3 Overture alternatives for artist booking & tour management

As a trusted booking platform in the entertainment industry, Overture has a lot to offer artist booking agencies of all shapes and sizes. But you may be considering switching to another platform that’s easier to use, more affordable, or delivers specific features that Overture lacks.

In this post, we’ll look at the pros and cons of Overture and three alternatives for your agency to keep growing. Here’s our TL;DR version:

• Overture is best for booking agencies working with classical orchestras.
• SystemOne is best as an all-in-one booking agency solution.
• Gigwell is best for individual artists, agents, and talent buyers handling contracts & online payments.
• Master Tour by Eventric is best for tour managers, touring artists, and production managers.

Quick overview table: Overture vs SystemOne vs Gigwell vs Master Tour

Before we explore each artist booking platform in more detail, here’s a quick overview of the most burning questions you may have:

OK, let’s take a deep dive into the features, pros and cons, and pricing of each of these platforms.

Overture overview

As a unified platform for managing bookings across various genres, Overture offers a comprehensive toolset that’s easy to use. The interface design might feel a little dated, but underneath the paintwork, it has all the features you need for booking and managing shows.

Overture aims to cover the entire artist booking flow, from processing bookings and generating contracts to managing itineraries and ensuring invoices are paid.

The platform is used by large and small agencies working with bands, DJs, and corporate acts. But it really shines for its specialized classical music booking flow. You can enter the repertoire, orchestration, and rehearsal information to keep classical shows organized.

Overture also has specific deal types for classical shows, which often carry extra expenses like multiple hotel stays and large instrument transport.

There are various document templates available, but the Overture team must assist you with customizing your template fields. The platform also offers automated digital document signing via Dropbox Sign, at an extra cost of about €1 per contract sent.

We like that you can share tasks and notes with your team to make sure each show is completed on time and everyone gets paid. And you can chat with the onboard AI to find answers to simple queries like, “What did X artist get paid for their previous show?”

Pros & cons of Overture

Overture has been around for over 15 years and is a trusted artist booking platform, but there may be a few features or flows that are missing for your agency. Let’s look at some of the pros and cons of using Overture.

Overture pricing

The pricing is simple and easy to calculate, but you might see bills rack up with the extra costs for sending digital contracts with Dropbox Sign. Overture’s Agency package includes all features and can be used by up to two agents, with each additional agent adding to the price. If you have more than 15 agents, you can contact their sales team for a quote.

Overture doesn’t offer a free trial or monthly billing, which means you must lock into an annual contract before you can use all the features.

SystemOne overview

SystemOne is an all-in-one platform for booking agents to sell more shows, work faster, and stay in control. It recently underwent a rebrand and a major platform refactoring, with UI/UX improvements across the board. The user-friendly dark/light mode interface is localized in five languages:

• English
• German
• Dutch
• Spanish
• Portuguese

SystemOne’s built-in document eSign module automates contract and rider merging and signing. It sends reminders and notifications to ensure all parties sign on time. The best thing is that it carries no additional cost with no third-party involvement.

Managing advancing and logistics is also easy and efficient in SystemOne. You can set the requirements and share with promoters or other external stakeholders, and get notified when they accept, decline, or leave feedback on requests.

The sidebar navigation enables you to swiftly switch between your integrated booking calendars, address book, and financial reports. You can find the settings menu in the top right corner of the screen, where you can customize pretty much anything on your account.

The preloaded basic email templates help you hit the ground running from day one, and you can create and customize your own templates with localized text.

Get a feel for SystemOne by following the prompts in the interactive demo below:

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Pros & cons of SystemOne

From Germany to Brazil, over 400 booking agencies worldwide use SystemOne for their day-to-day operations. The platform has been serving its loyal customers for over 15 years, with some agencies sticking around since day one.

The pros definitely outweigh the cons, but there’s always room for improvement.

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SystemOne pricing

SystemOne’s pricing is simple and predictable. You start with a base price and only pay for the number of agent seats you add. No hidden costs or extra fees for sending contracts or inviting external stakeholders. You can also opt for annual pricing at a 10% discount.

The artist & crew mobile app is also free of charge and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

Gigwell overview

Gigwell is a strong contender as an Overture alternative, offering a robust system for artist booking. With a simple top bar navigation to the main dashboards and a “roster” tab with all your artists, Gigwell seems like an easy system to use at first glance. But once you dive into the dashboards, you’ll find many tabs on the left and top of each page, plus some settings buried multiple clicks away.

Gigwell can quickly become difficult to use when you’re managing multiple shows and need a customized platform.

But once you get used to where everything is, it actually gives you a comprehensive overview of all your deals, shows, and payments. The “reports” tab lets you filter views and download bookings, events, invoices, expenses, and more. The filtering options are somewhat limited, but you can download results as CSV files and manipulate the data in the sheet.

Pros & cons of Gigwell

Gigwell provides a similar experience to Overture in that it has everything you need under the hood, but the UI/UX feels difficult to navigate.

Gigwell pricing

There are two options for Gigwell’s Productivity product (Book): The single-license artist subscription, and the seat-based agency subscription that varies based on usage (number of agents).

Gigwell also offers Tour IQ, which is a venue database, and Ticket Counts Pro for ticketing management. You may need multiple licenses and logins for these.

Master Tour overview

First of all, Master Tour by Eventric isn’t an artist booking software. So why is it on this list? It has many features that booking agents use, such as:

• Tour logistics & travel arrangements
• Schedule creation
• Calendar integrations
• Guest lists
• Advancing
• Accounting features for income, expenses, and settlements

Like the other tools we’re analyzing here, it also has a mobile app for artists and tour managers to keep track of their tour logistics.

After downloading the latest desktop version of Master Tour, the software takes quite some time to load. You must log in and add your Company Name again when you start it up. The interface is clean and easy to navigate, making it especially user-friendly when you’re traveling. It also has a smooth onboarding process to help you set up your first tour.

You can set up custom advancing for each event in your tour, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to collaborate on this with promoters (unless, perhaps, they use the mobile app with an account connected to yours). Travel arrangements are also a cinch, as Master Tour enables you to add ground, air, rail, and sea tickets.

The Google integration enables you to autofill venue details by simply searching and selecting your venue from the database.

Pros & cons of Master Tour

As mentioned, Master Tour is missing some key features for booking agencies, namely handling booking requests and artist scheduling. So if you’re starting a new booking agency, Master Tour may not be your best bet.

Master Tour pricing

There’s only really one license (Professional), and the pricing is super straightforward. Master Tour also offers a 14-day free trial.

Now that we’ve looked at each platform individually, let’s compare the winners in various categories to Overture. These categories are key feature sets every booking agency needs for efficient artist booking and show planning.

Booking requests & artist scheduling

• Winner: SystemOne offers highly customizable booking forms, availability & exclusivity checks, and multiple show views.
• Runner-up: Gigwell also has customizable booking forms and offers basic scheduling.

Overture is neck-and-neck with Gigwell in this category, as its booking and scheduling features are robust and flexible.

Contact management

• Winner: SystemOne’s address book management is the most intuitive, with custom tags and filters to keep your contact list organized.
• Runner-up: Gigwell provides contact–deal workflows, which are handy CRM features for booking agents.

Overture also has a complete address book module to connect contacts with shows and artists.

Communication & collaboration

• Winner: SystemOne, with organized task management in most platform views.
• Runner-up: Overture, with shareable contact tasks and notes.

Task management

Overture’s task management is easy to use, with default tasks that can be customized to suit your agency. It also includes a notes feature to help you stay on top of show planning.

Email automation

You can set custom email reminders triggered by different booking activities in Overture, and add dynamic fields with booking information.

In SystemOne you can also share really large files via email with a download link.

Advancing & contract management

• Winner: SystemOne is the top choice for its automated advancing and eSign workflows.
• Runner-up: Master Tour, for its comprehensive advancing and tour logistics capabilities.

In Overture, the contract and rider can only be merged in email, and the document signing process can be automated via a third-party service that incurs extra costs. Advancing documents can be sent as landing pages as part of your booking workflow, which is super handy.

SystemOne’s native eSign module empowers you to merge contracts and riders, and automate the entire signing and advancing process—at no extra cost.

Templates

• Winner: SystemOne shines with highly customizable document, email, and spreadsheet templates.
• Runner-up: Gigwell also offers customizable templates with merge fields.

Document templates

SystemOne gives you complete control over document layout and branding. You can use Microsoft Word and merge fields as a template editor. Overture’s document templates are also highly customizable, but you need their team to add new fields and upload templates.

Email templates

With SystemOne, you have extensive customization options. For example, you can tailor and send personalized deal memos, travel booking requests, hotel confirmations, final itinerary emails, and much more.

SystemOne has basic templates that you can copy and tailor to your agency’s communication needs. On top of that, you can set different languages for each template to localize every email you send.

Overture also offers complete customization of email templates for various messages, such as booking cancellation, artist confirmation, and artist invitation mails.

Excel templates

Both Overture and SystemOne provide highly customizable Excel and CSV exports.

Invoice management & financial reporting

• Winner: Gigwell offers accessible financial tools for agents and allows integrated instant payment on invoices.
• Runner-up: SystemOne, for financial tracking & reporting across artists and promoters with flexible file download options.

In Overture, you also have access to all the financial management tools you may need at your booking agency. You can create invoices, deal types, and credit notes, and log expenses and payments. You’re able to specify currency conversion manually for the conversions you do most often (for example, GBP to EUR) and set the rate to update once per day.

Detailed comparison table: Overture vs SystemOne vs Gigwell vs Master Tour

Here’s our side-by-side breakdown of all the features Overture and its three alternatives offer:

Which Overture alternative will you choose?

Overture is an especially popular choice for classical music booking because of its specialized workflows for orchestras, but it also caters to other types of booking agencies. It offers comprehensive feature sets for address book management, contracts, artist scheduling & advancing, and reporting.

But alternatives like SystemOne, Gigwell, and Master Tour each have something excellent to offer your agency that Overture may be lacking.

While Master Tour is especially intuitive and powerful for tour logistics, advancing, and crew management, it doesn’t have the booking features you’ll need.

Gigwell is a strong alternative to Overture, with an almost mirror-image offering in terms of features and usability.

SystemOne is a long-standing and trusted artist booking platform with all features developed and maintained in-house. With a fresh, easy-to-use interface and new features/improvements launched every month, it will give you the advantage you need in an unpredictable music industry niche.

Learn more about SystemOne by booking a demo or request a free trial to try it out for yourself.