If you’re planning an event, whether it’s a small workshop, an online masterclass, or even a large conference, choosing the right ticketing platform can make a world of difference. 

Tickets by Selar and Tix.Africa are two popular options among organizers and creators across Africa. These two platforms offer a range of features like guest management, ticket tiers, and multi-currency payment processing, among others. 

But, as you can imagine, there are key differences that define these platforms. This article compares both platforms, highlighting differences across features, pricing, integrations, and creator support. At the end of it, you’ll have enough info to decide for yourself which would work best for you as an African creator.

Head to Head: Tickets by Selar vs. Tix.Africa

Here’s a quick breakdown of Tickets by Selar’s features vs Tix’s.

Feature	Tickets by Selar	Tix.Africa
Pricing (NGN)	4% + ₦50 per transaction	5% + ₦100 per paid ticket
Supported currencies – Publicly listed	11 — NGN, USD, GBP, GHS, KES, ZAR, TZS, UGX. RWF, XOF, and XAF	3 — NGN, GHS, ZAR
Designed with creators in mind (all-in-one ecosystem of creator tools)	✓	Not quite
Calendar integration	✓	✗
Group tickets	✓	✓
Mobile app	Available on Android and iOS	Only available on iOS
Offline guest check-in	✓	✗
On-site event support	✓	✓
Hybrid events	✓	✗
Affiliate marketing	✓	✗
Integrations	Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel, Zapier, etc.	Google Analytics and Meta Pixel
Customer redirection after ticket purchase	✓	✗

Before moving forward, it’s worth noting that this table focuses on less common but important features. However, outside of these, Selar and Tix share a few features, including: 

• Ticket tiers – Free, Regular, VIP
• QR codes
• Detailed tickets with meeting links alongside start/end times
• Custom checkout forms/questions, etc.  

That said, Selar offers more affordability, more currencies, more integrations and, most importantly, it powers your entire creator journey from creating your course/ebook to organizing an event that supports it.

Notably, with the offline guest check-in feature, it’s possible to continue checking guests in even when internet service providers have downtimes.

Tix.Africa’s Discover page also comes in handy for users looking for more places to unwind or learn, depending on what adventures they’re hooked on.

But, with 10/11 perfect scores ahead of 4/11 (calculated based on the number of features where each platform matches or outperforms the other perfectly), the answer about which to use leans noticeably in Selar’s direction.

Feature-by-Feature Walkthrough of Tickets by Selar vs. Tix.Africa

The table above works great if you’re short on time. But there’s always room for context. 

1. Pricing and Supported Currencies

Charges by Platform

Selar charges 4% + ₦50 per transaction. Tix.Africa charges 5% + ₦100 per paid ticket. 

Interestingly, with Selar and Tix.Africa, you can push the transaction fees to your guests/customers. But, even if you push the fees to your customers, they still pay less with Selar, compared to Tix.Africa.

Charges in Other Currencies

On Ghanaian product sales, Tix.Africa charges 7.5% + GH¢5 vs Selar’s 5% + GH¢1. In South Africa, Tix.Africa charges 5% + R5 versus Selar’s 6% + R2. Multiply that by your expected number of ticket sales per event, and the charges immediately start to add up.

This wouldn’t be a problem if events weren’t already very expensive to organize and if you didn’t need every penny you could get. But they are, and you do.

Who Wins? Hint — It’s Selar.

Now, we can’t entirely say that we do not understand the prices. Running a business requires money. Plus, Tix.Africa doesn’t charge on free tickets (we don’t either).

Nevertheless, Selar comes out on top and lets you keep more of your earnings. That aside, Selar supports eleven currencies against their three, as seen on the table above.

2. Specific Attention to Creator Needs

Selar is built for creators across the world and in Africa specifically. Tix, on the other hand, is built for event organizers — individuals or organizations — and event goers. 

This slight distinction might seem inconsequential, but its importance comes out in minor details:

Upsells, Cross-sells, and Event Discovery

The first and perhaps less obvious is in Selar’s upsells and cross-sells — features that Tix.Africa does not offer.

These features, deployed in just a few easy steps, recommend other products on your storefront to customers at the point of purchase, giving you the chance to seamlessly convert them while they’re most open to spending.

The unique benefit of this feature is that you’re getting more value per customer as opposed to having one-and-done deals on your tickets and/or digital products.

To put that into context, let’s assume you already have an ebook on “How to Make Your First Million in One Year Selling Digital Products” and you’re organizing a networking session with people who’ve made a million selling the same.

Your customer lands on your storefront and they buy their ticket to the biggest African creator event of the year. In the process, they see the ebook and could immediately be converted on that.

It’s a win for you and for them, too.

3. Flexibility and Multi-Event Type Support

The average African creator has been “doing things” long before Silicon Valley turned it into their rallying cry for chasing your dreams. We pursue passions we are interested in and figure things out along the way. For that level of ambition, there’s a need for flexibility.

On-site Support

As far as flexibility is concerned, Tix.Africa offers on-site support for their customers. Tickets by Selar offers the same service and our experience with customers who are occasionally overwhelmed in the organization process has given us enough evidence to know that it’s a valuable feature. 

But, outside of this shared feature, a few other areas are worth considering.

Convenience During Internet Downtimes

One of the first and most obvious areas of concentration is support for offline guest check-ins. In the last 12 – 18 months or so, even MTN, one of the biggest network service providers in Africa, experienced outages.

Things like this happen. To ensure smooth sailing regardless, Selar has an offline guest check-in feature that allows you to continue admitting guests even when your internet connection is bad.

Tix.Africa does not offer this feature. 

Hybrid Events

During COVID-19, hybrid events were all the rage, with some people joining events in person and the rest joining online to avoid congesting the venue.

Without COVID-19, though, there’s still a solid argument to be made for hybrid events. 

For starters, sometimes, halls simply cannot accommodate the capacity of interested attendees. Other times, there’s a need to document the event better by livestreaming and gathering real-time audience reactions.

The list goes on, and Selar fully recognizes the importance of these sorts of events for creators. Not just event organizers, but creators specifically who want a little more out of every event they organize.

For that, Tickets by Selar offers hybrid tickets. People can buy in person and online. 

Tix.Africa only offers online or onsite tickets. No in-between.

Optimization for Attendance via Calendar Reminders

The journey doesn’t end when the customer makes the ticket purchase. As stated earlier, Selar pays specific attention to what the creator needs.

Especially for online events, there’s the option for attendees to add the event directly to their calendar. Nobody forgets when or where it should happen. Attendance rates go up.

Tix, unfortunately, does not offer this feature.

4. Integrations and Power Tools

For creators who need a bit more, there has to be a range of ways to improve your experience with a ticketing platform.

Tix.Africa’s Integrations

With Tix.Africa, there’s Google Analytics and Meta Pixel. These are absolutely great for giving a bird’s eye view of how your visitors behave, what they do when they’re on your page, how well your event marketing team is doing, and everything else in between. In more ways than one, it’s great.

Tickets by Selar’s Integrations

Selar offers Facebook Pixel and Google Tag Manager, a tool that allows you to add a range of analytics and tracking tools to your storefront. 

With Google Tag Manager, you can keep things simple and just add Google Analytics or you can go a step further and also add the tracking codes for Hotjar, TikTok Pixel, and a range of other tools with different capabilities.

Basically, with Tix, you have one option for tracking user behavior – Google Analytics. With Tickets by Selar, you have GTM which opens you up to a world of possibilities that include Google Analytics and several others. 

Beyond Analytics

Apart from checking out what users are doing, with Selar, you can add integrations like Mailchimp, SendPulse, Kit (formerly ConvertKit), Zapier, etc., and get all their functionalities with just a few button clicks.

5. Optimization for Ticket Sales via Discovery and Affiliate Marketing

Tix.Africa helps event organizers get more eyeballs on their functions by adding them to a discovery page where users can find them and get a ticket. It’s simple and straightforward.  

Selar, on the other hand, has an affiliate network with 40,000 affiliates. Any of these people could pick up your ticket and start actively marketing it to attendees, driving up sales for your events and masterclasses with practically no effort from your end.

What’s more, Selar supports African creators with their marketing via newsletter and social media spotlights. This essentially places you in front of an audience, thousands strong, across multiple channels, improving visibility. 

Other Features that Make Tickets by Selar an Excellent Companion for African Creators

The range of capabilities that Tickets by Selar has is extensive. Beyond the features we’ve highlighted above, there are a few others that are worth noting:

• Group Bookings and Check-ins: This allows more than one person to book tickets for a group of attendees and all of them can be checked in at once at the event instead of having to look through all their tickets one after the other.
• Multi-Device Check-in: This splits the workload across several people on your team and allows you to check in guests from different devices, speeding up the work and maximizing efficiency. 
• Guest List and Attendee Management: Much like Tix.Africa, you can easily access your list of guests and manage their info from an intuitive screen. Whether you’re organizing a small or large event, you have full control.
• Automated Abandoned Cart Emails: Every time someone leaves your checkout page without making a purchase, Selar goes the extra mile and sends them an email reminding them almost instantly that they’ve got unfinished business with you.
• Sales Control: Gives you full control over ticket limits based on event capacity. With this feature, you can restrict the number of tickets per purchaser and close ticket sales whenever you want with a simple click.

The list of features that Tickets by Selar offers goes on and all of them come together to help organize a successful event. But you shouldn’t simply take our word for it.

Real-World Example — The Shift Conference

The Shift Conference is an annual event hosted by Dr. Sam Adeyemi. Its earlier iterations saw about 600 – 800 attendees, especially in the United States.

However, when the event came to Lagos, Nigeria, the numbers were more than double and, the thing about unprecedented success is that it can be such a hassle to handle when you’re, you know, not prepared for it — as people tend to be for unprecedented successes.

The Shift Conference team outsourced ticketing and guest management to Selar and successfully sold 2,000 tickets in an organized manner with practically no stress.

The details are here.

Final Verdict

Tix.Africa is excellent for traditional events. You log in, create an event, choose your ticket tiers and the rest is history. Some features are somewhat limited but it works so well that they’ve been able to get impressive partnerships and events over the years.

But, if you’re looking for a bit more, Selar would be the place to be. Not only does it also work great for traditional events, it’s the place where events, products, affordability, community, and flexibility blend seamlessly.

Start selling on Selar today.