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Think back to the experiences you’ve had buying event tickets in the past five years or so. Were they seamless? Likely not: After the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, ticket revenue went way up and it got so hard to get tickets that the government had to try to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly.

Getting a ticket to a concert, sporting event, or other live show has never been more fraught (to say nothing of more expensive), but you do have some options. Most ticket sites sell roughly the same or similar seats, but they do so at different prices and with different levels of hoops to jump through. Here’s how to find a good deal.

What frequent ticket buyers advise

Your best bet, according to Redditors, is to go to the box office at the arena or event space for a ticket, as fees are usually pretty low when you buy them in person. Of course, for events with waitlists or ones that you’re planning to travel for, that’s not always an option, although I had great luck two years ago when I called a box office, told the receptionist I was traveling for the show, and bought my tickets over the phone. She upgraded them out of pure niceness, saying she rarely gets to talk to patrons anymore since most ticket-buying takes place online. Still, buying your tickets online is so convenient, it might be worth a few extra bucks to you. Let’s just make sure you’re not spending too many extra bucks.

Over the years I’ve been buying tickets to baseball games and concerts—and especially the last two years of reviewing ticket-sale marketplaces for Lifehacker—I’ve found that the reputations and service quality of each of the following platforms have changed wildly. Ticketmaster has always been considered expensive (spoiler alert: it still is), but has also been considered secure. TickPick used to be the only place to go for all-inclusive pricing with no checkout surprises. Now, a lot of these apps have upped their level of service, but there are still some differences to consider.

Putting ticket platforms to the test

Let’s do a real-world test of the major sites: Ticketmaster, StubHub, Vivid Seats, SeatGeek, and TickPick. There’s also a service called GameTime we’ll look at, plus a newer entrant called XP, but the first one is more for last-minute gets and the second one is still pretty new.

For transparency, I redo this test every year for Lifehacker, so if you visited this page last fall, you may have seen a price comparison of tickets to the Sept. 14 baseball game at Chase Field, which I actually attended. This year, I’ll do ticket prices for this Wednesday’s Twins vs. Yankees game, which I am also attending in just over 48 hours, so my comparisons are as realistic as possible.

Wednesday’s game includes a bobblehead giveaway, so prices are higher and seats are slightly more scarce than they would be for any other midweek match; that’ll give us a good idea of how these apps operate in real crunch times. My tickets are in the 230s and I paid $47 for each of them. For today’s test, let’s see what tickets in that area go for on each platform in question. (And I’ll tell you where I ended up getting mine, too, since I shopped around.)

Ticketmaster

For this year’s test, Ticketmaster shocked me. Typically, you can rely on the biggest name in the ticket sales game to have a ton of seats available. Not this time. For Wednesday’s game, there are no tickets available in sections 228 to 234. To sit in the 200 level at all (which I never do unless forced or seeing a matchup I don’t care about), you won’t spend below $112 per ticket—and that’s before fees. Ticketmaster has helpfully labeled these “$112+,” but will not reveal the total until you log in and enter your payment details. Dastardly. To pay around what I paid, in the $50 range, you’d have to sit in the 400s. May I recommend simply watching the game on TV?

StubHub

StubHub redeemed itself this year. Two years ago, StubHub was transparent with its pricing. Last year, it did a 180 and refused to divulge what “fees” I would be paying until I put in my card information. This year, I can see clearly, without even having to log in, that seats in my chosen section are going for $69 including fees. Transparent pricing is crucial, especially when ticket prices are so absurdly high these days. Still, our North Star here is what I paid last week: $47. With most major events, you can expect ticket prices to go down, not up, as the big day gets closer, as long as there are still plenty of seats available. There are hundreds of tickets to the game still available on StubHub, so this price-gauging is not ideal, bobblehead night or not.

Vivid Seats

Vivid Seats infuriated me last year and I have not patronized it since. I used to buy all my tickets on this platform, since they had a deal where you’d earn free tickets after every few purchases, but last July, as I was getting ready to leave for a game I had bought tickets to, I discovered my purchase had been revoked with no notification. I didn’t get a push notification, an email, or anything, and worse, when I spoke to customer service, they claimed they couldn’t verify my identity (despite me using the platform faithfully for years) and I was barred from purchasing replacement tickets.

Prices and transparency are one thing, but pure functionality and access to the tickets themselves are just as important, if not more so, so I want to be clear about my prior experiences with this particular site. The rewards system is novel and I haven’t found any other marketplaces that offer anything similar, so I actually mourn the free tickets I would earn on here, but I can’t risk my tickets being revoked in the future, so generally speaking, Vivid Seats is a no for me.

For today’s test, I will give credit where it’s due: You can sit in the first row of the section for $71 per ticket, including fees. I am in the eighth row, for what it’s worth, and would consider an extra $25 or so worth it to sit in front. (I really do hate sitting higher up!) Elsewhere in the section, you can sit for up to $100 per ticket. Moreover, Vivid Seats is following the lead of many of its competitors. This year, the price is clearly labeled to include fees.

SeatGeek

In last year’s comparison, SeatGeek also refused to show me the total price until I had entered my card information. This year, like nearly everyone else, they’ve improved transparency considerably. Seats in our chosen section are $57 each, the price quoted includes fees, and you can tap all the way to the final screen with the total due clearly visible. I’ll admit I never use this one, not because I have something against it, but just because I’m not in the habit of it. Today’s test results could cause me to change my behavior.

TickPick

Let me start by saying I am biased toward TickPick and always will be because this is the platform that saved the day last year when Vivid Seats arbitrarily revoked my tickets. Since then, I’ve used it consistently; it’s the platform I used to buy tickets to tonight’s game and Tuesday’s game, too, but not Wednesday’s game (more on that in a moment). TickPick was the pioneer in listing all-inclusive prices and though today’s test has revealed that most of its competitors have now followed suit, I’ll always respect it for being the first to bundle fees in with the quoted price.

Selection here is lower than some of its competitors, though. While there are seats available in nearly all sections, there are simply fewer of them to choose from. In fact, there are no seats available in the section we’re testing, but seats in the next section over in the same row as my tickets are going for $87 each. One more section over and you’re looking at $44 each. All things considered, the best prices are here, even if the selection isn’t as good.

GameTime

The tickets available on GameTime are even more limited, as the site is designed for “last-minute” buys. In each section, you have maybe one or two options. In the section we’re testing, you have one: Two tickets in the seventh row for $68 each, including fees. With GameTime, maybe even more than with other platforms, you can expect these to go down in price the closer to the event you get, since the app is all about last-minute deals.

XP

Finally, I will reveal where I got my beautiful $47 tickets to what is, apparently, a very in-demand match: a new app called XP. Why? I use a different app called Claim to get cash back on certain purchases and XP was the deal of the week, which meant I would get $25 back if I spent $50 there. I am a sucker for money-back apps, plus I wanted to test something new.

Now, obviously, the tickets I bought are not available anymore, but front-row tickets in that section are going on XP for $70, including fees. That is $1 less than you’d pay at Vivid Seats for front-row tickets in the section. Mostly, though, selection here was limited, too. Overall, I found purchasing my XP tickets very easy, but like the other non-Ticketmaster platforms listed here, it’s a resale app, so the seller has not yet transferred them to me and, still anxious from my Vivid Seats fiasco last year, that’s making me nervous.

The app does seem to have decent customer service, however; in fact, it’s their whole marketing schtick. I received a confirmation email, details on how to contact support, and a rough estimate that my tickets will be delivered no later than tomorrow.

Conclusions and things to keep in mind

For most of these options, you’re paying between $57 and $112—forgive me, “$112+”—to sit in the general area of our test for a game that doesn’t start for over 48 hours. That’s a huge range, in my opinion, especially since the event is in two days and the seats aren’t even the best. This year, the winners of our head-to-head are Vivid Seats and TickPick, though Vivid Seats can be stressful and TickPick has limited options.

Most of these function largely as resale sites, although some (namely Ticketmaster and SeatGeek) are primary marketplaces, too. The price you pay may have less to do with the platform itself as the person who has possession of the tickets and happens to be selling them on there. I’ve known for months that I would be going to the games tonight, tomorrow, and Wednesday, but I waited until five days ago to buy all my tickets because I knew the sellers would drop their prices as the events got closer. Ultimately, for tonight’s game, I saved $5 per ticket by doing that—enough to buy myself a hotdog at the stadium.

All of these platforms have improved significantly since I started doing this test two years ago. At no point today did I have to sign into an account or enter in my card details; even browsing as a guest, I was able to clearly see prices and click all the way through to the purchase page, which means you have more freedom to shop around. By far the biggest improvement, though, was that all of them except Ticketmaster showed the full price of tickets, including fees.

Ticketmaster had the highest prices by far here today, but its reach is also inescapable. On numerous occasions, I’ve purchased tickets through a platform listed here, only to have them come by email from Ticketmaster. I don’t really understand why, as Ticketmaster doesn’t own any of the other platforms, but you’ll most likely need to have an account with that marketplace to access your tickets, even if you aren’t using it for the actual buying part.

Crypto wallet owners beware: threat actors are using malicious browser extensions to steal your credentials. A recent campaign targeting Firefox is estimated to have included 150 extensions that allowed attackers to drain one million dollars from victims’ accounts.

The scheme, discovered by Koi Security and known as “GreedyBear,” spread through the Firefox add-ons store by impersonating well-known cryptocurrency wallet extensions. According to reporting from Bleeping Computer, the identified malware has been removed by Mozilla, but attackers may be able to quickly and easily mount similar campaigns targeting more users in the future. In fact, researchers have found a possible expansion of GreedyBear to the Chrome web store via an extension called Filecoin Wallet.

Crypto-draining malware spread through Firefox

As Bleeping Computer describes, the crypto-stealing extensions in Firefox started out relatively harmless before morphing into dangerous malware capable of draining funds.

Threat actors initially uploaded benign crypto wallet extensions for approval with branding that matched known platforms like MetaMask, TronLink, and Rabby and accumulated fake positive reviews to make them appear more trustworthy. Only later did they remove and replace the names and logos and inject malicious code, which turned said extensions into keyloggers that captured form field inputs and sent them to attackers’ servers. The compromised extensions also logged victims’ external IP addresses.

How to protect your crypto wallet from malware

Just because an extension has been approved by Mozilla or Google and made it to the official add-on store in Firefox and Chrome doesn’t mean it should be blindly trusted. Before adding a new extension to your browser, read user reviews (don’t just rely on star ratings) and check both the version history and the developer’s other projects for anything suspect.

For crypto wallets, a safer option than searching the add-on store is to go directly to the project’s website, which will link you to the legitimate extension.