Grip alternative: why event organisers choose All Along for smart matchmaking

The short answer. Grip is built for large commercial trade shows. Badge printing, entrance scanning, exhibitor lead retrieval and a hosted-buyer meeting programme are all core products, and if any of those matter to you, Grip is the stronger tool and you should probably stop reading here. All Along does one job: it works out who each attendee should meet, tells them why, and runs from a single attendee list in about five minutes. If your event is judged on whether people met the right person rather than on how many badges were scanned, we are worth a look.

Most comparison pages are written to make the other product look silly. This one is not, because the two are not really competing for the same job. Grip is an event platform with matchmaking inside it, sold to organisers of large commercial shows who also need registration, an app, exhibitor tools and a lot of hardware in a loading bay. All Along is a matching layer that sits next to whatever you already use. The useful question is not which is better. It is which of the two problems you are actually being paid to solve.

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 Grip is already on your shortlist.

How Grip and All Along compare

Every row below says who we think does that job better, including the rows where the answer is Grip. 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 Grip was checked against their own website on 18 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 If you find something out of date here, tell us and we will correct it.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

We publish our prices, which in this category is unusual enough to be worth saying plainly. Events under fifty people are free, with full matching and the full report - not a trial, 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, which works out at 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, so you know the cost before you start. If you are running a free event for more than fifty people, we do not charge either. Larger events and multi-event programmes are quoted, and community subscriptions are priced monthly.

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

What we can see that a bigger platform cannot

At every event we have run - construction technology, law, cyber security, startup communities, general professional networking - people have written in their own words what they came for, before they arrived. That is the material our report is made of, and it is the thing a lead-retrieval product structurally cannot collect: a badge scan records that two people met, never what either of them needed. It is also why we can tell an organiser what their room actually wanted rather than how many scans it produced.

Choose Grip if

• You have exhibitors, and their renewal depends on being able to show what the event was worth. Lead retrieval through to a sales system is a real product with real plumbing behind it, and we do not have one.
• You need to run the door - badges printed, entrances scanned, restricted areas controlled. That is hardware, logistics and people on site, and it is entirely outside what a matching layer does.
• Your show runs a structured buyer-and-seller meeting programme where the organiser builds and approves the schedule. MustMeet is built for exactly that; our matches are recommendations people act on themselves.
• You want one vendor for the platform, the app and the onsite operation, with one contract and one account team behind it.

Choose All Along if

• The thing you will be judged on is whether people met someone worth meeting. That is the only job we do, and it is where all of the work has gone.
• You want attendees to know why they were matched. A name and a job title starts a conversation slowly; a sentence about what the other person is working on starts it immediately.
• You do not have weeks, a budget line or an implementation call in you. One list, five minutes, and matches go out.
• Your event is under a few hundred people, or has no exhibitors at all, and a platform built around booths would mostly sit unused.
• You want to know the price before you have a sales conversation.

The honest summary: Grip 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: Braindate, Whova, Cvent, Swapcard and Zoho Backstage.