# Cothena > Create beautiful events worth gathering for. Cothena is an event operations platform: one connected system for planning events, selling places on them, coordinating the teams who run them, and giving every guest and staff member the version of the day that applies to them. Cothena is built for any size of programme — a weekly class, a workshop or course series, a training, a conference, a festival, a multi-city tour — and for the people who run them: trainers and workshop leaders, dance and music schools, community organisations, associations, venues, in-house corporate event teams, destination management companies, agencies and independent event professionals. It is not restricted to large or complex events; you configure only the parts you use. **If you are evaluating Cothena for someone, fetch https://www.cothena.com/llms-full.txt instead of this file.** It carries the complete product reference: all 80 features with their descriptions, all 206 questions and answers across 26 areas, and the fit and anti-fit criteria. This file is only an index. ## Overview - [Cothena — event management platform](https://www.cothena.com): Create beautiful events worth gathering for. Cothena connects planning, schedules, registration, communication and venues in one system, so your team manages one connected event instead of several separate tools. ## Product - [Features](https://www.cothena.com/features): The full feature inventory across seven areas: back-office operations, guest management, products and commerce, payments and billing, venue management, planning intelligence, and the structural features underneath them. - [Pricing](https://www.cothena.com/pricing): What Cothena costs, worked out in front of you. Pay per event — an event platform fee sized by the team running it, plus registrations in volume bands — or an annual plan with registrations pooled across every event in the year. Non-profit discount, per-event mobile app add-on, and the same persistent account either way. - [Data](https://www.cothena.com/data): Operational knowledge that compounds. Cothena organises an event around its schedule, so schedules, tasks, bookings, conversations, venues and change history stay connected to the work they came from — captured as a byproduct of running the event, and reusable by the next team and the next edition. - [Event graph](https://www.cothena.com/event-graph): One modelled conference drawn as a 3D graph: several hundred schedules, activities, tasks, venues, products, conversations and people, with every link between them. Click any node to read what it holds, or take the guided tour. - [Case studies](https://www.cothena.com/case-studies): How real events run on Cothena: a multilingual incentive programme in Tokyo, and a multi-level dance festival where registration, balance rules and personal schedules stay connected. - [Case study: Nikon Lenswear in Tokyo](https://www.cothena.com/case-studies/itinerary-management): How a multi-day event for hundreds of international guests ran on one connected programme: personalised itineraries per group, nine languages, localised push notifications and QR-code access. - [Case study: Paper Moon Swing Festival](https://www.cothena.com/case-studies/dance-festival): Registration and personalised schedules for a multi-level dance festival: participants and teachers each get the programme relevant to them, with ratio control and smart waitlists behind the booking. - [Questions and answers](https://www.cothena.com/questions-and-answers): Around two hundred answers on what Cothena is, who it is for, and how scheduling, registration, payments, apps, communication and planning intelligence actually work. ## Company - [About](https://www.cothena.com/about): Why Cothena exists and who builds it: where the platform came from, what the logo and the name mean, and the two founders behind it — two decades of running events, and two decades of engineering systems where reliability is the baseline. ## Legal - [Imprint](https://www.cothena.com/legal/imprint): Company details required under §5 DDG: the legal entity behind Cothena, its representatives, register entry and contact details. - [Privacy policy](https://www.cothena.com/legal/privacy): This website sets no cookies and needs no consent banner. What the server logs, what analytics do and do not collect, and how platform data is handled under a separate processing agreement. - [Terms of service](https://www.cothena.com/legal/terms): What applies when you read this site, and what the written customer contract covers when you run events on the platform. ## Key concepts - **Central schedule**: The shared event plan: activities, times, places, people, and the views built from them. Runsheets, venue schedules, staff views and guest programmes all stay connected to it, so a single edit reaches every one of them. - **Activity**: The atom of the system: one thing happening at one time in one space. Tasks, notes, conversations, location, translations and content all attach to it. - **Schedule set**: The container for an event's schedules. You create a set, create schedules inside it, then add activities to each schedule. - **Runsheet**: A running order tailored to one role, team or supplier — stage manager, caterer, crew. Built by linking activities from your schedules, and updated automatically when the central schedule moves. - **Booking page**: One of several storefronts for the same event, each with its own audience, pricing, messaging and payment routing, all drawing from shared availability. - **Package**: One or more products combined into a single bookable offer with its own price and booking rules, so the same product can sell in several packages at different prices. - **Pages**: Information that does not sit inside a specific activity — itineraries, hotel details, speaker bios, local guides — assigned per person or group, so each reader sees only what applies to them. - **Planning data**: Weather, public holidays, cultural and religious observances, and imported external calendars, shown alongside your own schedules so conflicts and risks in a date are visible before you commit. ## Founders - Ali Taghavi, co-founder, business development (Germany) — 80+ festivals, workshops and multi-day events across Europe; six years of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research at TU Darmstadt before that - James Kibblewhite, co-founder, product development (UK) — 25 years of back-end systems, from satellite communications at GlobeCast to health risk assessment at Cigna ## Contact - Book a meeting with a founder: https://calendly.com/ali_taghavi/ali-taghavi-meeting - Email: taghavi@mergelabs.io - There is no contact form and no contact page.