embeddable widgets, a check-in app, waitlists, discount codes, recurring events and seating charts, with email tools and integrations to Mailchimp, Zapier and others doing the audience work.

Worked example: a £20 ticket sold pay-as-you-go costs £0.60 to Ticket Tailor and £0.50 to Stripe, so £1.10 or 5.5% all-in. The same ticket on prepaid credits at the top bundle discount is roughly £0.72 or 3.6%. Eventbrite’s UK schedule for the same ticket would be well over twice that. Limits: the GBP-denominated price list means organisers elsewhere must check the site’s currency selector for local figures; the published free-ticket allowance is stated as 5,000 in one place and 2,000 in the FAQ, so confirm before relying on it; and no platform audience means a first event with no list will sell slowly.

How do the five compare on payouts, data and resale?

Payout speed, customer-data ownership and resale control separate the platforms more than headline fees. DICE pays within five business days; Ticket Tailor and Universe can settle instantly through your own Stripe; Eventbrite pays after the event; Tixr and Ticketmaster set terms in contract.

Data: Ticket Tailor, Tixr and Universe treat the buyer as your customer and export full records. Eventbrite shares attendee data with organisers but keeps the marketplace relationship and markets other events to the same buyers. DICE gives organisers a ticket-holders API with segmentation by genre, spend and geography, but the fan belongs to the app. Ticketmaster’s data access depends on the venue contract and on whether the artist team has been granted fan-data rights.

Resale: Ticketmaster integrates primary and verified resale and lets event owners cap resale prices in markets that permit it. Tixr offers official resale with floors and ceilings. DICE blocks secondary resale entirely and recycles returned tickets through its waiting list at face value. Eventbrite and Ticket Tailor have no official resale market, which suits conferences and community events where touting is not a problem. For an organiser whose fans face scalping, the choice collapses to three: Ticketmaster, Tixr or DICE.

Fee transparency to the fan is converging. Ticketmaster moved to all-in pricing in the US from 2023, DICE has always shown one price, and the US Federal Trade Commission’s 2025 junk-fee rule now requires live-event sellers to show the total price upfront. Eventbrite and Universe comply by displaying fees before checkout; the practical difference is whether the organiser or the buyer is seen to pay.

Which one should you pick?

Pick by whether you need an audience, a negotiated enterprise stack or a cheap box office. The scenarios below map typical organisers to the platform whose fee logic and feature set match, using October 2026 published terms.

• Workshop, meetup or conference with no mailing list: Eventbrite. The marketplace finds buyers, free events cost nothing, and the 3.7% + $1.79 fee is paid by attendees by default.
• Recurring community event, charity fundraiser or school production: Ticket Tailor. Flat pennies per ticket, 50% off for registered charities, 5,000 free tickets a year, your own Stripe account for instant settlement.
• Independent music venue or club promoter in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Milan or New York: DICE. The 13% all-in fee is higher than the self-serve alternatives but comes with 10 million monthly active fans, zero scalping and the waiting list that resells returns.
• Small organiser who expects to grow into Ticketmaster distribution: Universe. 2% + $0.59 per ticket now, with a path into the Ticketmaster ecosystem later.
• Festival, arena, stadium or touring production: Ticketmaster for the on-sale load, verified resale and venue contracts, or Tixr if you want a white-label commerce stack with payment plans and dynamic pricing and are prepared to negotiate fees.
• Brand activation or sponsor-funded event where the checkout must be invisible: Tixr, or Ticket Tailor with embedded widgets if the budget is small.
• Organiser in Türkiye or another market outside the published-plan countries: check Eventbrite’s country fee table, consider Universe or Ticket Tailor settling in euros or dollars, and compare with Biletix and Biletinial locally.

Frequently Asked Questions