Why Luma is eating Eventbrite — the London tech edition

If you go to enough London tech events you will have noticed something — basically nothing new is on Eventbrite anymore. The good stuff, the stuff that actually fills up in 90 minutes, is on Luma. Has been for about two years.

This is not me cheerleading for Luma. They have plenty of problems. But it is worth being honest about why this happened and what it means.

The actual reason Luma won

Everyone has a theory. The real reason is boring — Luma understood that for a tech founder posting an event, the thing that matters is "can I share a link in a Slack and have everyone register in 30 seconds." Eventbrite was building for venues and ticket scanners and conference organisers. Two completely different products, and the founder-world crowd quietly migrated.

A few specific things Luma got right:

• The link is the product. You share lu.ma/whatever in a tweet, a Slack, a WhatsApp, and people register. No "create an account first" hell.
• Calendars and series. A weekly meetup can live on a single calendar URL. Eventbrite never properly solved this.
• The aesthetic defaults are not embarrassing. This sounds petty but it is huge — a Luma page does not look like it was made in 2011.
• Email reminders are sane. Eventbrite spams you, Luma sends you exactly two emails.

That is mostly it. There is no big trick. They just made the boring stuff feel less bad.

What Eventbrite still does better

This bit gets ignored. Eventbrite is genuinely better than Luma for:

• Paid ticketing at scale. Selling 800 tickets to a conference at three price tiers with VAT? Eventbrite, every time.
• Box-office stuff. Comedy clubs, theatre, gig venues — the venue side of Eventbrite is properly built. Luma is not for that.
• SEO discovery. If you Google "[city] [thing] this weekend", Eventbrite pages still show up. Luma pages mostly do not.
• Refund and dispute handling. Eventbrite has actual customer service. Luma is "good luck."

So the framing of "Luma killed Eventbrite" is wrong. Luma killed Eventbrite for free or low-cost tech events in central London. That is a real but specific category.

What this looks like on the ground

If you are running a 30-person AI evening in Shoreditch with no tickets — Luma, obviously. If you are running a 400-person paid summit at the QEII Centre — Eventbrite, definately.

The middle ground is where it gets messy. A 150-person paid founders' breakfast at £20 — could go either way, and increasingly people are using Luma plus Stripe Checkout because the page is nicer, even though the tooling is rougher.

The thing nobody talks about is that this fragmentation is actively annoying for attendees. If you want to find every London AI event next week, you have to check both platforms, plus partybrite for the nightlife crossover, plus a couple of Substacks. There is no single source of truth.

The Luma problem nobody mentions

For all that Luma is the default — the platform itself is a black box. The discovery is bad, the search is bad, the way you find new events outside the ones your friends are already going to is basically "browse the calendar of whoever you trust." That is fine if you are already in the scene. It is rubbish if you are new to London.

This is the thing the AI events in London answer page is trying to fix — by pulling from both platforms and surfacing the good stuff regardless of where it was posted. Honestly that is the only sensible way to use these tools right now.

My actual advice

If you are running an event in London tech in 2026, default to Luma. You will fight your audience if you do not. The exceptions are paid ticketing, anything theatre or comedy adjacent, or anything where you genuinely need accomodation booking integrated.

If you are attending — assume the event you are looking for is on whichever platform the organiser feels comfortable with, which is increasingly Luma but is not always Luma. Use a tool that aggregates both, or accept that you are going to miss things.

The bigger picture is that London tech got a default platform back, which is good. We just lost a bunch of discovery in the process, which is bad. Net-net, probably a wash.