Luma vs Cvent

If your team runs many events — field marketing dinners, customer meetups, community events, workshops, and conference registration — and wants to set each one up in minutes without an implementation project, choose Luma. If you run large multi-day conferences that need session management, exhibitor tools, venue sourcing, and hotel room blocks, Cvent is built for that, with a larger contract and implementation effort.

Pricing

Luma: Pricing is published and self-serve. Free events are free, with unlimited events and guests. On the Free plan, paid tickets carry a 5% platform fee plus Stripe processing (2.9% + 30¢). Luma Plus is $59/month billed annually (or $69 month-to-month) per calendar and drops the platform fee to 0%, so you pay only Stripe processing. For larger organizations, Luma Enterprise adds SSO, CRM integrations, and a company-wide organization, with pricing based on your needs.

On a $300 conference ticket, fees total $24.00 on the Free plan or $9.00 on Luma Plus.

Cvent: Pricing isn’t published — every contract is negotiated with sales. Buyers report an annual platform license starting around $20,000 and running well past $75,000 for enterprise deployments, per-registrant fees for the event app and attendee hub (around $7–$12 per attendee, per event), and implementation fees of $5,000–$50,000 in the first year. Contracts are typically annual or multi-year with auto-renewal. Procurement platform Vendr reports an average contract of about $19,550 per year, with deals ranging from roughly $5,000 to $94,000.

Pricing checked in September 2026 from third-party buyer data (Vendr, Docket). Contact Cvent for a quote.

How They Compare

Cvent is an enterprise event management suite. It covers the full lifecycle of a large conference: registration with complex logic, agenda and session management, speaker and exhibitor portals, the Attendee Hub event app with networking, polling, and Q&A, hotel room blocks, and OnArrival for onsite check-in with kiosk badge printing. Its Supplier Network is a venue sourcing marketplace where planners send RFPs to hundreds of thousands of hotels and venues. That breadth is why large enterprises, associations, and agencies standardize on it — and why getting started usually means an implementation project, admin training, and a dedicated event operations team.

Luma is built for running many smaller events. Anyone on your team can create and publish an event page in a couple of minutes — no templates to configure or builds to request. Guests register with just a name and email (no account required), get a calendar invite automatically, and can add their ticket to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. Teams organize events under calendars, send invites and blasts, collect registration questions, require approval or run a waitlist, and check guests in from the iOS or Android app.

The tradeoff is scope. Luma doesn’t have agenda or session management, exhibitor and sponsor portals, a branded conference app, or venue sourcing. Many teams use both: Cvent for the flagship annual conference, and Luma for the dozens or hundreds of smaller events that happen the rest of the year.

Where Luma Shines

1. Fast for every event: Create and publish an event in minutes, then clone it for the next city or date. No implementation project, and anyone on the team can run an event.
2. Published pricing: Free events are free, and Luma Plus is a flat monthly subscription. No per-registrant fees, so costs don’t rise with attendance.
3. Simple registration for guests: Guests register with a name and email — no account needed — get a calendar invite automatically, and can add wallet passes to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet.
4. Built for recurring programs: Calendars with subscribers, newsletters, and event tags keep your audience in touch between events, and embeds put your events on your own website.
5. Enterprise features when you need them: SSO, HubSpot and Salesforce sync, custom sending domains, and a SOC 2 Type II audit (see Enterprise Security).

Why You Might Choose Cvent

• Large multi-day conferences – Agenda builder, session registration, speaker management, and complex registration paths for thousands of attendees.
• Venue sourcing – The Cvent Supplier Network lets planners send RFPs to venues and hotels and compare proposals in one place.
• Hotel room blocks & travel – Manage housing and attendee travel alongside registration.
• Exhibitors, sponsors & event app – Exhibitor portals, lead retrieval, and a branded attendee app with networking, polling, and Q&A.
• Established procurement footprint – Many large companies already have Cvent approved, integrated, and staffed.

Migrating from Cvent to Luma

1. Pick the events that don’t need Cvent’s conference tooling — field events, meetups, customer dinners, webinars — and start there.
2. Create a Team Calendar for each team, region, or program, and add your teammates as admins.
3. Export attendee lists from Cvent as CSV and use them to invite guests to your Luma events.
4. Connect your Stripe account if you’re selling tickets, and set up ticket types and coupons.
5. For SSO, CRM integrations, or bringing many teams onto Luma at once, contact enterprise@luma.com about Luma Enterprise.

FAQs

Can Luma handle a multi-session conference? Luma doesn’t have agenda or session management. You can model a few sessions as separate ticket types, or create each session as its own event on one calendar — see multi-session events.

Does Luma print badges? Yes — onsite badge printing is available on Luma Enterprise. On any plan, you can also export your guest list with per-ticket QR codes and print badges with your own template — see printing event badges. For very large events, Luma also works with hardware scanners.

Does Luma sync with our CRM? Yes. On Luma Enterprise, registrations and attendance sync automatically to HubSpot or Salesforce across every calendar in your organization. On Luma Plus, you can use the API, webhooks, or Zapier.

Will guests need to create a Luma account? No. Guests register with a name and email.