What is a good free alternative to Google Forms for event registration?

Google Forms is free with a personal Google account, everyone recognises it, and responses land in Google Sheets where you can run your own formulas. Google's Forms page does not list a response cap. Respondents do not need a Google account unless you add a file-upload question, which requires them to sign in.

For an internal workshop, a volunteer rota, a potluck or an interest poll before you even pick a date, that is usually all you need. Switch when guests need something to show at the door, when you take money, when you approve applicants, or when the link is shared in public and needs to look like an event rather than a questionnaire. Our AET vs Google Forms page goes through those breaking points one by one.

The eight alternatives fall into two groups.

Form builders (Tally, Jotform, Typeform) replace the form itself: better design, more field types, logic, file uploads and payments through Stripe or PayPal. They do not create an event page, tickets or a door list. They are the right move when your problem is the form.

Event platforms (Luma, Eventbrite, Ticket Tailor, Zeffy, AET) replace the whole workflow: an event page, registration, a confirmation or ticket for each guest, check-in at the door and, if you charge, ticket sales. They are the right move when your problem is everything that happens after someone fills in the form.

A practical test: if you are copying names from a spreadsheet into a printed list on the day, you need an event platform, not a better form.

Checked on each vendor's own pricing or help pages on 15 October 2026. A dash means the vendor page we checked does not state it.

Payment processors (Stripe, PayPal, Square, plata by mono) charge their own fee on every platform except Zeffy, which covers card fees for nonprofits.

On the free plan, AnyEventTool gives you an event page (poster, description, place with map, date with countdown, program and speakers), a registration form with standard fields plus custom field types, applications with organizer approval, anonymous registration, QR tickets by email, a check-in scanner in the phone browser and participant export to Excel. You can reveal the venue, date or time only in the ticket, and sell paid tickets with a 0% platform fee: the guest pays your own account (Stripe, or plata by mono in Ukraine).

Where it is weaker than the alternatives: the free plan allows 3 new events a month (Pro: 30, for 29 USD a month); there is no live sync to Google Sheets, no Zapier or REST API and no native mobile apps; there is no discovery marketplace like Eventbrite's; and there is no recurring-event series yet. If you only need a list, Tally or Google Forms is simpler. Step by step: how to create a registration page for free.

We opened each vendor's own pricing page and, where the pricing page was silent, its help centre, on 15 October 2026, and recorded only what those pages state. Where a vendor page was inconsistent (Typeform lists two different prices for its Basic plan; Ticket Tailor's FAQ mentions a 2,000-ticket threshold next to the 5,000 free tickets in its pricing table) we left the number out or used the figure from the pricing table. We did not use third-party reviews.

Disclosure. This page is published by the team behind AnyEventTool. AET is listed with its limits, and we recommend other tools where they fit better. Prices change; check the linked pages before you decide.