Choosing the wrong transactional platform for your museum can have serious consequences.
Museums rely heavily on critical transactional systems for their day to day operations. Memberships need to be processed, donations received, and tickets sold. Additionally, museums need to communicate with patrons, donors, visitors via email lists and texts—so transactions need to be recorded in a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM).
And these transactions have overlapping layers of complexity. Donation levels might offer museum memberships among their benefits. So when a donation is processed, a membership needs to be created. Or when a ticket is purchased, its price may need to be discounted according to their membership status.
Ticketing alone has complex requirements. Certain events may have limited availability, or require timed entry. Tickets may have to be refunded if an event gets canceled. Tickets that are related to specific events, rather than general admission, may need to be integrated into a calendar system.
With so many programs depending on these transitions, with so much revenue flowing through them, and with so much data being collected—museums usually have to look for specialized third party software solutions to handle all these complex and integrated functions.
Comparing and Contrasting Museum Transaction Platforms
There are a number of solutions available to museums to meet all these transactional requirements. This article will review some of these solutions, and compare and contrast their strengths and weaknesses. And in an upcoming article we’ll consider the potential of building some of these functions right into a museum’s own website, without relying on third party platforms.
This overview of ticketing, membership, and donation platforms is not intended to be comprehensive. Rather we are reviewing these options based on how well these tools interact and integrate with a museum’s main website.
While each of these platforms have their core strengths and weaknesses, we’re only including options here that cover all three main requirements of ticketing, memberships, and donations. We’ll also comment on some of these system’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capabilities, and note their capacity to sell hard goods.
For our purposes we’ll break these options down by two overarching attributes: their pricing tiers, and their website integration capabilities.
TLDR Summary: At the enterprise level Tessitura and Spektrix are standouts both in terms of core capability and website integration. At the lower cost level VBO Tickets is the clear winner, but keep an eye on eTix, especially when they release their major upgrade in 2025.
Enterprise Level Systems
Beginning with the higher end of the market, the first eight platforms we’ll review are Tessitura, Spektrix, PatronManager (LEAP), TixTrack (Ticketure), ACME Tickets, Veevart, Blackbaud/Altru, and CenterEdge. While costs for these platforms vary, these higher priced platforms are analogous to buying a car. You can get a decent used car between $10k-$20, but more likely a nice new car is going to run north of $25k, and a really nice car is going to be between $50k-$100k.
Tessitura. Tessitura is top of the line. They check all the boxes in terms of functionality, website integration, API (application programming interface), and customizability. However, they are certainly enterprise level, both in terms of capability and cost. There is also a high bar for setup and configuration. With such broad customizability, and extensive features, implementing this system is a major endeavor for any museum. But if you can afford it, and you have the opportunity to implement Tessitura, there are no limitations to how you can integrate this system into your website.
Spektrix. Spektrix is a UK based software provider, and their main market focus is performance venues. However they also serve museums. They have a very strong CRM component. In fact, it might be fair to say that they are a specialized CRM with ticketing, membership, and donation capabilities built on top. Like Tessitura their feature set is pretty comprehensive. One of the big pluses with Spektrix is their focus on partnering with and supporting website developers to integrate their platform directly into the museum’s main website. Of all of the platforms reviewed here, Spektrix would rank the highest in terms of website integration. For Spektrix this is not just an option, it is foundational to their development philosophy.
Another very important feature offered by Spektrix is the option of utilizing Single Sign On (SSO). This feature can be extremely helpful to elevate the dynamic features of your museum’s website. If a user can be logged into both their membership account, and at the same time login to a matching account on your website, your website can begin to offer member only content, open up new features for logged in members, and dynamically adapt website Calls to Action (CTAs) for logged in users.
PatronManager. PatronManager is built on the Salesforce platform. Systems built on Salesforce do benefit from high levels of customization, and complete API integration potential. However, that does come with a pretty steep cost. Salesforce seat licenses, and API licenses are costly on their own—though PatronManager does include most of your core Salesforce costs in their licensing. And while the customization and integration options are wide open, customizing Salesforce is a heavy lift and requires working with specialized Salesforce developers which introduces yet another costly price center.
Without this custom Salesforce integration PatronManger allows for some embedding of widgets on your main website, but when it’s time to transact, they do a “hand off” to their platform to complete the transaction. From the perspective of website integration, the “hand-off” is the least desirable option. One other limitation of most “hand-off” mechanics is that they often provide limited styling options to match your museum website’s branding and design. You can select colors, fonts, and add your logo, but most of the structure and layout of “hand-off” solutions are locked in.
TixTrack (Ticketure). Ticketure is also quite robust in its core capabilities. But it does not include a significant CRM feature. It does however offer a couple external CRMs integrations with Salesforce and Humanitru. While its core ticketing options are impressive there are a few limitations to keep in mind. Its transaction processing requires Stripe only, which is not that problematic since Stripe is so popular. It also only integrates with MailChimp for email marketing, but that also is a pretty popular option. Its donation options center around adding donations to ticket sales, rather than direct donation processing. That said, since it integrates with Salesforce there are a number of workarounds to enable stand alone donations. And while it does offer some sale of hard goods, such as adding snacks and beverages to ticket orders, it does not provide a full ecommerce system for selling full gift store inventory.
Veevart. Veevart was built from the ground up on Salesforce. One significant differentiator between Veevart and the other options is that Veevart includes not only ticketing, membership, and donations, but they also have a complete collection management system offering. In fact, Veevart’s roots started from the collections management side and has evolved over time to cover all aspects of museum content and transactions. If you are looking for true one stop shopping, one system that can support all the museum’s operations, Veevart is a great choice. It does not just integrate with Salesforce, or use Salesforce as the CRM aspect of the platform, it is entirely built in, on, and with Salesforce. Therefore if you want to customize or integrate with any other system, you know your systems will have profound potential for integration and expansion. And since Veevart are Salesforce experts, you don’t have to add another party into your support and development services. Veevart can provide full support over every aspect of its broad ranging capabilities.
ACME Ticketing. Another option, similar to PatronManager and Ticketure, that also works with Salesforce is ACME Tickets. ACME is still in the category of “hand-off” platforms, but they offer robust control over CSS styling. This allows for a closer match to your main website’s branding. ACME also provides a strong API. And so while most customs will use the hand-off method, a museum could build their own user interface utilizing their API and maintain complete control over the user experience of their ticketing, membership, and donation interactions. Lastly, ACME offers an integration with Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge system.
Blackbaud/Altru. Another popular platform for museum ticketing, membership, and donations is Blackbaud. Blackbaud has a range of sub-products offering tiered pricing levels for museums of different sizes. Altru, is one of their more popular offerings. In terms of core features, Blackbaud covers all the bases. But it is less integrable than Tessitura. While it does offer an API, it is not as robust, and the costs of licensing and developing with it tend to be prohibitive for many museums.
There are some third party platforms that have extended Altru’s integration abilities (Social Good Software and XTruLink, for example) but the costs of those additional services push the total cost of ownership even higher. As a result, most Altru implementations settle for the “hand-off” mechanism, where any ticket, donation, or membership link sends the user offsite to a second transactional site.
CenterEdge. CenterEdge offers the most robust Point of Purchase solution, even boasting a robust inventory management component. However, they are less focused on the CRM aspects of transaction management. They also only offer one integration option for email—Constant Contact. They are a closed system, with no website integration options. It’s a “hand off” only platform with no API available. Unless your museum sells a lot of hard goods, such that the POP aspects are your greatest concern, CenterEdge might not be the best fit.
For our purposes, considering these systems from a website integration standpoint, Tessitura and Spektrix are going to be the most integrable with your main website. PatronManager, Ticketure, Veevart, and ACME also have high potential for integration because of their use of Salesforce. Blackbaud and CenterEdge integration options are limited. CenterEdge has no website integration options.
Lower Cost Systems
In contrast to the more expensive enterprise level solutions these lower cost platforms tend to focus on ticket fees/percentages, with modest monthly software license fees (in the $100 – $300 per month range). Most of the lower cost options do not charge fees for free events, or for donations.
While the enterprise level platforms above offer robust capabilities, these less expensive alternatives also have well rounded capabilities. Often the more expensive options in the software market are not always significantly more robust than lower cost alternatives. Sometimes software platforms are expensive simply because they were built on older legacy technology stacks, which are more costly to maintain and support. Some newer platforms have the competitive advantage of having been developed on newer technology stacks, technologies that have enabled them to rapidly catch up in terms of features and capabilities.
So don’t let cost alone be an indicator of a platform’s suitability for your museum’s transactional needs.
In evaluating these lower cost options, we’ll also group them by their website integration capabilities.
Best Lower Cost Transaction Platforms for Website Integration
VBOtickets. VBOTickets offers a surprisingly comprehensive set of features given the significantly lower cost of their platform. VBO charges a monthly license fee around $100 per month (with a one time set up fee around $1,000). Beyond that you are only charged based on transactions. Most of these ticketing platforms will charge a percentage of the ticket price, on a sliding scale based on volume. Additionally, most of them offer free processing for free events and donations (including VBO).
One thing museums should keep in mind, when choosing a transaction platform, is that most of these providers structure their pricing around ticket sale price and volume. Museums don’t typically have as high a ticket volume as entertainment and concert venues. This is especially true if you offer free admission and only charge for exhibitions and special events. This being the case you should expect these transaction platforms to ask for a higher percentage of your ticket sales, or to adjust their license fees to compensate for lower ticket sales volume.
The core ticketing, membership, and donation aspects of VBO Tickets are quite robust, but they also offer a surprisingly robust CRM and Point of Purchase capability. With eCommerce added to your transactional platform you can implement an online museum store that can apply member discounts to the shopping cart.
What’s more, VBO offers a growing range of API integration capabilities, and can be fully embedded in the museum’s website—no “hand off”! VBO also provides developer access to their embedded form’s CSS files, so your developer can fully match the museum website’s styling.
Lastly, like Spektrix above, VBO can be implemented using Single Sign On, enabling the potential of member only content, or member augmented content.
Given the price point, their full range of capabilities, integration with your main website, robust styling control, and SSO—in our opinion VBOTickets is a great option for just about any museum.
SimpleTix. Another attractive lower-cost option is SimpleTix. They also cover the bases in terms of core functionality for ticketing, membership, and donations. Their platform is primarily designed to operate using Square transaction processing. They don’t exactly integrate into your website, rather, when a transaction is triggered via a ticket button, or a “become a member” button, a modal popup window appears to complete the transaction. While that’s not exactly integrated, it’s much better than the typical “hand-off” that most other platforms require.
SimpleTix does not have CRM capability built into it, however, they can work with automation platforms like Zapier or Make.com to sync transactions with contact data in whichever CRM you prefer. That is a nice feature to make your CRM choice more flexible, though on the other hand it does introduce the need to build and maintain those integrations.
Etix. Etix is a veteran in the ticketing space and is perhaps the easiest and quickest to implement. And one thing I love about their offering is that they include full access to their robust API with their basic pricing plans (based on a share of ticket revenue by volume). And while most of their clients opt for the easier to implement “hand-off” option, a museum could use that API to completely build the transaction screens into their core website.
However, in another regard Etix barely squeaked into our list due to our criteria that the platform handles tickets, donations, and memberships. While you can ask for donations as part of the ticketing process with Etix, they don’t have robust options for direct donation form processing.
One other important note on Etix, they are currently in the process of a major technology upgrade which will likely be completed in early to mid 2025. Given the strengths of Etix, it will be exciting to see what else they will deliver on their upgraded technology stack next year!
Of the lower cost options that offer the best website integration options VBO Tickets stands out as an easy choice. If donations are not a major requirement then Etix also stands out as a great option, especially if you want to invest in full website integration.
Low Cost Options With Limited or No Website Integration Options
NeonOne is a solid lower cost option for many museums. It began its life primarily as a specialized CRM for non-profits with its solid donation capabilities including a peer-to-peer fundraising option. It’s grown over the years to offer memberships and ticketing options. Unfortunately, NeonOne is a “hand-off” only platform. So while it is an excellent lower cost option for its core capabilities, if website integration is of any importance it’s a non-starter.
Audience View is very similar to NeonOne both in terms of its core features and its limitations for website integration. If website integration is not important of the essence for you, then Audience View is one to check out.
The last system on our list is Doubleknot. As we pointed out above, many of these platforms started out with a focus on one or two of the three main features needed. Some were primarily specialized CRM platforms that then added ticketing, others were ticketing focused and then added CRM. DoubleKnot’s core strengths came from the membership management aspects and so it’s going to be stronger than some of the others in this regard. It gets higher grades for its donation capabilities, but somewhat weaker on the ticketing side. That said, over the years all of these platforms have developed these other facets such that the real differences between them are pretty subtle. DoubleKnot does offer API capabilities, and an integration with Blackbaud’s RaisersEdge platform.
While there is a good degree of parity between the core capabilities of all of the platforms we’ve reviewed, when it comes to website integration, in our opinion Speaktrix stands out within the enterprise level options and VBO Tickets is the stand out among the lower cost set, but keep an eye out for the new version of Etix when that is released.
