Revel

Revel has screening questions, approval-based events and private guest lists built in. Free events cost nothing and ticket money goes straight to the organiser. It’s open source, and the people building it come from the communities that use it.

Not much so far. I’d like more organisers to know it exists, because the communities it’s built for are the ones who’d get the most out of it.

The biggest benefit I’ve seen is for queer, kink and polyamory groups. They can list events without worrying about being removed, and they keep control over who sees their guest list. A few poly groups already host their meetups on Revel and have been really positive about it. Free events cost nothing, which matters for volunteer-run groups with no budget.

What stands out most about Revel is its native attendee vetting and access control, which allows us to screen guests through built-in questionnaires and private invitation links right inside the ticketing flow instead of duct-taping Google Forms to spreadsheets. Equally "helpful" is the platform's strict privacy-by-design approach: there are no third-party ad trackers or data brokers mining guest lists, making it ideal for trust-sensitive communities and private clubs. On the operational side, being able to manage both automated Stripe checkouts and fee-free offline payments (like cash or bank transfers) alongside recurring memberships and reserved seating maps in one clean dashboard saves hours of administrative overhead before every event.

Because Revel prioritizes attendee privacy and refuses to act as a data-harvesting ad network, the main trade-off is that there is no public algorithmic marketplace driving random discovery traffic to your events: you have to bring your own audience and handle your own promotion. Also, as a relatively young platform, it has a leaner catalog of out-of-the-box third-party CRM and marketing integrations than legacy enterprise ticketing giants, though that rarely gets in the way of day-to-day community operations.

Revel replaced our fragmented setup of external questionnaires, spreadsheets, and payment links with a single platform that handles guest vetting, memberships, and ticketing natively. It solved our biggest operational bottleneck: curating private or capacity-limited events without exposing our attendees' personal data to third-party ad networks. As a result, we've cut hours of manual payment reconciliation before every event, eliminated platform fees on cash-at-the-door tickets, and built much stronger trust with our community.