In short. Decide first whether you are buying an event app or a networking layer, because they are different products sold under the same words. Then settle three things before any demo: the total cost for one event of your size with no annual commitment, what happens to your delegate data if you do not renew, and what your attendees get if they do not pay.
The difficulty with buying event networking software is not that the products are hard to compare. It is that they are sold in a way that makes comparison awkward on purpose: no published price, a demo scoped to your event, and a quote that arrives afterwards.
In October 2026 we read the pricing pages of four platforms in this market. Three published no figure at all. The fourth published guide prices starting at €3,400 per event for an event of up to a hundred people. The full table, with dates and links, is on the comparison page.
That is the environment. Here is how to get through it.
First, work out which product you are buying
Two different things are sold under the same words, and buying the wrong one is the expensive mistake.
An event app belongs to you, the organiser, for one event. It handles the agenda, the venue map, session feedback, push notifications and usually a networking tab. It begins when the event begins and the attendee loses it when the event ends.
A networking layer belongs to the attendee and runs across events. The profile is written once, the connections accumulate, and the organiser gets to see what their programme produced over time rather than on one day.
If your problem is fifteen parallel tracks and four thousand people who need to find room 2B, buy an event app. If your problem is that people leave your events without having met anyone, an event app’s networking tab is not going to fix it, because it opens when the doors open and shuts when they shut. Most disappointment in this market comes from buying the first thing to solve the second problem.
The three questions that decide it
Ask these before you agree to a demo, in writing.
1. What is the total cost for one event of my size, including setup and support, with no annual commitment? Not a range, not a starting-from, and not a figure that assumes a three-year term. If the answer requires a call, the answer is that the price depends on what they think you can pay.
2. What happens to my delegate data if I do not renew? You want to hear that you can export it, in a usable format, without a fee, and that their copy is deleted on request. Anything vaguer than that is a renewal lever being built into the contract.
3. What do my attendees get if they do not pay? Many platforms are free to the attendee because the organiser has paid. Some are not. Find out before your delegates find out, because an attendee hitting a paywall at an event you invited them to reflects on you, not on the vendor.
Nine more that are worth asking
- Does the price change if attendance doubles on the day?
- What do you count as an adopted user, in one sentence? (Why that question matters.)
- How long before the event can delegates see who else is coming, and how long after can they still reach them?
- Can an attendee contact every other attendee, or is there a limit?
- What can I as the organiser see about an individual delegate?
- Can I export a list of attendee contact details?
- Is there anything to install, or does it open in a browser?
- What does onboarding require from my team, in hours?
- Can I run it alongside the platform I already use, and what does that integration actually involve?
Questions 7, 8 and 9 are the ones that reveal what the product is for. A platform that lets anyone contact everyone and lets you export the lot is a lead generation tool with a networking label on it. That may be exactly what you want. It is not the same product as one that caps outreach and shows you nothing about individuals, and your delegates will behave differently in each.
How to run the demo
Bring a real delegate list, anonymised, of the size you actually run. Demos are built on a sample event of a flattering size, and a product that is elegant with 60 fake attendees can be unusable with 600 real ones.
Ask to see the organiser’s reporting view, not the attendee view. The attendee view is what gets demonstrated because it is the prettier half. The reporting view is what you will live in and what you will have to put in front of a sponsor or a board.
Then ask them to show you the worst case: an event where adoption was poor. What the screen looks like when 18% of delegates turned up on the platform is more informative than what it looks like when 90% did.
The questions nobody will answer, and what that tells you
Some of the above will not get a straight reply. That is itself information, and it is reasonably predictable which ones: the total cost without a commitment, the definition of an adopted user, and what happens to the data on non-renewal. Those three are where the commercial model usually hides.
A vendor who answers all three plainly is worth more of your time than one with a better feature list.
Our answers, for completeness
Since this guide would be worth less if we dodged our own questions: nothing, for any size of event; your data stays yours and you can take it with you; your attendees get the free tier, which is 30% of the Rooms on the platform, 30% of the people in any room they join and 2 nudges per event, or the whole of your room at no cost to them if you grant delegate access, which also costs you nothing.
And the one we fail: we cannot show you adoption data from a large sample, because the platform is young. If a long track record is the deciding factor, that is a real reason to buy something else, and we would rather say so here than in month four.
Related: what event networking software actually costs, and what each platform publishes about its pricing.