B2B Event Management Technology

This category has been superseded. Forrester now evaluates this market as All-In-One Event Management Platforms, and current buyers should work from that evaluation rather than this one. What follows is the history of how the category got there.

Forrester has renamed this market three times in five years. B2B marketing events management solutions in 2021. B2B event management technology in 2023. All-in-one event management platforms in 2024.

Analyst firms do not rename categories for fun. Each change was a response to something that had shifted underneath, and the sequence reads as a fairly precise record of what B2B marketers were worried about at the time. The vendor lists tell the story better than the reports do.

What the category covered

Forrester's definition of B2B event management technology centred on executing in-person, virtual, and hybrid events that build awareness, drive demand, capture data, and engage employees.

Worth noticing what that definition puts on equal footing. Awareness and demand are marketing outcomes. Data capture is an operations outcome. Employee engagement is an internal comms outcome. One technology category was being asked to serve three different budget owners, which is part of why the market fragmented as badly as it did.

The functional scope was registration and invitation, event setup across formats, attendee engagement during the event, and the data coming out the other end.

2021: the virtual scramble

The Forrester Wave: B2B Marketing Events Management Solutions, Q1 2021 evaluated fourteen vendors against twenty eight criteria: 6Connex, Bizzabo, CadmiumCD, Certain, Circa, Cvent, Hubb, Intrado, Kaltura, meetyoo, ON24, RainFocus, Splash, and SpotMe.

That list was assembled while every in-person event on earth was cancelled. The word "marketing" sits in the category name because events were, at that moment, unambiguously a marketing channel rather than a logistics operation. Nobody was booking venues.

2023: the video giants arrive

Two years later, The Forrester Wave: B2B Event Management Technology, Q1 2023 evaluated fourteen vendors again, but six of the names had changed.

Out: CadmiumCD, Certain, Circa, Hubb, Intrado, and meetyoo. In: Cisco Systems, Engagez, Hubilo, Notified, Stova, and Zoom.

Cisco and Zoom appearing in a B2B marketing technology evaluation is the single most legible signal in this whole lineage. The video conferencing platforms had spent three years absorbing event functionality and were now credible enough to be scored against Cvent. "Marketing" had dropped out of the category name because the market was no longer only about marketing.

Forrester scored these fourteen against twenty eight criteria across three categories, and named four Leaders, four Strong Performers, five Contenders, and one Challenger. Bizzabo, RainFocus, and SpotMe all confirmed Leader placement publicly. Splash was named a Contender.

The Bizzabo profile is a period piece in itself, singling out wearable technology alongside mobile app and day-of-show support. Badges that talk to each other were, briefly, a differentiator.

RainFocus was credited for event data capture, deep CRM and marketing automation integration, and event environmental impact tracking, taking the highest possible score in data management. Positioned, in the report's framing, for enterprises where large and complex events are core to the strategy.

Forrester's guidance alongside that Wave pointed at three things: driving digital engagement across formats, capturing event data, and integrating cleanly into marketing automation, CRM, and CDP systems. It also noted that nineteen percent of marketers were running between four and seven separate event technology providers.

2024: the consolidation rename

By The Forrester Wave: All-In-One Event Management Platforms, Q4 2024, the field had shrunk to twelve, the criteria count had risen to thirty one, and the category name had become an entry requirement rather than a description.

That nineteen percent figure had become twenty two percent of large enterprises running six or more event tools. The problem had stopped being capability and started being sprawl.

Two structural changes came with it. Vendors now had to cover the full event portfolio across every format to be included at all, which pushed out the specialists. And Forrester replaced market presence as the third scoring dimension with customer feedback, shown as halos on the graphic. The 2023 Wave scored vendors partly on how big they were. The 2024 Wave did not.

What the sequence is actually telling you

Read the three vendor lists in order and the churn rate is the finding. Six of fourteen names replaced between 2021 and 2023, then a further contraction to twelve by the end of 2024, with the entry bar raised twice.

For a buyer, that has a practical consequence that has nothing to do with features. This is a market where a meaningful share of vendors will not be independent in three years, and event platforms are unusually painful to migrate away from because they hold historical attendee data, integration wiring into the CRM, and often the registration flows for events already announced.

Which makes vendor durability a genuine selection criterion here rather than a box-ticking exercise. Ask about ownership, funding, and what happens to your historical event data on exit before you ask about the mobile app.

One note on the research itself. The Q1 2023 Wave has been superseded and several of the vendors in it have since been acquired, renamed, or repositioned, SpotMe having become Onomi. Treat it as a record of how this market arrived where it is. Anything you are actually buying should be assessed against the current category, All-In-One Event Management Platforms, which is where Forrester's evaluations of this market now appear.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.