Swapcard alternative
Swapcard is the app on top of your event.
Expola is the system underneath it — the floor sales, the tickets, the gate and the lead reports the app is showing.
An app is the visible half of an event platform. The question is where the data in it comes from, and where the scans it collects end up.
What Swapcard is good at
Swapcard's matchmaking is genuinely good, and for a conference where the value is who meets whom, an app-first platform makes sense. The attendee experience is polished and the AI recommendations do move meeting counts.
The job underneath the show
The app is downstream of everything an expo team actually spends the year on. If the floor plan, the exhibitor invoices and the badge data live in other systems, the app becomes another import to reconcile — and the exhibitor's lead report arrives days after they have gone home.
Side by side
What changes. The same jobs, handled by Expola and by Swapcard's category.
| The job | Expola | Event app and matchmaking |
|---|---|---|
| Where exhibitor data comes from | The record they filled in when they booked and paid for the stand | An import from whatever sold the stand |
| Selling stands and sponsorship | On the live plan, from one catalogue, with invoices and holds | Elsewhere |
| Badges and entry | Registration, badge printing and access control in the platform | Badge and gate handled by a separate supplier |
| Lead retrieval | Scans land on the exhibitor record; reports are ready on site | In the app, exported after the event |
| The event website | Built to rank, with the directory and program generated from the same data | Not the product |
Product names are trademarks of their respective owners. This page describes what each category of tool is designed to do, not the current feature list of any one release.
Why teams move
Three reasons it keeps happening.
01
One record from booking to lead report
The company that booked the stand, the staff on its badges and the leads it scanned are the same record. Nothing is stitched together afterwards.
02
The exhibitor sees their return on the last day
Not after an export, a spreadsheet and a week of silence. That is what rebooking is decided on.
03
A branded app without an agency rebuild
The app publishes from the program and directory you already maintain, for every edition, without a project each year.
FAQ
Switching, in practice. What teams ask before they move off Swapcard.
See Expola next to Swapcard, on your own event.
A demo built around your floor plan, your ticket types and the exhibitors you already have.