How AtlasLinq compares

Popl is one of the best-known names in the category and its events tooling is genuinely well developed. If exhibitions are a recurring, budgeted part of your year, it deserves a look on those terms alone.

The difference is what happens as a team changes. Their model has you buying hardware per person and buying it again when someone joins, leaves, or changes title. Ours has you writing a card to any standard tag, or to no tag at all, because the phone is already the card.

The other gap is object cards. A listing, a meeting room or a machine can hold a card of its own with us, managed from the same dashboard as your people. That is a different job from personal cards and most of this category does not do it.

Blinq is a well-made product and the design shows. If you are choosing on feel, spend time in both before deciding, because that is a fair way to choose.

Where we differ is who the team plan is built for. Ours starts at an admin plus two colleagues, so a three-person brokerage is a normal customer rather than an awkward fit, and the governance parts (locked template fields, departments, roles, an audit log) are on the standard team plan rather than behind a sales call.

Pricing is also set per market rather than converted from a single figure, which changes the answer considerably in India and the Gulf.

HiHello has the most generous free tier in the category and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. If you are an individual who wants several cards and no team behind them, take it seriously.

It is built around a person, though, and that is the boundary. Once you have colleagues to keep consistent, or a room, a listing or a piece of equipment that should carry its own card, you are asking for something a personal-card product does not set out to do.

This is not really feature against feature. 1Card makes a card; we make software and sell no card at all, so the two are answering different questions. They have delivered at a scale in India that we have not, and for a procurement process that wants a long local track record, that history counts.

A printed card is also fixed at the moment it is made. A promotion, a new number or a rebrand means another order, and the card tells you nothing after it leaves your hand. Ours keeps updating, reports views and saves, and stops resolving the day someone leaves the company.

If you like the object, keep it. Add a standard NFC sticker to the card you already have and write your AtlasLinq profile to it, and you get both.

Linq moved its focus to communications infrastructure for AI assistants, and digital business cards are no longer part of what the company sells. Existing accounts and cards may well still work, so there is no need to rush.

It does mean that if you are choosing where to put a team today, you are choosing between a product someone is building and one they have moved on from. If the cards you already own are physical NFC cards, check whether they are writable: many are, and if yours is, your AtlasLinq profile can go straight onto it.