Great virtual conference tool!

A fantastic platform for managing virtual events.

A very impressive platform for organizing events virtually.

Pros

This is an excellent software for organizing online event which offers several benefits. Firstly, It has a mobile app which allows participants to attend the events remotely even with a low data. Secondly, enabled features for socializing and networking helps the audience to feel the sense of community virtually. Finally, managing sessions and agenda by setting reminders helps audience to plan well during the event.

Cons

Nothing much in the cons. Just adding a feature for a detailed overview of all sessions will complete the app.

Extremely user friendly

Pros

From the first time I used Whova for a conference it was clear that it was a very user friendly app. Messaging and making connections is extremely easy. After a year of not using the app, and even having deleted and re-downloaded it, it remembered my login information and still had my old messages saved. I haven't used many of the additional features that the conference had enabled, but did look at them, and it has a lot of great networking capabilities. Definitely recommend both administrators orchestrating events and users to use Whova.

Cons

When using Whova on the desktop it does not sync well with updating that messages have been open on the app. It'll look like you have new messages even though you've already opened them. Additionally once you've messaged someone it doesn't indicate that until you go into the messages, or if you click "say hi" instead. I have decided to just use that messaging feature instead.

Upgrade Options and Double Dipping Billing - Poor Customer Service

We hosted an event in August 2022. It was a successful event but unfortunately our experience with WHOVA was very disappointing. We procured the software and opted for 10 sponsor package. Then we upgraded to a 20 sponsor package and paid the difference in pricing. Fortunately, we went over 20 sponsors and then called WHOVA to upgrade us to the unlimited package. To our surprise, they would not allow us to upgrade to an unlimited option. They wanted to keep the fee for the 20 sponsors and then we had to pay close to another $2k for the unlimited package. We protested this with them since this is double dipping. We had about 5 more sponsors over the 20 we had paid for. We are therefore very disappointed with their approach. We sent numerous emails to our sales person as well as the supervisors in charge as well as their general email ID. Not one email or phone call was received back from them to even have a discussion so that we could bring closure to this.We are a small not for profit run by professionals and 100% voluntary. It is for this reason, we thought to share our concern and experience so that anyone else who may be looking for event management apps is aware upfront. We are happy to share our experience with anyone who may like to know more at [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

Pros

The software overall has the functionality needed for a small to mid sized event. However, the user interface is not very inviting to the end user

Cons

Everything is being sold as add-ons. An event management software should have all of the basic functionality packaged in. The add-on features add to the total cost and the pricing overall does not become very transparent to the end user.

Whova Leveled Up my Conference Experience

When getting ready for an upcoming conference, the event organizers suggested we as attendees install the conference app, Whova. I'd used similar apps in the past that were buggy, slow, and were honestly worse to interact with than the hard copy event agenda, so my expectations were not high. However, Whova blew me away. The ability to introduce myself to other attendees and see the organizations and bios of others helped me prepare for the conference in a way I had never been able to - I knew exactly who I wanted to network with in advance. I also loved the ability to customize my own event agenda, but still easily toggle back to the full agenda...we've all been in the situation at conferences where all the talks sound good and end up changing our mind, and Whova made that seamless. I honestly don't want to attend another event that DOESN'T use Whova. I loved it that much. I will note that it was clear our event organizers worked hard to make sure content was up to date, and they did a lot of legwork to get attendees to use the app - without that advance effort from the organizers I don't think Whova would have been optimally utilized and it could have completely changed my perception of the app. Go Whova and go conference organizers for making this awesome!

Pros

The networking! I loved that I could peruse attendees like I was scrolling through a mini LinkedIn and connect with them there. It not only made it easy to find the people I wanted to talk to during the conference, but also made it easy to find people again after the conference to add them on real LinkedIn.

Cons

While I liked the way you could take notes within each event space on the app, it would have been awesome to be able to link my notes and the pre-uploaded presentation to my own notes app. This is so minor, though.