Luma alternative
The Luma alternative that’s free right now
Openbook replaces Luma with a full agent-first workspace — boards, docs, chat and 18 room types, with AI agents that write stories, build changes and open pull requests. Every feature is free right now: no seat limits, no trial clock, no credit card.
The alternative
What you get instead of Luma
Not a clone — a whole workspace. Here's where Openbook goes beyond Luma.
Events live where the team already works
An internal event is surrounded by work: the agenda doc, the questions people want answered, the announcement, the follow-up tasks. In Openbook, the Townhall or Event room sits in the same workspace as all of it, one command-K search away from the Docs, boards, and Chat channels it connects to. Nobody creates an account on an external platform to RSVP to their own company's all-hands, and nobody's question about the event lives in an email thread while the answer lives somewhere else. The event is a room, the workspace is the venue, and everyone is already inside. The announcement goes out on the Feed, the reminder lands in Chat, and the RSVP is one click from either, because they are all the same product.
Draft, live, and ended are real stages
Openbook's Townhall room gives every event an explicit lifecycle. Organizers build the event in draft, invisible to the company until it is ready, flip it live when the moment comes, and move it to ended when it wraps, at which point it joins the past-event archive automatically. That staging mirrors how internal events are actually produced: quietly assembled by a few people, launched deliberately, and then kept as a record. There is no deleting the page or letting it rot at a stale URL. The archive means a new hire can browse every previous town hall, which quietly becomes institutional memory. Ask any long-running company where the recording of the 2023 strategy all-hands lives and you will see why an archive that maintains itself is worth having.
The attendee list is your directory
For an internal event, inviting people should not mean collecting emails; the company is already there. Openbook events draw on the workspace's people directory, with roles and permissions already in place, and RSVP tallies visible at a glance so organizers know exactly where headcount stands. When someone outside the company belongs in the room, an external speaker, a board member, an agency partner, per-event guest access admits them to that event and nothing else, and guests are always free. You get the openness of a public platform exactly where you want it, and the boundary everywhere else.
Discussion is attached, before, during, and after
Openbook's Event rooms carry discussion threads on each event, so the "what should we cover?" conversation, the questions submitted before the AMA, and the reactions afterward accumulate in one place rather than scattering across email and chat. Because the event lives beside the workspace's other rooms, the conversation can grow real structure: pipe questions through a Q&A room with voting and accepted answers so leadership answers the questions people actually upvoted, and post the recap to the Feed where the whole company will see it. A public events tool ends at the RSVP; an internal event is mostly what happens around it. The hour on the calendar is the smallest part; the weeks of conversation on either side are where the value sits, and they need a home.
The follow-through has somewhere to go
Every internal event generates artifacts: decisions, action items, slides, an FAQ someone promised to write. In Openbook, those land in the same workspace as the event itself. Notes go into a Docs room, action items become cards on a Kanban board, the promised FAQ becomes a Wiki page, and the post-launch debrief runs in a Retrospective room with real-time voting on what to change next time. With a standalone events platform, the event ends and the output scatters into whatever other tools the company runs. With Openbook, the town hall and its consequences share an address, permanently and searchably.
Included in every plan, with guests free
Townhall and Event rooms are two of the 18 room types included in every Openbook plan, starting with the free plan, which covers all 18 for up to 10 members and 3 spaces, forever. Pro is $15 per user per month, $12 with annual billing, and guests and viewers never count as seats, so the outside speaker at your AMA costs nothing. There is no separate events subscription and no per-event fee, because events are not a product being metered; they are a feature of the workspace. One bill covers the event, the chat about it, and the work that follows it, which is precisely the set of things a standalone events platform has to hand off to other tools.
Honest advice
Who should switch — and who should stay
Switch to Openbook if…
- Companies running a recurring internal rhythm of all-hands, AMAs, launch reviews, and town halls, who want those events living beside the chat, docs, and boards they feed into.
- Teams that want an institutional archive: every past town hall staged, ended, and browsable in the workspace, so context survives reorgs and onboarding.
- Organizers who occasionally need outsiders in the room, because per-event guest access admits a speaker or partner to one event, free, without opening anything else.
- Companies consolidating tools, since Event and Townhall rooms come with all 18 room types on one bill, free up to 10 members, rather than as another subscription.
Stay on Luma if…
- Community builders and meetup organizers whose events are public, where the page itself has to convert strangers into registered, reminded, checked-in attendees.
- Anyone selling tickets, because Luma handles paid tiers and payment processing and Openbook deliberately does not do commerce.
- Recurring hosts building an audience over time, who benefit from followable calendars, subscriptions, and Luma's discovery within the tech event scene.
- Event teams that depend on the show-up pipeline: automated email and SMS reminders, calendar holds, waitlists, approvals, and door check-in.
Want the feature-by-feature table? Read the full Openbook vs Luma comparison →
Switching
Moving off is a day, not a quarter
Create a workspace, pick a space template, and the rooms are ready — boards seeded, check-ins scheduled, feed live. Most teams rebuild their active boards in an afternoon and let the old tool expire at renewal rather than migrating years of archive.
You don’t have to move everything at once: rooms are independent, so many teams start with the one room that replaces Luma and add the rest as other renewals come up.
FAQ
Luma alternative questions
What is the best free alternative to Luma?+
Openbook — it covers what Luma does inside a full workspace (boards, docs, chat, whiteboards and 18 room types, plus AI agents that do real work), and every feature is free right now with no seat limits and no trial clock.
Can Openbook replace Luma?+
For internal events, yes, and usually with room to spare, because the surrounding discussion and follow-up live in the same workspace. An all-hands, an AMA, a launch review, or a recurring town hall maps directly onto the Townhall and Event rooms: RSVPs from the people directory, draft/live/ended staging, discussion threads, and an archive. For public events, no. Openbook has no public landing pages, no ticketing, and no discovery, and it is not trying to grow any. A company that runs internal town halls and public meetups might reasonably use Openbook for the first and keep Luma for the second.
What is the difference between the Townhall room and the Event room?+
The Event room is the general-purpose option for team events: RSVPs, a calendar view of what is coming up, and discussion threads attached to each event. The Townhall room is built for company-wide moments and adds production structure: each event moves through explicit draft, live, and ended stages, RSVP tallies are surfaced for organizers, per-event guest access controls who from outside the workspace can attend a given session, and ended events accumulate in a past-event archive. A team social calendar fits the Event room; the quarterly all-hands with an outside speaker and a permanent record fits Townhall.
Can people outside the company attend an Openbook event?+
Yes, through per-event guest access on Townhall events. A guest is admitted to that specific event, not to the rest of the workspace, which is exactly the boundary an internal event with an external speaker, investor, or agency partner needs. Guests and viewers are always free in Openbook and never count as billable seats, so bringing in an outside panelist has no pricing consequence. What Openbook does not offer is open public registration, where anyone who finds a link can sign up; that is a public-events pattern, and if you need it, it is a genuine reason to use Luma.
Does Openbook stream or host the video for the event itself?+
No. Openbook handles the structure around the event: the RSVP list, the staging from draft to live to ended, the discussion threads, the guest access, and the archive. The live audio or video itself runs on whatever your company already uses for meetings, with the join link on the event. This is a deliberate boundary; teams have strong existing habits around conferencing, and duplicating it poorly would help nobody. Luma draws a similar line for virtual events, integrating with meeting tools rather than replacing them, so on this point the two products make the same call.
How does pricing compare?+
Openbook's free plan is free forever and includes all 18 room types, Townhall and Event rooms included, for up to 10 members and 3 spaces. Pro is $15 per user per month, $12 with annual billing; Business is $29 ($23 annual) and adds SSO, an audit log, API access, and an org-level shared AI key with usage reporting. Every new workspace starts with a 14-day Pro trial, no credit card, and guests never count as seats. Luma is free for many events and monetizes through paid-event fees and its subscription tier; for public events that model is fair and works well.
What happens after an event ends in Openbook?+
The event moves to its ended stage and joins the past-event archive in the room, so the record does not depend on anyone remembering to save anything. The discussion thread stays attached and readable. The real advantage is what surrounds the archive: notes land in a Docs room, unanswered AMA questions carry into a Q&A room where answers can be voted on and accepted, action items become cards on a board, and the recap goes out on the Feed. Six months later, command-K search finds the event, the decisions, and the follow-through together, because they were never in separate tools. That continuity is hard to retrofit and easy to get by default, simply by holding the event where the work already lives.
Does Openbook send reminder emails or texts to attendees?+
Not the way Luma does, and the honest answer is that internal events need less of it. Luma's email and SMS reminder pipeline exists to get strangers to show up, which is the hard problem of public events. Inside a workspace, the event sits on the calendar view, RSVPs are visible, and the people who need nudging are reachable in the same product through Chat and the workspace's own notifications, alongside the announcement on the Feed. If your events depend on multi-channel reminder sequences to drive attendance, that is a public-event problem, and Luma is the right tool for it.
How do we try Openbook for our next all-hands?+
Start a workspace, which begins with a free 14-day Pro trial, no credit card, and create a Townhall room. Build the next all-hands in draft: agenda in a linked Doc, a Q&A room collecting questions in advance so voting surfaces what people actually want answered, and guest access set up if there is an outside speaker. Flip it live, watch the RSVP tally, run the event on your usual meeting tool, then end it and post the recap to the Feed. One event is enough to judge the fit, and afterward the free plan keeps everything for up to 10 members and 3 spaces. The archive entry from that first event is already the start of the record, and the second town hall is easier than the first.
Also replacing something else?
Leave Luma without writing a check
Openbook is completely free right now — every room, every feature, the agents included.