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Chobble Tickets vs Ticketek

Ticketek dominates large venue ticketing in Australia and New Zealand, but here's when Chobble Tickets is the better choice.

Different markets

Let's be upfront: Ticketek and Chobble Tickets serve very different markets. Ticketek is built for stadiums, arenas, and major tours across Australasia, whereas Chobble Tickets is built for community events, independent venues, and organisations that want control over their ticketing.

If you're selling tickets at the MCG or Qudos Bank Arena, Ticketek is probably unavoidable — many large venues are contractually locked to them. But if you're running a 200-capacity gig, a charity trivia night, or a community workshop, you don't need (or want) Ticketek.

Fees and pricing

Ticketek's fees are notoriously opaque and vary by event, venue, and contract. A typical service and handling fee is around $7–8 per transaction (roughly 2–3% of the transaction price), plus additional charges for ticket delivery, reissues, and credit card surcharges. In some cases the service fee can exceed the ticket price itself.

Chobble Tickets charges a flat £50/year (approximately AU$95), and payment processing fees from Stripe or Square are the only other cost — which go directly to the payment processor, not to us.

Interactive cost calculator

Drag the sliders to see how costs compare at different volumes:

Total takings £2,000.00
Chobble Tickets Ticketek
Annual fee £50.00 £0.00
Platform fees £0.00 £0.00
Payment processing £0.00 £0.00
Total cost per year £0.00 £0.00
Cost per ticket £0.00 £0.00

Ticketek fees vary by event and venue — this estimate uses approximately AU$8 per transaction (converted to GBP) as a typical service and handling fee. Actual fees may be higher or lower. Chobble Tickets: £50/year flat + Stripe processing (1.5% + 20p).

Feature comparison

Ticketek is built for a completely different market, but if you're considering whether you actually need it, here's what each platform offers:

Both platforms share some features:

  • Online ticket sales with payment processing
  • QR code or barcode scanning for entry
  • Email confirmations to ticket holders
  • Capacity management to prevent overselling
  • Mobile-friendly booking experience
  • Refund processing

Ticketek has features Chobble Tickets doesn't:

  • Massive distribution network — Ticketek sells over 23 million tickets to more than 20,000 events annually across Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia through its website, mobile app, phone sales, and retail outlet network
  • Reserved seating with interactive venue maps — detailed seat selection for stadiums, arenas, and theatres with exact views from each section
  • Exclusive venue contracts — many major venues (MCG, Qudos Bank Arena, Adelaide Entertainment Centre) are contractually locked to Ticketek, making it the only option
  • NFC tap-and-go entry — world-first tap-and-go ticketing using NFC technology, awarded global Ticketing Business of the Year
  • Afterpay integration — first ticketing platform globally to offer buy-now-pay-later for ticket purchases
  • Dynamic pricing — automatically adjust ticket prices based on demand, similar to airline pricing
  • Retail outlet network — physical ticket sales through outlets at major shopping centres, newsagencies, and other locations
  • Phone and call centre sales — buy tickets over the phone through a dedicated call centre
  • Ticket resale marketplace — official resale platform for sold-out events
  • Accessible seating management — dedicated wheelchair accessible spaces, hearing impaired tickets with hearing loop support, sign language interpreter tickets, and Companion Card support
  • Large-scale analytics and data — TEG's data analytics division provides audience demographics, sales-by-location reporting, and enterprise-level insights
  • Multi-event season passes — manage season tickets, memberships, and recurring subscriptions for sports and entertainment
  • Box office POS — sell tickets at physical box offices and on-site locations
  • Mobile app — dedicated consumer app for ticket management, browsing events, and receiving notifications
  • TEG Live integration — connections to TEG's broader live entertainment ecosystem including concert promotion, venue operations, and touring

Chobble Tickets has features Ticketek doesn't offer small organisers:

  • End-to-end encryption — attendee data is encrypted at rest with hybrid RSA-OAEP + AES-256-GCM (notable given Ticketek's 2024 data breach that exposed up to 30 million users' data)
  • Open source — every line of code is public under AGPLv3
  • Self-hosting option — run the platform on your own servers for free
  • Flat annual pricing — £50/year with no per-ticket fees, compared to Ticketek's ~$7–8 service fee per transaction
  • Full data ownership — you control your attendee data, not Ticketek
  • No exclusive contracts — use Chobble Tickets alongside any other platform
  • Apple & Google Wallet tickets — attendees can add tickets to their phone wallet
  • ICS calendar and RSS feeds — subscribers get automatic updates
  • Pay-what-you-want pricing — let attendees choose their own price
  • Daily/recurring events — per-date capacity with calendar picker
  • Event groups with tiered ticketing — organise related events into collections for multi-event bookings with a single checkout, and create ticket tiers (VIP, general admission, etc.) sharing a venue capacity cap
  • Custom questions — add multiple-choice questions to events and collect answers at checkout
  • Public & admin API and webhooks — build custom integrations
  • Custom email providers — use Resend, Postmark, SendGrid, or Mailgun so emails come from your domain, not the platform's
  • Customisable email templates — full control over confirmation emails with Liquid syntax
  • Custom domain — your ticketing at your own web address
  • Apple Pay and Google Pay — accept wallet payments at checkout via Stripe
  • Transparent pricing — no hidden fees, no negotiations, no drip pricing
  • Community Interest Company — run by a CIC, not a private equity portfolio company

Data ownership and security

In May 2024, Ticketek suffered a major data breach that exposed the personal information of up to 30 million users — including names, dates of birth, and email addresses — through a compromised third-party cloud platform. The stolen database was listed for sale on a cybercrime forum.

With Chobble Tickets, attendee data is encrypted end-to-end with hybrid RSA-OAEP + AES-256-GCM. Even if someone accessed the database, the data would be unreadable without the encryption keys that only you hold.

When Ticketek makes sense

  • You're running events at large Australian venues that require Ticketek (contractual obligation)
  • You need reserved seating for thousands of seats with interactive maps
  • You want access to Ticketek's massive buyer network across Australasia
  • You need box office POS, retail outlets, and phone sales
  • You're selling season passes for major sporting codes

When Chobble Tickets is the better choice

  • You're an independent venue, community group, or small organiser
  • You want to keep your ticket revenue instead of losing $7+ per transaction in service fees
  • Privacy and encryption matter to you — especially after Ticketek's 2024 data breach
  • You value open source and data ownership
  • You're a charity or school (£25/year)
  • You want Apple/Google Wallet, calendar feeds, or a public API
  • You don't want a platform marketing competing events to your audience

Who owns Ticketek?

Ticketek was originally part of Nine Entertainment in Australia. In 2015, private equity firm Affinity Equity Partners bought Ticketek from Nine for A$640 million and rebranded the parent company as TEG (Ticketek Entertainment Group).

In 2019, US-based private equity firm Silver Lake — which specialises in technology investing — acquired TEG for a reported A$1.3 billion. TEG's empire now spans ticketing, live entertainment, data analytics, and venue operations across Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and the UK, including brands like TEG Live, TEG Dainty, Qudos Bank Arena, and Eventfinda (acquired in 2025).

Ticketek has received sustained criticism for excessive fees. Consumer advocacy group Choice gave Ticketek and Ticketmaster a joint Shonky Award in 2012 for excessive booking fees, and the Australian federal government has promised legislation to ban the kind of drip pricing tactics Ticketek has been accused of.

Chobble Tickets is run by one person as a Community Interest Company (CIC) — a UK legal structure that locks the company's assets for community benefit. All of Chobble's code is public under AGPLv3, and the platform can be self-hosted by anyone without depending on Chobble as a company.

Pricing sources

Ticketek does not publish a standard public fee schedule — fees vary by event, venue, and contract. The pricing estimates used on this page are based on publicly reported figures. Check the links below for the latest information.