Planning Pod alternative: event67 for the attendee side of the event
Two different systems of record, and this page argues for running both. Planning Pod is venue and event-planning software: booking calendars, banquet event orders, food and beverage, contracts, proposals and invoices. event67 is a branded conference companion app for iOS, Android and web with an organiser console behind it, charged per attendee who actually shows up. One of them manages the business of putting the event on; the other is what a guest holds while they are at it.
Last verified: 3 September 2026/Written and maintained by the event67 team
Two systems of record that never touch the same data
Planning Pod (Planning Pod is a trademark of Planning Pod) publishes a product built around the operator of a venue or a planning business. Its own site sets out venue and catering operations — a booking calendar, floor plans, banquet event orders, food and beverage management, tour scheduling and equipment management — alongside a CRM with lead capture forms, pipeline automation, proposals and e-signatures, business operations covering contracts, integrated payments and invoices with instalments, event management with timelines, registration, ticketing, attendee and vendor management, branded client portals with a central inbox and web forms, and automation with workflows, custom reports, dashboards and reminders (planningpod.com, accessed 3 September 2026). It positions itself as software that venues run on, and that is exactly the shape of the list.
Read that list from an attendee's point of view and something becomes clear: almost none of it is visible to the person who turns up. A BEO is for the kitchen. A proposal is for the client. A deposit schedule is for accounts. All of it is essential, and all of it happens before anyone walks through a door.
event67 starts at the door and stops when the event ends. It holds the schedule the delegate reads, the personal agenda they build, the workshop they RSVP to, the questions they ask from the floor, the polls they answer, the people they scan to connect with, the photos they post, the pass in their phone's wallet. It has no booking calendar, no BEOs, no proposals and no invoices to a client — those are a different profession's tools and we have never attempted them. The two products never contend for the same record, which is why the honest recommendation here is to keep whichever planning system already runs your business and add the attendee layer separately, rather than looking for one thing that pretends to do both.
What venue and planning teams ask us for — event67's own opinion
This is event67's own opinion, based on conversations rather than research, and it makes no factual claim about any other product. We are selling something here, so treat it as our view of what people tell us they are missing on the guest-facing side.
- Something for guests to hold on the night
- A schedule that updates without reprinting anything
- Questions from the floor, moderated before display
- Sponsor and partner pages ordered by tier
- Photos collected in one place, not everywhere
- An app carrying the event's own name
Here is what event67 actually puts against those. Guests get a native app on iOS or Android, or the event web site, with a live day-by-day schedule filtered by track, session detail carrying speaker bios, room and sponsors, and My Picks as their own agenda. When a room changes at four in the afternoon, the schedule updates live and a scheduled or immediate announcement deep-links straight to the change rather than relying on a printed board. Live Q&A takes questions with upvoting and passes them through an organiser approval queue first, and polls run from the session screen. Sponsor pages are tier-ordered from Platinum to Bronze with logos, bios and websites. The shared photo album collects the whole event in one viewer, with moderation set to open, moderated or admin-only and auto-hide once an image is reported. And the app is published to the App Store and Google Play under the organiser's own listing, themed with their logo, colours and typography.
Planning Pod and event67, row by row
Every cell in the Planning Pod column is quoted or summarised from a page we loaded ourselves, with the link and the date beside it. A row we could not source is not softened, it is removed. Planning Pod may change its pricing at any time; check Planning Pod's pricing page for current figures.
| Row | Planning Pod | event67 |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Monthly subscription banded by the number of events managed at a time, plus a separate flat-rate venue-management plan. The vendor's own site routes to a demo rather than publishing a price table.capterra.com/p/125947/Planning-Pod/pricing, accessed 3 September 2026 | Per activated attendee on a single event. An attendee is activated only when they claim their invite and open the app. |
| Published price points | As at 3 September 2026, Planning Pod does not publish list pricing and directs buyers to request a quote.capterra.com/p/125947/Planning-Pod/pricing, accessed 3 September 2026 | $5 per activated attendee beyond the first 50, and one event never costs more than $4,750. Published at event67.com/pricing. |
| Free tier | Capterra records both free trial and free version as not available; the vendor site publishes neither, so no free tier is recorded.capterra.com/p/125947/Planning-Pod/pricing, accessed 3 September 2026 | One live event, up to 50 activated attendees, with the whole feature set, the full branded theme and bulk invites. No card and no trial clock. |
| Branded app in the organizer's own store listing | Branding is offered on client portals, not on a mobile app. No organiser-branded app-store product is published as of 2026-09-03.getapp.com/operations-management-software/a/planning-pod, accessed 3 September 2026 | Standard on every event, including the free one. Published to the App Store and Google Play under the client's own listing. |
| Published set-up or lead time | Not published on the pages recorded in the source list.getapp.com/operations-management-software/a/planning-pod, accessed 3 September 2026 | Not published. event67 states no lead-time figure, because store review time varies; a date is given against a specific event date instead. |
| Core attendee features, as published by the vendor | Venue and catering operations: booking calendar, floor plans, banquet event orders (BEOs), food and beverage management, tour scheduling, equipment management. CRM: lead capture forms, pipeline automation, proposals, e-signatures. Business operations: contracts, integrated payments, invoices with installments, embedded event insurance. Event management: timelines, registration, ticketing, attendee and vendor management. Client collaboration: branded client portals, central inbox, web forms. Automation and reporting: workflows, custom reports, dashboards, remindersplanningpod.com, accessed 3 September 2026 | Live schedule with a personal agenda, workshop RSVPs with server-side capacity and waitlists, attendee directory, QR attendee-to-attendee connections, live Q&A, polls, reactions, session feedback, shared photo album with moderation, tier-ordered sponsor pages, smart and scheduled push, Apple Wallet pass. |
| Scope the vendor publishes | full-suite event management. Venue-first: event and wedding venues, country clubs, wineries, restaurants with event programmes, hotels, museums and standalone event centres, plus event and wedding planners. Priced by how many events you manage at a time.planningpod.com, accessed 3 September 2026 | Attendee app and organizer console only. No registration, ticketing or payment collection, no badge printing, no exhibitor lead retrieval, no maps, no streaming, no abstract management. Organizer console: Events, sessions, speakers and sponsors; bulk CSV invites with per-recipient delivery tracking; QR check-in and live arrivals; approvals for photos and Q&A; announcements; admin chat with an audit trail; email campaigns, templates, forms and tracked links; engagement analytics; theme editor with a WCAG AA contrast advisory; owner self-serve accounts and Stripe billing. |
| Attendee platforms | Listed as supporting web, iOS and Android, but this is ORGANISER/venue-staff access to the management platform. Planning Pod's own site describes no attendee-facing event app.getapp.com/operations-management-software/a/planning-pod, accessed 3 September 2026 | iOS, Android and a browser event site. |
event67 meters activated attendees on a single event. Planning Pod's published model is monthly subscription banded by the number of events managed at a time, plus a separate flat-rate venue-management plan. The vendor's own site routes to a demo rather than publishing a price table. The two are not the same unit, so the figures are not directly comparable.
Every event67 figure on this page is generated at build time from event67's own pricing library rather than typed into the page, so the page and the meter cannot disagree. event67 publishes no performance, capacity or throughput measurement on this page, and makes no comparative measurement of any other product.
All third-party names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification only. event67 is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any company named on this page. Comparison details are accurate as at the dates shown.
How event67 handles a 420-guest conference and awards evening
A day programme in two rooms, then dinner and awards in the ballroom. The venue side — the room block, the covers, the BEO, the bar — stays wherever it already is. In event67, the organiser creates the event, sets the theme, imports the guest list from CSV and sends invites with per-recipient delivery tracking. Invites are unlimited and never metered, so the plus-ones and the maybes can all be invited without a cost decision attached.
During the day, guests filter the two rooms into their own agenda, RSVP to breakout sessions with capacity enforced server-side and automatic waitlist promotion, scan each other's QR codes to connect, search the directory by name or company, upvote questions in moderated live Q&A, answer polls from the session screen and rate what they attended. In the evening, crowd reactions run during the awards, photos land in the shared album, and an Apple Wallet pass sits in each guest's phone, refreshed by the backend while the event runs. On the console side the team scans arrivals against the guest list — a repeat scan returns 'already' rather than an error, which matters at a busy door — clears approvals, publishes announcements, runs branded email campaigns from themed templates, and reads engagement analytics live. Afterwards the reports page archives every question, poll and photo for the client's file.
The cost in full: 420 activated guests, less the 50 included free, leaves 370 billable at $5 each — $1,850 for the event. Nothing is taken from ticket sales, catering or any other line, because event67 bills the organiser only and never the guest. The charge lands 48 hours after the event ends, with the amount emailed first. Figures generated from event67's own pricing library.
When Planning Pod is the better fit
If you are a venue, or you plan events for clients, Planning Pod is doing work that event67 does not touch at any point. Its published capability set covers the booking calendar, floor plans, banquet event orders, food and beverage management, tour scheduling and equipment management on the operations side, and contracts, integrated payments, invoices with instalments and embedded event insurance on the commercial side, with a CRM carrying lead capture forms, pipeline automation, proposals and e-signatures in front of both (planningpod.com, accessed 3 September 2026). event67 has none of these and never will: no venue booking, no catering CRM, no BEOs, no proposals, no invoicing and no payments. If your problem is running a building or a book of clients, we are not a candidate at all.
There is also the client relationship, which is a real part of the job for anyone planning on someone else's behalf. Planning Pod publishes branded client portals with a central inbox and web forms, plus workflows, custom reports, dashboards and reminders (planningpod.com, accessed 3 September 2026), and it lists organiser access across web, iOS and Android (getapp.com, accessed 3 September 2026). event67's console has roles and reporting for the people running an event, but it has no client-facing portal, no proposal to approve and no signature to collect. And on the money: Planning Pod collects it — proposals, e-signatures, integrated payments and instalment invoicing — while event67 takes no payment from a guest and no share of anything you sell. For a venue rather than a conference organiser, Planning Pod is the system of record and event67 would be an accessory bolted to the guest side of one night.
What event67 does not do
Set out plainly, because most of this list is the reason the two products sit alongside each other rather than against each other:
- Venue booking calendars, room blocks and tour scheduling
- Banquet event orders, catering, food and beverage management
- Equipment management and vendor coordination
- Proposals, contracts, e-signatures and client portals
- Invoicing, instalments, deposits and taking payment
- Attendee registration, ticketing and box office
- Paid forms — our forms collect responses, never money
- Interactive floor plans, venue maps and wayfinding
- Virtual and hybrid streaming, breakouts and on-demand video
- Onsite badge printing, kiosks and check-in hardware
- Exhibitor lead retrieval and booth badge scanning
- In-app account deletion — handled by email and a web page
It is worth being explicit about the floor plan, because both products use the phrase for different things. Planning Pod's floor plans are an operations tool for laying out a room; event67 has no floor plan of any kind, for guests or for staff.
How the two fit together
Leave the business side untouched
Bookings, BEOs, catering, contracts, proposals and invoices stay exactly where they are. event67 has no opinion about any of it and no field to store it in, so nothing in this step is a migration.
Export the guest list once it is final
Name, email and the profile fields you want one guest to see about another. event67 imports from CSV. We publish no integration with Planning Pod and claim no partnership, approval or affiliation — this is a file you export yourself.
Build the guest-facing event
Sessions, rooms, speakers and sponsor tiers in the console, then the theme: logo, colours and typography running through every screen. The console checks each colour pair against WCAG AA and reports what it found; the check warns and confirms and never blocks a save.
Invite and watch activation
Invites carry per-recipient delivery tracking, and the live meter counts activated guests from the day the event is published. Someone invited who never opens the app is never billed, and the charge lands 48 hours after the event ends.
The genuinely awkward part is that the guest list now lives in two places at once, and it moves. Late additions, swapped delegates and a table plan that changes on the afternoon of the event all have to be reflected on both sides, and nothing automates that for you because there is no integration between the products. In practice teams re-import the CSV once the list settles and handle the last few by hand in the console. That is the honest cost of keeping two specialist tools instead of one that does neither side as well.
Sources
Each entry is a page a person loaded on the date shown. The specific claim each one supports sits beside that claim in the table above, so you can check any single row against its own source rather than against this list. Pricing and status are re-checked every 60 days; capability claims every 90.
- planningpod.com, accessed 3 September 2026The vendor's own site
- planningpod.com/venue-software-pricing.cfm, accessed 3 September 2026The vendor's own pricing page
- capterra.com/p/125947/Planning-Pod/pricing, accessed 3 September 2026A third-party software directory listing, not the vendor
- getapp.com/operations-management-software/a/planning-pod, accessed 3 September 2026A third-party software directory listing, not the vendor
Trademarks and independence
All product names, company names, logos, and trademarks referred to on this page are the property of their respective owners. All such names and marks are used for identification purposes only. Their use does not imply any endorsement of, sponsorship of, affiliation with, or partnership with event67, and event67 is not affiliated with, authorised by, sponsored by, or endorsed by any of the companies named on this page.
Comparisons on this page are based on information published by the named company and by event67, accessed on the dates shown. Products and prices change; the named company may have altered its product or pricing since the access date shown. Please check the named company's own website for its current features and pricing. Where this page states an opinion, it is event67's own opinion and is labelled as such.
What it costs
- Free up to 50
- activated attendees, on one live event
- $5
- per activated attendee beyond 50
- $4,750
- the most one event can ever cost, whatever happens past 1,000
Activated means the person claimed their invite and opened the app. Not when you import them, not when the invite is delivered, and not if they register and stay home.
Questions people actually ask
Does Planning Pod include an attendee event app?
Nothing on the pages we read describes one. Planning Pod's own site sets out venue operations, CRM, contracts and payments, client portals and event management, with mobile access listed for web, iOS and Android as organiser and venue-staff access to the management platform (planningpod.com and getapp.com, accessed 3 September 2026). We found no attendee-facing event app published under an organiser's own name. event67 is exactly that layer and nothing else.
How much does Planning Pod cost?
As at 3 September 2026, Planning Pod does not publish list pricing and directs buyers to request a quote. Its own pricing pages route to a demo, and its FAQ states that pricing is based on how many events you manage at a time (planningpod.com, accessed 3 September 2026). Figures shown on third-party directories are not the vendor's published prices, so we do not repeat them here. Check Planning Pod's own site for current terms.
What does event67 cost for a 420-guest event?
$1,850. Four hundred and twenty activated guests, less the 50 included at no charge, leaves 370 billable at $5 each. Activated means the guest claimed their invite and opened the app — not on import and not on invite delivery — so a padded list and a run of late cancellations cost nothing. Billing happens 48 hours after the event ends, never before, and the amount is emailed first.
Can event67 handle contracts, deposits or catering?
No, none of them. There is no booking calendar, no banquet event order, no food and beverage module, no proposal, no e-signature, no invoice and no payment collection anywhere in event67. Those belong to planning and venue software, and an organiser using both keeps them there. event67 begins at the guest list and ends with the post-event report.
Is there a free way to try event67?
Yes. One live event, up to 50 activated attendees, with the whole feature set, the full branded theme and bulk invites, no card and no trial clock. For a venue or a planner, that is enough to run the app on one real client event and see whether guests use it before it appears in a proposal to anybody.
Whose branding do guests see?
The organiser's, or the client's. event67 publishes the app to the App Store and Google Play under the client's own listing, and the theme editor sets logo, colours and typography that flow through every attendee screen. Planning Pod's published branding is on client portals rather than a mobile app, and we found no organiser-branded app-store product on their side (planningpod.com, accessed 3 September 2026).
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One live event, up to 50 activated attendees, with the whole feature set and the full branded theme. No card.