There is a version of the event tech stack article that lists forty tools in nine categories and helps nobody. This is not that. An event stack has seven layers, the same seven whether you run a 200-person board briefing or a 12,000-delegate congress, and the interesting question is not which vendor sits in each box. It is what happens between the boxes.
Start from the one number that frames the whole decision. Forrester's 2024 B2B Event Trends Survey found that around a quarter of large enterprises use six or more B2B event technology solutions, spending over $250,000 per annum in the process.1 That is not a criticism of those teams. It is what happens when you solve seven problems one purchase order at a time, which is how almost every stack gets built.
The seven layers, and what each one does
Here is the whole stack. You do not get to skip a layer; you only get to choose whether you bought software for it or whether someone on your team is doing it by hand.
Two things are worth noticing about that list. The first is that layer one feeds all six others. The registration record is the atom of the whole event: the badge prints from it, the email sends to it, the check-in scan matches against it, the report counts it. Every other layer is downstream of the attendee record, which is why the decision about where registration lives is the decision that constrains everything else.
The second is that only two of the seven layers are visible to your attendees as software. They see the website and, if you have one, the app. The other five are infrastructure. That asymmetry is why stacks drift: the layers people advocate for in meetings are the visible ones, while the layers that determine whether the event actually works get bought last and cheapest.
What the market charges
Published 2026 pricing, where it exists. It mostly does not, which is itself the finding.
At the accessible end, Eventbrite lists $15 per month, then takes a 3.7% plus $1.79 service fee on every paid ticket, on top of 2.9% payment processing.3 That is a rounding error as a subscription and a serious number at volume, which is the trade we unpacked in detail in our piece on what event registration software really costs.
In the middle, Bizzabo publishes a genuine floor: $499 per user per month, billed annually, with a three-user minimum, giving a $17,999 per year starting point for unlimited events and registrations.3
Above that, pricing disappears. Cvent, Splash and Whova all quote custom, with published industry estimates putting Cvent at roughly $50,000 to $500,000 or more per year, Splash at $25,000 to $200,000 or more, and Whova at $2,000 to $15,000 or more per event, or $15,000 to $80,000 or more annually across multiple events.3 Treat those as ranges from a pricing aggregator rather than quotes, because that is exactly what they are. The reason they are ranges is that nobody in that tier will tell you a number before a call.
Then there are the per-layer licences that hide inside operational budgets. Badging is the clearest example: published rental breakdowns for a self-run badge printing kiosk put the badging software licence at roughly $1,000 per event, billed again every event, for the work of connecting your own registration data to a printer.5 We took that apart properly in on-site badge printing without an agency. The pattern generalises: a layer that should be a feature of the platform gets sold as a product, priced per event, forever.
The eighth layer nobody quotes for
Here is where the money actually goes, and it is not in any of the seven boxes.
Forrester found that only one in five enterprises has integrated its primary B2B event technology platform with its wider marketing technology stack.1 Sit with that for a second. These are organisations spending a quarter of a million dollars a year on event software, and four out of five of them have not connected it to the system that is supposed to receive the leads. The event runs. The data lands nowhere.
The downstream symptom shows up in the reporting layer. Only 4% of event leaders say pulling event data is easy, and 56% cite post-event ROI data as their single biggest frustration.2 Meanwhile 40% of organisers still report struggling to prove event ROI at all, which is at least an improvement on the 70% reported a year earlier.2 Those numbers are not a measurement problem. They are a plumbing problem wearing a measurement problem's clothes. You cannot report across seven systems that never agreed on what an attendee is.
There is a nice tension in the industry data on this point. Splash's Events Outlook found that 68% of marketers say they use an event platform that integrates with the rest of their tech stack, including their CRM.4 Forrester counts one in five who actually did it. Both can be true: "integrates with" is a capability on a feature list, and integration is a project somebody has to finish. The gap between those two numbers is the eighth layer.
What makes the seams expensive is that they are not a one-time cost. Every layer you add multiplies the joins that have to keep working through vendor API changes, contract renewals, staff turnover and the week before your event. And the seams fail quietly. Nobody notices a broken sync until the badge prints the wrong company name, or the sponsor asks which of their prospects attended the breakout and the honest answer is that the app and the check-in system disagree.
When a stitched stack is the right answer
It would be convenient for us to argue that consolidation always wins. It does not, and you should be suspicious of anyone selling a platform who says otherwise.
Assemble best-of-breed tools when one layer carries unusual weight. Academic conferences with abstract submission and peer review, broadcast-grade virtual production, complex exhibitor and sponsorship management: these are deep specialisms, and a generalist platform's version of them is usually a checkbox rather than a product. If one layer is your event, buy the best thing for that layer and connect the rest to it.
Stitching also wins in two ordinary situations. If you already have an enterprise contract with real years left on it, the exit cost dominates the analysis and the answer is to integrate what you have. And for a genuine one-off, a single conference with no sequel, integration work you never have to repeat is cheaper than migrating a platform you will not use again.
The case for consolidating is narrower than the marketing suggests, but it is sharp: it applies when your events repeat, when the same attendee record has to move through all seven layers, and when nobody on your team has "owns the integrations" in their job description. That last condition is the one that decides most real cases. Forrester's own recommendation off the back of its survey was that leaders should investigate consolidation opportunities as a priority.1 Coming from a firm with no platform to sell, that is worth more than any vendor's version of the same sentence.
How to decide, in four questions
Skip the feature matrix. Four questions separate the two answers faster.
One: how often do your events repeat? Integration cost is paid once and amortised across every event that follows. One event a year, stitching is fine. One a month, every seam is a recurring tax.
Two: name the person who owns the joins. Not the vendor. The person. If you cannot name them, you do not have an integrated stack; you have a set of tools and a hope. This is the question that changes the most minds in the room.
Three: how long does it take you to answer a sponsor's question? "Which of our twelve invited prospects attended the Thursday breakout, and did they open the follow-up?" If the answer is three exports and an afternoon, your reporting layer is a spreadsheet regardless of what you paid for it.
Four: where does the attendee record legally live? Seven tools means seven copies of personal data, seven processors, seven deletion obligations and seven breach surfaces. Under India's DPDP Act that is not a filing detail, it is a compliance position you have to be able to describe. We wrote the full checklist in our DPDP compliance guide for event organizers, and consolidation makes almost every line of it shorter.
None of those four questions is about features, because features are not where stacks fail. Stacks fail at the joins, at three in the afternoon on event day, when two systems that were each working perfectly turn out to disagree.
Where Aurentex sits
Our answer to the seven layers is to sell them as one thing. Aurentex runs all seven on a single platform, fourteen modules, on your own domain and branding: registration, check-in and team access always included, then badge designer, invitations, email builder and tracking, event website, payments, floor plan and seating, access control, analytics and offline check-in as you need them. The attendee record is created once and every layer reads from it, so the seams we spent this article costing do not exist to be maintained.
Two specifics, since general claims are cheap. Payments run through your own gateway and we take 0% of your ticket revenue, so the ticketing layer does not scale its price against your success. And badging is a module, not a per-event licence, so the roughly $1,000-per-event software line in the rental breakdowns above5 is simply not a thing you pay us.
Where we are not the answer: if one layer is a deep specialism that defines your event, a generalist platform including ours will feel thin there, and you should buy the specialist. We would rather tell you that now than in month three. If you want to compare the two paths properly rather than take our word for it, our build versus buy analysis lays out the arithmetic without the sales pitch, and your first event on Aurentex is free, so you can run the four questions above against a real event before spending anything.
Common questions
What is an event tech stack?
The set of software an event runs on: registration and ticketing, event website, communications, check-in and badging, attendee app, floor plan and seating, and analytics, with payments underneath. You do not get to skip a layer. If you have not bought one, somebody on your team is doing that job in a spreadsheet.
How many tools do event teams actually use?
Forrester's 2024 survey found around a quarter of large enterprises use six or more event technology solutions, at over $250,000 a year.1 Smaller teams usually run three to five, but the structure of the problem does not change with scale, only the invoice does.
How much should an event tech stack cost per year?
On 2026 figures the spread runs from $15 a month plus per-ticket fees at the accessible end, through a $17,999 annual floor for a mid-market platform, to estimated ranges of $50,000 to $500,000 or more for enterprise suites.3 Budget the integration work as a real line item rather than an afterthought; on the evidence above it is the part most teams underestimate.
Is an all-in-one platform better than best-of-breed tools?
Only sometimes, and the test is honest: do your layers exchange data constantly, or barely at all? Constant exchange plus repeating events plus nobody owning the integrations favours consolidation. A single deep specialism, a live enterprise contract, or a genuine one-off favours best-of-breed.