Revel vs Luma
Revel is a European alternative to Luma: same use case, headquartered in Austria and governed by EU GDPR, while Luma (Luma Labs) is based in the United States.
By the EU Alternatives team Last updated
Run ticketing, RSVPs, memberships and reserved seating with QR check-in and attendee questionnaires, on hosted servers or your own.
- Jurisdiction
- EU / EEA
- Primary privacy law
- EU GDPR
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- No
- Open source
- Yes
- Free tier
- Yes
Luma has become the default invite page for tech meetups and community events, thanks to polished event pages, calendars people subscribe to and easy RSVP approval. The free plan charges a 5% platform fee on paid tickets, while Luma Plus at 59 dollars a month, billed annually, removes it; Stripe card fees apply on top. It is run by Luma Labs, Inc. in San Francisco under California law.
- Jurisdiction
- United States
- GDPR by default
- Requires DPA + TIA
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- Yes
Revel vs Luma at a glance
| Revel | Luma | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Austria | United States |
| Data jurisdiction | EU / EEA | United States |
| Primary privacy law | EU GDPR | Requires DPA + transfer assessment |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | No | Yes |
| Best for | Teams that need this built for European data-protection requirements | Teams already invested in the Luma Labs ecosystem |
Choose Revel if…
- You want a provider governed by a European privacy regime
- GDPR or public-sector data-protection requirements apply to you
- You want to start free and scale up later
- Open-source code and self-hosting matter to you
- You'd rather back the European tech ecosystem
Stick with Luma if…
- You depend on integrations only available in the Luma Labs ecosystem
- Your organisation has no EU data-residency constraints
- Migration costs outweigh the jurisdiction benefits for now
About Revel
Revel is a free, open-source event platform for communities, clubs and independent venues. It handles ticketing, RSVPs and memberships in one place, with no ads and no data mining, and free events cost nothing on the hosted version.
Organisers sell free or paid tickets with tiers and reserved seating, then check guests in by QR code at the door. Venues get a seat map designer with zone pricing, clubs get recurring memberships and class passes delivered as wallet cards, and communities can vet attendees through door-policy questionnaires and keep guest lists private. The whole stack is MIT-licensed on GitHub and can run on Revel's servers or yours.
Key benefits:
- Free events at no cost, with paid tickets at 3% plus EUR 0.50
- Reserved seating with a seat map designer and zone pricing
- Memberships and class passes on monthly or annual plans
- Attendee questionnaires to vet guests and keep events safe
- QR check-in and wallet passes for smooth entry
- Potluck boards so guests can coordinate who brings what
- Self-hostable under the MIT licence, with a published self-hosting guide
Revel is operated by Biagio Distefano, a sole trader in Vienna, Austria, and its terms are governed by Austrian law. Data is stored in Germany on Hetzner servers, transactional email goes through Brevo in France, and payments are processed by Stripe. Requests pass through Cloudflare, a US company, and adding a pass to Google Wallet sends data to Google in the United States. There are no tracking cookies or analytics.
Ideal for grassroots communities, queer and kink collectives, clubs and small venues that want control over their guest data without paying marketplace fees.
Why choose Revel over Luma?
The decisive argument is data jurisdiction. Luma is headquartered in the United States, which means personal data processed through it can be subject to non-EU legal regimes: the US CLOUD Act, FISA 702, or similar laws depending on the provider. After the 2020 Schrems II ruling, EU organisations must carry out a transfer impact assessment for every such data flow.
Revel removes that overhead. As an Austria-based provider, it operates under EU GDPR, and data stays inside the EU/EEA by default. For regulated sectors such as health, public administration, and finance, that's not a nice-to-have but a requirement. For everyone else, it's concentration-risk insurance: you avoid depending on a single jurisdiction that can change the rules without warning.