Zoho Backstage alternative: an honest comparison for event organisers

The short answer. Zoho Backstage is a full event product - ticketing, an event website builder, speaker management, badge printing and session check-in - and if your organisation already runs on Zoho it is the obvious thing to buy. It also has matchmaking, which is why you are here. Worth knowing first: their own plan comparison marks matchmaking as absent from the Free and Essentials plans and present only in Premium and Ultimate. All Along includes matching in every plan, including the free one, and works alongside the registration tool you already have.

This is the comparison where the honest answer most often is buy theirs. If you need ticketing, a website, badges and check-in, Zoho Backstage does all of it, does it cheaply by the standards of the category, and slots into a suite you may already be paying for. We do none of that. What we do is read what each attendee wrote when they registered and give them a short list of people to meet with a sentence explaining each one. So the question is not which product is better. It is whether the introductions are the point of your event or one feature inside a platform purchase - and, if they are the point, which plan you would have to be on to get them.

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 Zoho Backstage is already on your shortlist.

How Zoho Backstage and All Along compare

Every row below says who we think does that job better, including the rows where the answer is Zoho Backstage. 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 Zoho Backstage 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 If you find something out of date here, tell us and we will correct it.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

Both of us publish prices, so you can do the sum yourself - with one caveat about theirs. Zoho's plan figures are drawn in by script rather than written into the page, so we are not quoting a number of theirs that we cannot see served. What is on the page, and what we have checked, is the shape: four plans called Free, Essentials, Premium and Ultimate, capped at a hundred, two hundred, a thousand and five thousand attendees an event, sold either as a subscription or as a one-off per-event purchase, in US dollars, Indian rupees, euros or pounds. Ours are simpler. Events under fifty people are free, with the full matching and the full report. 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. 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 narrow thing we have that a suite this broad does not is the material the matching is built from. 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 the form they were already filling in. It is a small body of material, and we would rather say so than round it up. A platform that has ticketing, an agenda and a badge printer sees that someone bought a ticket and turned up. It does not see what they came to sort out, and that sentence is the whole of what our match note is made from.

Choose Zoho Backstage if

• You need ticketing, an event website and speaker management as well as networking. That is a real platform and we are not one.
• Your organisation already runs on Zoho. One more product on an existing bill, with one login and one support relationship, is a genuinely good reason to buy and we cannot match it.
• You need badges printed and sessions checked into. That is hardware and logistics, and it is entirely outside what a matching layer does.
• You want your attendees inside one app for the agenda, the lounges, the polls and the questions, rather than reading an email.
• Your event is over two hundred and fifty people and you would rather buy attendee capacity in one go than pay per event.

Choose All Along if

• The introductions are the point, and you do not want them locked to a plan you would otherwise not need.
• Your event is small. Under fifty people we are free and matching is included; their free plan is marked as not including it.
• You already have a registration tool you are happy with and you would rather add one thing to it than move the whole event.
• You want each person told why they were matched, in the words both of them used, before they arrive.
• You want to be billed in Australian dollars.

The honest summary: Zoho Backstage 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.