Switching from Bizzabo: what changes

Bizzabo is a solid platform. Their "Event Experience OS" positioning is accurate — they've built strong tools for registration, event websites, and attendee engagement. If your events are primarily about getting people in the door and keeping them engaged once they're there, Bizzabo does that well.

But if you've been using Bizzabo and finding yourself reaching for spreadsheets, shared drives, and email threads to manage everything behind the curtain — exhibitors, compliance, floor plans, production tasks — that's the gap we're talking about.

Where Bizzabo is strong

Credit where it's due. Bizzabo's event website builder is polished. Their registration flow is clean. The attendee engagement features — networking, personalised agendas, the event app — are well-executed. Their AI matchmaking for attendee networking is a genuine differentiator on the attendee side.

If your events don't involve exhibitors, complex production workflows, or multi-track scheduling with dozens of speakers, Bizzabo might be all you need. This post is for teams who've discovered it isn't.

The production-side gap

Bizzabo is attendee-facing. That's a design choice, not a flaw. But it means the production side of your event — the work that happens before attendees ever show up — often lives outside the platform.

Exhibitor management. Bizzabo doesn't offer an exhibitor portal. If you're managing 30 or 50 or 200 exhibitors, you're tracking booth assignments, asset uploads, insurance certificates, and compliance documents somewhere else. Usually a combination of email, spreadsheets, and optimism.

Floor plans. There's no floor plan designer in Bizzabo. Your exhibition layout lives in a PDF or a PowerPoint slide, disconnected from your schedule, your exhibitor data, and your attendee-facing maps.

Speaker workflow beyond CFP. Bizzabo handles basic speaker management. But if you need abstract submission with peer review, speaker portals for content uploads, AV requirement collection, and a scheduling workflow that connects speakers to rooms with conflict detection — you're stitching tools together.

Task management. Running an event involves hundreds of tasks across multiple team members. Bizzabo doesn't include production task management, so you're back in Trello or Asana, disconnected from your event data.

Compliance tracking. For conferences and exhibitions with regulatory requirements, tracking which exhibitors have submitted what — and chasing the ones who haven't — is critical. That workflow doesn't exist in Bizzabo.

What you gain with ema

The short version: production-side depth that sits alongside the attendee-facing features, in one platform.

Full exhibitor management with compliance tracking. Exhibitors get their own portal. They upload documents, manage booth details, and track requirements. You see compliance status across every exhibitor at a glance — who's submitted, who's overdue, who needs chasing.

Interactive floor plans linked to your schedule. Design your exhibition floor on a canvas. Assign booths, manage reservations, and publish interactive maps that attendees can actually navigate. Floor plans are connected to your exhibitor data and your schedule — not floating in a separate file.

An AI agent for production queries. Not matchmaking AI — an agent with access to specialised tools across your entire event. Ask it to check exhibitor compliance status, find schedule gaps, draft emails, or generate reports. It has context across every part of your event, not just the attendee side.

Task management with five views. Kanban, list, calendar, timeline, and table. Built for event production workflows, connected to your event data, with assignments, due dates, and progress tracking.

Real-time collaboration. Comments, mentions, live updates. When someone changes a session time or updates a floor plan, everyone sees it immediately. No more "check the latest version in the shared drive."

Document management. Version tracking, permission-aware sharing, tied to event context. Insurance certificates, speaker contracts, venue briefs — all in one place with an audit trail.

No per-seat fees. Bizzabo runs approximately $15,000 per year with per-user licensing that adds up as your team grows. ema packages start from $499/month and are priced around event operations instead. Your coordinators, volunteers, and stakeholders can all get access without inflating the bill.

What's different

Being honest: Bizzabo has strong event website builders and marketing automation tools. Their event site templates are polished, and their marketing workflows — email sequences, social sharing, promotional tools — are more developed than what ema offers today.

If event website design and marketing automation are critical to your workflow, evaluate whether ema's approach covers your needs. For some teams, the production-side gains more than compensate. For others, the marketing tools might be a dealbreaker.

That's a genuine trade-off, and you should weigh it based on where your team spends its time.

Migration

Moving from Bizzabo to ema is straightforward in practice. Attendee data, speaker records, and schedule information can be exported from Bizzabo and imported into ema. The data formats are standard — CSVs and structured exports that map cleanly.

The best time to switch is between event cycles. Finish your current event on Bizzabo, export your data, and set up the next one on ema. Trying to migrate mid-event creates unnecessary friction.

If you've built exhibitor records and compliance data in spreadsheets alongside Bizzabo, that data imports into ema too — and you won't need the spreadsheets any more.

The pitch, honestly

Bizzabo isn't bad software. It's good software that's built for a specific job: attendee experience. If that's all you need, it does it well.

But if you need production-side depth alongside attendee experience — exhibitor management, floor plans, compliance tracking, task management, and an AI agent that understands your whole event — ema covers both. At a fraction of the cost, with no per-seat fees, and without stitching five tools together to fill the gaps.