Stova alternative: event67, the app without the platform around it

A good share of the traffic to a Stova alternative search is people who typed an older name first. Stova (Stova is a trademark of Stova Group, LLC) says on its own story page that the company was formed by converging MeetingPlay, Aventri and eventcore, and that the name is a shortening of "standing ovation" (stova.io, accessed 3 September 2026). Aventri was itself formerly eTouches, and the support knowledge base is still served from an etouches.zendesk.com domain (accessed 3 September 2026), which is about as clear a signal as you get that the older brand equity has not decayed. All of those names are one product today under one owner. None of them is a separate vendor you can still buy, and any page that compares against them as though they were live products is describing a market that no longer exists.

Stova's published platform covers event management with registration and session and speaker management; a mobile event app with personalised agendas, venue maps, speaker bios, push messages and offline schedule access; AI-assisted attendee networking and meeting scheduling; contactless QR digital-badge check-in; in-app polls, surveys, ratings and gamification; event lead capture for exhibitors; onsite services and access control; virtual, webinar and hybrid experiences; an Event Intelligence Suite for analytics; an Exhibitor Resource Center; and integrations with Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Stripe and Zoom (stova.io, accessed 3 September 2026). If your requirement list genuinely looks like that list, this page is not going to change your mind and it is not trying to.

The reader we can help is the one who wants three or four things off it. Here is our own view, offered as opinion rather than fact: a large amount of enterprise event software is bought as a suite in order to get the attendee app inside it. If that is the shape of the quote on your desk — registration you already have elsewhere, badge hardware you rent, a virtual stage you will not use, and an app you actually need — then it is worth pricing the app on its own before you sign for the platform wrapped around it.

One more thing worth recording precisely, because it is the question we get asked. Stova's mobile capability page uses the phrase "Brand the Application Your Way" and markets sponsor banner ads, splash screens and whole-app sponsorship (stova.io, accessed 3 September 2026). What it does not state, on the pages we accessed on 3 September 2026, is whether a fully white-labelled app with its own App Store and Google Play listing is offered, or what that would cost or take. We are not going to assert an answer either way. Ask them directly; it is a fair question and it has a definite answer that we simply do not hold.

Registration is the first and largest reason. Stova's published platform includes registration and session and speaker management with payment integration, and it is built for the complex, multi-variant admission structures that a large association congress actually runs — member and non-member rates, day passes, workshop add-ons, group bookings (stova.io, accessed 3 September 2026). event67 has none of that. We do not sell a ticket, take a card or run a box office, and our forms collect responses rather than money. If registration and the app must come from the same contract, the comparison ends there.

The second reason is everything physical and everything streamed. Onsite services and access control, contactless QR digital-badge check-in and event lead capture for exhibitors are published Stova capabilities (stova.io, accessed 3 September 2026), and a large tradeshow genuinely needs them. So is the virtual, webinar and hybrid stack, and so is the enterprise integration surface into Salesforce, Marketo and HubSpot for organisations that run events as part of a marketing pipeline.

We should be equally plain about our own gaps in that comparison. event67 does no venue sourcing and no hotel RFPs. It drives no badge hardware. It has no virtual stage, no breakouts and no on-demand library. And it has no long enterprise security-review track record behind it — if your procurement process runs a twelve-week vendor assessment, that is a real consideration and a smaller vendor is a real risk. Those are our limitations, stated in our own words, and none of them is a criticism of anybody else.

1. Draw the line around the app

   Decide which modules you are actually replacing. For most readers of this page it is the attendee app and the engagement tooling only, with registration, onsite hardware and any streaming staying exactly where they are.

2. Export the delegate list

   Name, email and whichever profile fields you want in the directory. event67 imports from CSV, and that import is the single join between the registration system of record and the app.

3. Rebuild the programme

   Sessions, tracks, rooms, speakers and sponsors go into the console. A five-track congress is a couple of days of careful data entry, and it is worth doing it against the printed programme rather than a spreadsheet.

4. Theme, invite, and watch the meter

   Logo, colours and typography flow into every screen with a WCAG AA contrast advisory that warns and confirms rather than blocking. Invites carry per-recipient delivery tracking, and the activation meter runs from publication so the bill is never a surprise.

The genuinely awkward part is that a suite is one contract, one login and one support path, and splitting the app out of it makes two of each. Somebody on your side then owns the join: the CSV that moves the delegate list, the decision about which product scans at the door, and the reconciliation when a late registrant exists in one system and not the other. There is also a second-order effect worth naming — if the modules you keep depend on the app you are removing, such as badge check-in or exhibitor lead capture running through the platform's own app, then those stay where they are and delegates end up with two things to open. For a congress with a large exhibition floor that may be reason enough not to split at all.