The FestForums® Resource Guide: Tools, Tech, and Trusted Partners
By William Davis, FestForums | May 21, 2026
Whether you're running a three-day camping festival or a single-day urban event, the resources and partners you choose behind the scenes are just as important as what happens on stage. From data and operations to fan comfort and safety, the following companies are doing some of the most interesting work in the festival space right now.
Operations & Management
Pollstar
Pollstar has been the Voice of Live Entertainment for over 40 years, providing the most up-to-date and useful data and insights available for the global concert industry. It's become the backbone that agents, talent buyers, venues, and promoters rely on to do business.
The Pollstar Data Cloud gives subscribers the ability to search, filter, and build custom reports based on concert box office and route book data for over 319,000 artists, covering shows from 1999 to present, alongside access to Pollstar's extensive live entertainment industry contact database.
Tour histories give professionals a distinct advantage in negotiating deals, while tools like the Artist Availability and Venue Availability features help buyers and bookers find the right match based on genre, past crowd sizes, ticket sales, and box office revenue. Weekly charts including the Artist Power Index, Concert Pulse, and the Live 75 round out the offering, giving industry professionals an at-a-glance read on who is making waves and who is making money.
Their year-end data reports have become essential reading across the industry. Pollstar's 2025 year-end analysis tracked a worldwide gross of $8.9 billion across the top 100 tours, a correction from 2024's record-setting $9.5 billion, yet still 60.8% higher than the last full pre-pandemic year. That kind of rigorous, long-view analysis is what keeps Pollstar at the center of every serious conversation about the business of live events.
Festival Pro
FestivalPro was born from a collision of worlds, its founders spent over a decade developing CRM software while simultaneously organizing music festivals and performing in bands, driving through the production gates of more than 80 festivals across the UK and Europe. That firsthand experience is baked into every corner of the platform. Designed for and by festival organizers, FestivalPro is an intelligent system built to organize all aspects of your event, replacing the dreaded tangle of spreadsheets with a single, unified system. The platform includes dedicated modules for managing artists, contractors, venues, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guest lists, ticketing, cashless payments, and contactless ordering. Trusted by over 600 events worldwide, organizers can manage their entire event lifecycle from applications and contracts through to check-in and post-event analysis, all in one place.
What sets FestivalPro apart is its commitment to growing alongside the events it serves. Rather than infrequent major updates, the team adds powerful new features every week, automatically rolled out to all users. Recent feedback says it all: Soulfest praised the end-to-end vendor flow, noting that pulling data from applications straight through to confirmations and payments was a "massive improvement," while Medicine Festival highlighted the human touch, saying "having someone to speak to instead of automated chats or emails makes such a difference." For festival operators tired of duct-taping together a dozen disconnected tools, FestivalPro is the all-in-one answer built by people who've actually been in the trenches.
Attendee Experience
ConCHAIRto
ConCHAIRto founder Brett Smiley is a self-described live music junkie whose frustration at festivals became a business idea. Flying annually to Austin City Limits, he kept running into the same problems: no easy way to bring a comfortable chair, slow security lines, and piles of abandoned seating left behind at the end of the night. His solution was straightforward. Attendees reserve a chair online in advance, find it waiting on the other side of security, and drop it at a designated zone when the night is done. No hauling, no searching, no waste.
The security angle is one organizers tend to notice quickly: eliminating bulky personal chair carry-ins removes one of the most common methods for smuggling drugs, weapons, and contraband into festival grounds, letting security teams focus their attention elsewhere.
Chairs can be reserved for as little as $15 booked a week in advance, and the platform integrates directly with Ticketmaster, Frontgate, TIXR, and other major ticketing providers with no technical lift required from the festival team.
ConCHAIRto has also grown well beyond seating, now offering on-site branded charging stations, sponsorship activation tools, and photo opportunity installations that give organizers new ways to generate revenue from the footprint. Having already surpassed their goal of 20 festivals in a single season with partners including Rock the Country and Monterey Jazz, they are pushing toward 30 festivals with room still on the calendar. For organizers tired of the chair pile at the end of the night, conCHAIRto is the fix that pays for itself
Skywell
Skywell is a Los Angeles-based company on a mission to change how the world thinks about drinking water - and their approach is as simple as it sounds remarkable. Their atmospheric water generators draw ambient air through a pre-filter, pass it over a cooled surface where moisture condenses into pure water droplets, run it through a 13-stage filtration system removing 99.9% of contaminants, and re-mineralize it for perfect taste, all dispensed hot or cold on demand. No pipes, no plastic, no delivery trucks. For festivals and large-scale events, their Mobile Hydration Station can generate over 300 gallons of pure, clean, cold drinking water per day while on the move, making it a natural fit for high-traffic outdoor environments where single-use waste adds up fast.
Skywell has been putting that to the test on the ground. Most recently, they brought their systems to FloatFest 2026, the post-Rose Parade showcase in Pasadena, where tens of thousands of visitors experienced refill-first hydration powered entirely by air - Zero plastic bottles, zero chemicals. For festival organizers looking to make a genuine dent in their sustainability footprint without sacrificing convenience, Skywell makes the cleanest possible case that the future of festival water is already here.
Risk Mitigation & Safety
Crowd Cushion
Crowd Cushion was born from a frightening personal experience. Founder Catherine Curtin grew up a lifelong festival fan who loved being right up front, until one show where the crowd was so dense her feet left the ground and she fell, narrowly avoiding being trampled. That moment, combined with the tragic crowd crush at Astroworld in 2021, set her on a mission to build something the industry had long been missing. The technology is straightforward: pressure sensors attached directly to stage-front barricades monitor horizontal crowd force in real time, and when pressure hits a pre-set threshold, alerts fire simultaneously across four channels including SMS to mobile devices, a command center display mirroring the stage layout, roaming security pagers, and warning lights on the barricades themselves.
Now in its fourth year, Crowd Cushion has taken its technology global, most recently deploying at Sandstorm festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, headlined by Eminem, Muse, and Tyler, the Creator, where 100 cushions were placed across the highest-pressure areas of the venue. For festival operators serious about fan safety, Crowd Cushion is the kind of solution that should already be in every production rider.
End Overdose is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit founded in 2018 with a straightforward mission: put life-saving tools in the hands of the people who need them most. The organization trains individuals to recognize the signs of an overdose and administer naloxone, the medication that reverses opioid overdoses, and distributes it for free alongside fentanyl test strips that can detect whether a substance has been laced with the often-fatal synthetic opioid. Everything, including the training, is available at no cost. To date, End Overdose has trained over 705,000 people and distributed more than 750,000 doses of naloxone, with a goal of reaching one million of each by the end of 2026.
The festival world has become a central part of their reach, and for good reason. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of accidental death for adults aged 18 to 45, the exact demographic most likely to be standing in a crowd on a Saturday night. End Overdose has a presence at most major festivals nationwide, including all Insomniac events, and recently partnered with the National Independent Venue Association to provide quarterly overdose response training and free naloxone to independent venues across the country. For festival organizers, bringing End Overdose on site is one of the simplest, highest-impact decisions you can make.
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