Every lead capture tool scans a badge. That part is solved. What separates them is what the pricing does to your behaviour on the stand, whether your data survives from one show to the next, and how much of the conversation actually makes it into the record.
Most exhibitors shortlist on features and then get surprised by the invoice. So this comparison leads with cost shape, because that is what actually changes once a show goes well. We make one of the tools here, and its section says so plainly — including the one case where it is the wrong answer.
The short version
| If you are | Look at | Cost shape |
|---|---|---|
| Already using digital business cards | Blinq | Per seat, plus $9.99 per lead |
| Running booked meetings, 3 to 8 shows a year | MeetZaa | $99 per show, unlimited |
| A large exhibitor needing SSO and multi-team governance | iCapture | ~$8,000/yr plus per-show kits |
| Running booth games and activations | Captello | Quote-gated, plus API kits |
| Measured on content engagement after the show | Momencio | From ~$6,000/yr, 5-seat minimum |
| Already running events on Cvent | Cvent LeadCapture | Inside your Cvent contract |
| Exhibiting exactly once, tiny stand | The organiser's scanner | Per device, per show |
How we compared them
Four things decide whether a tool helps or quietly costs you money.
Pricing shape, not headline price. Per-lead, per-seat, per-device and per-show behave completely differently once a show goes well. A model that charges more when your team captures more is working against the thing you are trying to measure.
What happens offline. Hall wifi fails routinely. Any tool that stops recording when the signal drops is worse than a notebook.
Whether context travels with the contact. A scan with no notes is a contact record. Six weeks later nobody remembers what was discussed, and the follow-up says nothing specific.
What persists between shows. Data locked to one event cannot tell you which show was worth repeating.
1. Blinq — best for teams already on digital business cards
Blinq started as a digital business card product and grew into event capture, which is still the clearest signal of who it suits. If your reps already hand out Blinq cards, adding capture is a small step, and the app is genuinely well made.
It is also one of the few vendors here that publishes a rate. Lead capture sits on the Business plan at $4.99 to $6.99 per user per month depending on billing, with capture billed at $9.99 per lead captured and enriched. Teams at four or more events a year are directed to sales for discounted packages.
Where it wins: published pricing in a category that mostly hides it, strong enrichment, and a 30-day trial so you can test before committing.
Where to be careful: model the per-lead rate at your real volume. At 500 captured leads that is roughly $5,000 on top of seats, and the cost rises precisely when the show goes well. Reps who know each scan has a price get selective about which conversations are worth capturing, which is the opposite of what you want on a busy floor.
If your best shows are also your most expensive shows, the pricing model is working against you.
Consider MeetZaa instead if your volume is unpredictable or your best conversations are booked meetings rather than walk-ups. Flat per-show pricing means a busy Wednesday costs the same as a quiet one.
2. MeetZaa — best for exhibitors whose value is in booked meetings
We make this one, so treat what follows as the argument rather than the verdict.
MeetZaa is not primarily a badge scanner. It is meeting management for exhibitors: booked meetings, walk-ins and no-shows on one schedule, with what was said attached to each record and a follow-up drafted the same evening. Pricing is flat at $99 per show with unlimited capture, and the first 20 meetings are free.
The gap it fills is specific. Badge scanning is built for walk-up volume, and it is good at that. But the meetings you spent six weeks securing usually happen in a meeting room, away from the scanning desk, so they often never get captured at all. And a booked meeting that nobody turned up to leaves no trace anywhere — no scan, no notes, no record that the opportunity existed. For most exhibitors that is the single largest pool of recoverable pipeline at the show, and almost nobody works it.
Where it wins: teams doing roughly three to eight shows a year who book meetings in advance. Flat pricing means a good show lowers your cost per lead instead of raising your invoice. It is the only option here that treats a no-show as a tracked outcome rather than a gap in the data. Every rep captures at once, because they use the phones they already have, so there is no queue at a rented device.
Where it is the wrong choice: if you are a large enterprise that needs SSO with SCIM provisioning and formal governance across thirty shows and multiple business units, we do not have that and iCapture or Cvent will serve you better. We would tell you the same on a call.
3. iCapture — best for large exhibitors needing governance at scale
iCapture is the enterprise-reliability option. It pulls official registration data at covered shows and is built for governance across a large event programme rather than for a small team at a handful of stands.
Its G2 listing shows entry-level pricing starting at $8,000 per year, with per-event badge API kits reported as an additional cost on top.
Where it wins: reliability, rep-level activity reporting, and multi-show consistency when twenty teams need to capture the same way. If you need SSO and formal provisioning, this is the lane.
Where to be careful: the annual floor is hard to justify below roughly ten shows a year, and the per-event kit fees are easy to miss when budgeting. If half your shows sit outside its coverage, you are paying for a tool that idles.
Consider MeetZaa instead if you are shortlisting iCapture because it is the "serious" option rather than because you genuinely need enterprise provisioning. At three to eight shows a year, $8,000 plus kits buys considerably less than it looks like it does.
4. Captello — best for booth games and activations
Captello's centre of gravity is engagement. Teams choose it when the goal is drawing people to the stand and capture is the byproduct, and the gamification depth is genuinely ahead of the rest of this list.
Pricing is demo-gated with no public pricing page, though Captello's own comparison material cites a one-event Premium Lead Capture licence from $500. The recurring complaint in public reviews is per-show API kit costs, which one G2 reviewer puts at $700 to $1,200 per event.
Where it wins: activation mechanics and broad integrations. If booth traffic is the KPI you are measured on, this does that job.
Where to be careful: budget the API kits before you sign, not after. A $500 licence plus a $900 kit is a different number from $500, and it repeats every show.
Consider MeetZaa instead if the games are drawing crowds but your pipeline is not moving. Engagement mechanics fill the stand; they do not tell you what was agreed with the twelve people who actually mattered.
5. Momencio — best for content engagement after the capture
Momencio's distinctive feature is what happens after the scan: personalised microsites and asset-level engagement data, so you can see which collateral a prospect actually opened.
It publishes per-seat pricing with online checkout, at $100 to $170 per seat per month billed annually on a five-seat minimum, which puts the entry floor at roughly $6,000 a year. Its own FAQ describes 12-month non-cancellable terms with no free trial.
Where it wins: if your deals genuinely turn on collateral, the engagement data is real and few others offer it.
Where to be careful: the five-seat minimum and non-cancellable annual term mean the cost is identical whether you exhibit twice or twelve times, with no trial to find out first.
Consider MeetZaa instead if you exhibit at a handful of shows a year. Paying a fixed $6,000 for a season of three events is roughly $2,000 a show before you have captured anything.
6. Cvent LeadCapture — best if your events already run on Cvent
If your organisation already runs its event programme through Cvent, LeadCapture is the path of least resistance. It is bought through your existing Cvent contract rather than priced separately, and it inherits whatever governance you already have.
Where it wins: no new vendor, no new procurement, and it works cleanly at Cvent-run events.
Where to be careful: this is an ecosystem decision rather than a product decision. Outside Cvent-run events the value drops sharply, and you have no independent lever on pricing.
Consider MeetZaa instead if a meaningful share of your calendar sits outside Cvent-run events, or if the exhibiting team's needs keep losing to what the central events team already bought.
7. The organiser's rented scanner — fine for exactly one show
Worth saying plainly, because the whole category has an interest in you forgetting it: for one show a year with two people, renting the organiser's handheld is a sensible decision. Guaranteed compatibility, nothing to set up, a support desk in the hall.
Blinq's own research puts rental at $495 to $685 per handheld at major 2026 shows — a competitor's figure rather than a neutral one, so check your specific show's order form.
Where it stops working: the moment you need a second device, or a second show. Three units at one show already costs more than a full season of flat per-show software, and nothing you capture carries forward to next year.
What a season actually costs
Rough shapes for a mid-size exhibitor doing five shows a year with a small team. Illustrative, not quotes.
| Option | Cost shape | What drives it up |
|---|---|---|
| Blinq | Seats + $9.99 per lead | Capturing more leads |
| MeetZaa | $99 per show, unlimited | Number of shows only |
| iCapture | ~$8,000/yr + per-show kits | Shows outside coverage |
| Captello | ~$500/event + kits at $700–1,200 | API kits, every show |
| Momencio | From ~$6,000/yr, 5 seats | Fixed, regardless of show count |
| Cvent LeadCapture | Inside Cvent contract | Your overall Cvent spend |
| Scanner rental | Per device, per show | Devices × shows |
Run your own number: devices needed, multiplied by shows per year, plus expected lead volume where per-lead pricing applies. That figure — not the headline price — is the comparison that matters.
How to choose in one minute
- 1Three to eight shows a year, booking meetings in advance. MeetZaa. You need meeting management, not just capture, and flat per-show pricing beats per-lead comfortably at this volume.
- 2Unpredictable lead volume, or a team that hesitates before scanning. MeetZaa. Remove the per-lead charge and the hesitation goes with it.
- 3Booth games filling the stand but pipeline not moving. Captello for the activations, MeetZaa for the conversations that came out of them.
- 4Deals genuinely turn on collateral. Momencio, if you will use the engagement data and the fixed annual cost works at your show count.
- 5Already on Blinq cards, one or two events a year. Blinq, with the per-lead maths modelled at realistic volume first.
- 6Thirty shows, multiple business units, SSO and SCIM required. iCapture or Cvent. This is the one case where we are not the answer.
Questions exhibitors ask
6What is the cheapest trade show lead capture app?
For a single show with a small team, the organiser's own scanner rental is hard to beat on total cost. Across a season, flat per-show pricing tends to win because it does not scale with lead volume or device count. The honest answer depends on how many shows you do and how many people need to capture at once.
Do these apps work without internet at the venue?
Most capture offline and sync later, but the detail varies — some capture offline yet require a connection to enrich or sync, which matters if enrichment is why you bought the tool. Confirm the specific behaviour before the show rather than discovering it in the hall.
Can a third-party app scan official event badges?
Often yes, but it depends on the organiser. Many shows permit approved third-party apps, while some restrict scanning to their own hardware or API. Check the exhibitor manual for your event, because badge formats and permissions vary by organiser and occasionally by hall.
Why do so many of these vendors hide their pricing?
Because the real number depends on show count, seat count and badge API fees, and because quote-gating allows different prices for a two-person stand and a global enterprise. It is not necessarily sinister, but get every component in writing before comparing.
Is per-lead pricing ever a good idea?
It can be, if you capture low volumes and want costs to track usage exactly. The risk is behavioural: once reps know each scan has a price, borderline conversations stop getting captured, and some of those were real opportunities.
What happens to meetings we booked that nobody turned up to?
In most systems, nothing — a no-show produces no scan and leaves no record, so it is never followed up. Tracking them deliberately is usually the cheapest pipeline recovery available after a show, because the interest was real and nobody else is contacting those people.
Pricing in this category moves. Every figure here was checked against the vendor's own published pricing or a cited public review at the time of writing, and anything quote-gated has been marked as such rather than guessed at. If you find something out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Try it at one show before you commit to anything
No seats to buy, no annual invoice. Apply a licence to a single show and see what your team actually captures.
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