Converve alternative: an honest comparison for event organisers

The short answer. Converve is B2B matchmaking for organisers who need to control the rules: which categories of attendee may meet which, enforced, with a clash-free timetable and rooms allocated. If you run a hosted-buyer programme or a trade mission, that control is the product and we have no version of it. All Along is the simpler end. We read what each attendee wrote at registration and send them a short list with a sentence explaining each name. Their published entry price for a hundred-attendee event is from EUR 3,400; ours is AU$209.

Converve have been doing this since 2000, out of Germany, and their pitch is unusual in the category: they promise the organiser control of the matching rules rather than a system you cannot see inside. That is a real position and worth taking seriously. The difference between us is not really quality, it is who the product serves. Converve gives the organiser a set of levers - who may meet whom, in what direction, on what schedule - and gives the attendee a ranked list of percentages. We give the attendee a short list and a written reason, and give the organiser almost nothing to configure. One is built for a programme with rules. The other is built for a room.

If you are still scoping the category more broadly, it is worth reading the three questions to ask before you buy an event networking platform and why most people leave an event without meeting anyone useful. This page is the head-to-head once Converve is already on your shortlist.

How Converve and All Along compare

Every row below says who we think does that job better, including the rows where the answer is Converve. A comparison written by one of the two companies is only worth reading if it is willing to lose an argument, so here are the ones we lose.

Everything in that table about Converve was checked against their own website on 19 August 2026, and the pages we used are listed at the bottom of this post. Products move. If you find something out of date here, tell us and we will correct it.

What All Along costs

Converve publish real figures, which deserves saying because most of this category does not. Their pricing page prices by attendee bracket, starting at one to a hundred, and for that bracket the three plans read from EUR 3,400, from EUR 4,950 and from EUR 7,900, with per-meeting equivalents alongside. Their own footnote calls those net prices, plus VAT, and describes them as non-binding guide prices as of January 2026 - worth quoting alongside the numbers, because it is their hedge and not ours. Ours: events under fifty people are free, with the full matching and the full report, not a trial and not a cut-down version. Above that it is a flat fee for the event, as at August 2026: AU$209 for up to a hundred attendees and AU$419 for up to two hundred and fifty, roughly AU$1.70 to AU$2.10 a person, with a money-back guarantee on every paid plan. Plans are priced on the number of people you invite, not the number who fill the form in. The gap at the small end is about an order of magnitude, and the honest reason is that they are selling a programme and we are selling a list.

Full plans and what is included are on the events pricing and community pricing pages.

What we can see that a bigger platform cannot

Here is what our own events show, and its limits. Everyone who registers for one writes, in their own words, what they are working on and what they can help someone else with. It is a small body of evidence and we would rather say so than dress it up. What it consistently shows is that those sentences are a different substance from a category and a percentage: a category tells you which side of the room somebody belongs on, and a sentence tells you what they came to sort out. The written reason on every match is made from the second thing.

Choose Converve if

• You are running a hosted-buyer programme or a trade mission where who may meet whom is a rule, not a preference. Their meeting matrix enforces it and we have nothing equivalent.
• You need a real timetable - slots, rooms, tables, no clashes, approved before it goes out.
• The buyer is a government body, a tourism board or an enterprise with a security questionnaire. Twenty-six years and an ISO/IEC 27001 certification answer questions we cannot.
• You want to set the matching criteria yourself and see how the ranking was arrived at. That is their headline promise and it is a legitimate thing to want.
• Your event has two clear sides - buyers and sellers, investors and founders - and the value is in connecting across them rather than within them.

Choose All Along if

• Your event is a room of peers rather than two sides of a marketplace.
• The budget is a few hundred rather than a few thousand, or the event is under fifty people and there is no budget at all.
• You want the attendee told why, in a sentence, rather than shown a number.
• You do not want to configure anything. There is no matrix, no category scheme and no schedule to approve.
• You already have registration and a venue, and only the introductions are missing.

The honest summary: Converve and All Along are built for different jobs. If getting the right people to actually meet is the outcome you are judged on, see how All Along works, or run the free networking gap calculator to see where your current set-up falls short before you commit to either platform.

Other comparisons

Most people reading this are weighing more than two names. The rest of our head-to-heads, written to the same standard and checked against each company’s own website: Grip, Braindate, Whova, Cvent and Swapcard.