Comparing Event Announcement Sites

I have two favorite sites for hosting events right now:

1. lu.ma
2. gath.io

I was going to try to compare them in a toot, but I really want a table, so instead you get a blog post.

feature	lu.ma	gath.io
creates a public internet page for your event	Y	Y
allows link to virtual event	Y	Y
only shows link to participants	Y	N
obscures link so the video meeting tech is not shown	Y	N
allows someone to follow an event group calendar page	Y1	Y
keeps attendee emails private from organizer	N	Y
sends an email reminder	Y	N
has repeating events	N2	N
can use without creating an account	N3	Y4

I prefer the open source ness of gath.io, and the privacy - I do not want to know your emails

But I do really like the reminder emails from lu.ma, and I think I am correct that it doesn’t just put my zoom link on the open web. (TBF, I have so far not had a Fediverse zoom bomber.)

1. in order for events to show up on your event group page on lu.ma, you have to make them public which automatically opts them in to being featured by lu.ma - not sure how I feel about that yet. May still be able to opt out of the featuring? ↩

2. I thought lu.ma had some repeating events, but now I’m not finding them. I think somehow you can do day of month/week, but I couldn’t do “first Sunday of the month” ↩

3. lu.ma does lightweight accounts based on your email address where they send you a code and you can’t set a password, but they do still require you to do that to sign up for an event. ↩

4. all the event info is visible publicly on gath.io. Optionally the organizer can allow people to mark themselves as attending, but there’s no need to “mark as attending” to get the event details ↩