Opendate or Prism?

A purpose-built booking system vs a ticketing tool add-on.

Over the years, Opendate (OD) has sent direct emails to Prism clients, positioning themselves as a cheaper alternative with feature parity. In reality, the two products and our company philosophies are very different.

Whichever platform you select as your booking system, keep in mind your team will use and rely on it daily. It’s an essential tool that becomes the system of record for the finances of your business.

“I’ve thoroughly looked at everything, and nothing’s even close.”
– Marc Geiger

Opendate is primarily a ticketing company that “bundles” a few different offerings. They’ve developed email marketing tools that compete with Hive and some booking features, which they can market as free or cheap since it funnels leads to their ticketing platform. Their focus and resources are inevitably split as a result.

Instead of building a ticketing company, Prism focuses solely on creating the best possible booking software and integrates with a growing number of ticketing partners. This dedicated focus has allowed us to become a top-of-class system—tried and tested at scale by the best promoters and venues in the world—and used to plan hundreds of thousands of events (in 2025, over 10,000 offers are being sent out of Prism every week). It has also allowed us to build out features like Insights, which has proven to be a highly impactful tool for mitigating risk when sending offers.

We believe that having separate companies provide booking and ticketing is the most effective setup for venues, promoters and the industry as a whole. Teams have access to the very best technology and it grants them more freedom to choose which ticketing option suits their business as their needs evolve. When ticketing contracts expire, our customers can easily migrate to another ticketing partner, whereas OD does not provide options for ticketing integrations outside of their own technology.

In addition to Prism having an abundance of ticketing integrations, there are thousands of small and large features we have developed over the years that are required in order to have a platform reliable enough for settlement and financial reporting. We will list below in the product comparison section.

Addressing Pricing
is Opendate more cost effective?

If you’re only looking at shelf price, maybe. Opendate’s booking tools appear to be cheaper than Prism, but when you consider the fees on Opendate's ticketing contracts (the not-so visible price tag added at checkout), they end up charging far more than Prism.

Consider a small club that sells 50,000 tickets a year. A ticketing partner usually makes $75,000 or more off that club by adding fees to each ticket sold. $1.5 per ticket really adds up… Our most sophisticated venues look at the $75,000 as lost revenue or an expense. If that same club pays Prism $7,500, then we’re looking at a ticketing contract that’s 10x more expensive to the venue than their Prism contract. We don’t charge per ticket, but for comparison’s sake, that’s $0.15 per ticket, or about 1 comp per show. And we’ve seen ticketing contracts up to 40x more expensive than Prism’s fee.

The ROI and efficiency gains that come from using a feature-rich tool like Prism to the fullest are often overlooked because it’s viewed as a flat cost without factoring in the money saved. Prism clients don’t need to hire as rapidly when they grow because they’re getting hours back every day, they make fewer mistakes because they’re not wrangling spreadsheets, and they have less friction in their daily communications because everything is tracked and managed in one place.

We also have plenty of customers whose ticketing partner covers their Prism subscription as part of their contract, so it’s worth opening that conversation with your ticketing company when weighing out your booking tool options.

In summary, our strategy is to affordably provide you with the best possible booking system—and we charge far less than Opendate does for their core technology.