Whova alternative: an honest comparison for event organisers

The short answer. Whova is a whole event platform. Registration, ticketing, badge printing, check-in, the attendee app, exhibitor lead retrieval and abstract management for academic conferences are all real Whova products, and All Along has none of them. If you are replacing several tools at once, Whova is the more sensible purchase and this page will not talk you out of it. All Along does one job: it reads what each attendee wrote at registration and tells them who to meet and why. The useful question is whether the networking is the thing you are judged on, or one feature among twenty.

Whova is the name most organisers have heard, and most of the comparison pages written about it are written by other platforms trying to sell you a different platform. This one is not that, because we are not a platform. Whova's matchmaking works from the profile an attendee fills in inside the app, and gives them people to search, browse and message. All Along works from the registration form you already use, and gives each person a short list with a written reason for each name. If Whova is on your shortlist because you need the door run and the badges printed, keep it there. If it is on your shortlist because the networking at your last event fell flat, this comparison is worth ten minutes.

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 Whova is already on your shortlist.

How Whova and All Along compare

Every row below says who we think does that job better, including the rows where the answer is Whova. 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 Whova 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 If you find something out of date here, tell us and we will correct it.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 - Whova's pricing page is a quote request form with no figure on it. Events under fifty people are free with us, 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, 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. 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

The thing we can see that a platform this size cannot is narrow but real. Everyone who has registered for an event through All Along wrote, in their own words, what they were working on and what they could help someone else with, before the event, on a form they were filling in anyway. It is a small body of material and we would rather say so than dress it up. What makes it useful is the kind of material it is: a completed app profile describes who someone is, and those answers describe what they came to sort out. It is also why we can hand an organiser a picture of what their room actually wanted rather than a count of how many people opened the app.

Choose Whova if

• You are buying a platform on purpose. Registration, badges, check-in, the app and the exhibitor tools under one contract is a real thing to want, and assembling it from parts is genuinely more work.
• You run an academic or scientific conference. Abstract submission and review is a specialist job and Whova does it - we do not go anywhere near it.
• Exhibitors or sponsors need proof of return. Lead scanning through to a report is a product with real plumbing behind it and we have none.
• Your attendees expect an app with the agenda, the map, the speaker list and the community boards in it. Ours is not an app and never will be.
• You run several events a year and want one system, one login and one place your data lives.

Choose All Along if

• The outcome you will be judged on is whether people met someone worth meeting. That is the only job we do.
• You already have a registration tool you are happy with, and you would rather add one thing to it than replace it.
• You cannot rely on your audience to download an app and complete a profile in it. Our questions sit on the form they are already filling in.
• You want each person told why they were matched, in the words both of them used, before they arrive.
• You want to know the price before you have a sales conversation - or your event is under fifty people, in which case there is not one to have.

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