Linq Discontinued Digital Business Cards: What to Do Now (2026)

Linq no longer sells digital business cards. The company moved its focus to communications infrastructure for AI assistants, and the card product is not part of what it offers any more. Nothing has been switched off underneath the cards people already own, so there is no reason to rush. But the question has changed shape. For most people reading this it is a migration question now, not a comparison.

So this covers both. What the change means for a card you already have, how to tell whether yours keeps working, where AtlasLinq is genuinely different, and the one thing Linq did better that is worth knowing before you move. Where the two products are simply the same, this says so rather than inventing a difference.

What is the difference between AtlasLinq and Linq?

Linq sold a physical NFC card that links to your profile. AtlasLinq turns the phone already in your pocket into that card, and sells no hardware at all. AtlasLinq is the newer of the two, priced per market rather than converted from a US figure, with a few capabilities Linq did not offer and one limitation it did not have.

Both let the person you just met save your details without installing anything, and the differences that actually change a decision are narrower than most comparison pages admit. They come down to three things: whether you have to buy hardware, what you pay each month, and what happens when you roll it out to a team. The fourth, now, is who is still building.

Do you need to buy a physical card?

With AtlasLinq, no. This is the structural difference between the two products, and it is worth understanding before anything else.

Linq's model starts with an object you order: a card, a badge, or a sticker that carries an NFC chip pointing at your profile. It works well, and a well-made card feels good to hand over. It also means you have something to carry, something to remember, and something to reorder when you change job title or company.

AtlasLinq uses Host Card Emulation, which lets an Android phone behave like an NFC card on its own. You tap your phone against the other person's phone and your card transfers. Nothing to order, nothing to leave in your other jacket. If you want the physical experience anyway, you can write your profile to an NFC tag or sticker and stick it on a desk, a badge, or the back of your phone. The tag is optional rather than the entry ticket.

Whether that matters depends on how you work. If you attend a booked calendar of events and want a premium object to hand over, hardware is a feature. If you meet people unplanned and want the card to always be with you, hardware is a thing to forget.

What does AtlasLinq cost compared to Linq?

AtlasLinq publishes its prices per market. Pro is $4.99 a month in the United States and ₹150 a month in India, with the same pattern across the other markets on the pricing page. The free Essential plan is not a trial. It keeps working, collects leads, and shows ads on your card.

We are not going to quote Linq's prices here, because vendor pricing changes and a stale number in a comparison post is worse than no number. Check their site for the current figure. What is structurally true is that a Linq setup has two costs, the subscription and the card itself, and that their plans are priced in USD. If you are earning in rupees, pesos, or rand, a USD subscription is a larger share of your income than the sticker price suggests, which is the gap AtlasLinq's local pricing is built to close.

Do recipients need to install an app?

Neither product requires it. This used to be the dividing line in this category, and plenty of comparison pages still sell it as one. It is not. Both AtlasLinq and Linq open your card as a web page in whatever browser the other person already has, and both offer a save-to-contacts action from that page.

So do not choose on that claim. Check the thing underneath it instead: how many taps it takes from the card opening to the contact being saved, and whether the saved contact arrives complete. A card that opens instantly but needs an account signup before it will hand over a phone number has an app requirement wearing a different hat. You can open a live AtlasLinq card and try the save yourself, on your own phone, without creating anything.

Does AtlasLinq work on iPhone?

Partly, and this is the honest limitation. Receiving works everywhere. Any iPhone can open an AtlasLinq card and save the contact, because the card is a web page, so the people you meet are never a compatibility problem.

Sending is where the difference sits. AtlasLinq ships on Android and iOS, and phone-to-phone NFC tap needs an Android device on the sending side, because Apple does not open the equivalent NFC capability to third-party apps. An iPhone user can still share an AtlasLinq card by QR code, AirDrop, or link, or by writing their card to a tag and tapping that. What they cannot do is turn the handset itself into the card, and that is Apple's restriction rather than a gap waiting to be filled.

Linq does not have this constraint, because the tap comes from the card rather than from your phone. If you are an iPhone user who specifically wants to tap your own device against someone else's, that is a real reason to pick Linq, and we would rather say so than waste your afternoon. There is more detail in our guide on how digital business cards behave on iPhone.

What happens when you roll it out to a team?

This is where the two products diverge most, and it is the part worth reading if you are evaluating for more than yourself.

AtlasLinq Enterprise gives a team a shared company directory at a single address, so a customer can find anyone at your company from one link instead of hunting for the right person's card. Branding, locked fields, and offboarding are handled from a web admin dashboard rather than by asking each person to update their own profile.

Two things there have no direct equivalent in a card-first product. The first is object cards, which give a card to a thing rather than a person: a restaurant table, a hotel room, a property listing, a piece of equipment. The thing gets a scannable identity that outlives whoever is currently responsible for it. The second is lead auto-sync, which pushes the contacts your team captures into Google Contacts, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot without an export step.

Linq has team management too, and a mature one. The difference is emphasis: their team story is largely about issuing and managing cards to people, and AtlasLinq's extends to the physical places and objects those people work around.

Which one should you choose?

Choose AtlasLinq if you want your card to be the device you already carry, if you would rather not buy or reorder hardware every time your title changes, if you are paying from a market where USD subscriptions bite, or if you want cards attached to physical things and not only to people.

Stay on Linq if your existing setup still does what you need and nothing has broken for you. There is no deadline being enforced here, and moving a team is work. Just know that the product is not being developed, so the question is when rather than whether.

If you own a Linq card and like it, check whether it is writable. Many NFC cards are, and if yours is, your AtlasLinq profile can go straight onto the card you already have. You keep the object and change what it points at.

If you are undecided, the cheapest way to settle it is to try the free tier before you buy anything from anyone. AtlasLinq's Essential plan costs nothing and needs no card, so you can run it through a week of real meetings and find out whether phone-to-phone sharing fits how you actually work. If it does, you have saved yourself a hardware order. If it does not, you have learned that for free, and Linq will still be there.