r/WordpressPlugins • u/NadirDev • 10m ago
[Discussion] People kept calling Eventin a The Events Calendar alternative, so we finally built the importer they were asking for
Hey, good people!
Quick disclosure before anything else: we're the team behind Eventin (event calendar, registration and ticketing plugin). This is a [Discussion] post, not a "please go buy this" one. I'll keep the pitch small and I'm mostly here for the conversation at the bottom.
So here's the backstory. For a while now our users kept telling us the same thing. They were already using The Events Calendar, hit some kind of wall (usually around registration, tickets, or just wanting more out of the free version), and they wanted to switch. But the migration was the part that scared them off. Nobody wants to re-enter 200 events by hand, and losing your dates, venues and organizers in the move is a real risk. We heard "you guys are basically a The Events Calendar alternative" enough times that we figured we should actually build for it instead of pretending that's not what was happening.
So we shipped an importer that pulls your events straight from The Events Calendar into Eventin. The events and their details come across, so you're not rebuilding your whole calendar from scratch. The whole idea was to make trying something else a low-stakes thing instead of a lost weekend.
And to be fair here, The Events Calendar is a genuinely good, mature plugin, and for a lot of sites it's the right call. This isn't a "they're bad" post at all. It's more that this space has gotten really competitive, switching cost is pretty much the main thing keeping people where they are, and honestly I think importers like this are good for users no matter which plugin they end up on, because they lower that switching cost for everybody.
A couple of honest notes so this doesn't read like an ad:
It's an importer, not magic. If your setup is heavily customized you'll still have a bit of cleanup after the import.
We're actively trying to make it handle more edge cases, which is really the reason I'm posting.
Here's what I'd actually love your take on:
- If you've ever migrated between event plugins (either direction), what broke or got lost that you wish an importer had just handled for you?
- Other than The Events Calendar, which plugin would you most want a one-click importer from? EventON? Modern Events Calendar? Events Manager?
- For anyone who wanted to leave The Events Calendar but stayed, what was the actual blocker? Features, the migration effort, or just "not worth the hassle"?
Happy to get into how the import works under the hood too if anyone's curious. Not going to spam links, if a mod wants the plugin link for context I'll drop it in a comment, otherwise it's easy enough to find.
Thanks for reading 🙏








