Swapcard alternative
What is the best Swapcard alternative in 2026?
Swapcard is the better choice when exhibitor lead volume and attendee matchmaking decide the event, which is what Cortex and its per-attendee packaging are built around. Choose Attendu when the organizer's setup work is the bottleneck, because one agent creates and configures the event itself.
Attendu vs Swapcard at a glance
| Dimension | Attendu | Swapcard |
|---|---|---|
| What the AI does | One general agent creates and configures the event itself, then runs it: pages, registration, guests, emails, ticketing, check-in, reporting. | Cortex for participants, marketed as "A self-reasoning agent that runs your event playbook", and The Architect for organizers, which "offloads repetitive tasks: registration forms, content creation, exhibitor enrichment" inside Studio (swapcard.com/features/event-ai-agents, checked 2026-08-17). |
| Who builds the event | The agent, from your description, and you edit the output in the builder. | Your team, in Swapcard Studio, with The Architect taking the repetitive parts. An organizer reviewer: "customization options for the event layout and branding can feel somewhat limited, especially for organizers" (G2 3.5/5, 2 Feb 2026). |
| Time to first live event | About 30 seconds for the registration page, per the agent's own one-shot flow. | Not published. The Starter tier shows a "Start free trial" call to action, which Capterra's listing contradicts with "Free trial not available" (swapcard.com/pricing and capterra.com/p/234990, both checked 2026-08-17). |
| What it costs | Not published. Priced by capacity and tier, so the bill does not track attendee or exhibitor counts. | No figure published. "Our packages combine licensing fees with per-user rates for attendees and exhibitors", with attendee ceilings of 1,000 a year on Starter and 10,000 on Professional (swapcard.com/pricing, checked 2026-08-17). |
| Contract shape | Monthly or annual, or a single-use plan for one event. No multi-year term in the billing model. | Not published. Ten add-ons are listed with a currency symbol and no amount, among them Exhibitor Lead capture, Mobile Branded App, Session Tracking and Access Control, and Support Services (swapcard.com/pricing, checked 2026-08-17). |
| Migrating in and out | Guests, speakers and agenda items import from a spreadsheet with column mapping and duplicate checking, and the guest list exports back out. Guests, events and logs also move over the API-key REST API and outbound webhooks. No documented path imports a whole event from another platform. | Participants import in batch from Swapcard's own Excel template, where the External ID and Checksum columns are required, and organizers export all people, selected groups or abandoned registrations from Studio (help.swapcard.com, checked 2026-08-17). |
| Where your data lives | Attendu is private by design: your data stays in your workspace and isn't used to train external AI models, built with GDPR and EU data residency in mind. Two data controllers, Attendu s.r.o. in Prague and Attendu Inc. in Dover, Delaware, and the one party to your contract is the one holding your data. | GDPR, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, with data held in AWS data centers in the European Union. Swapcard states that only anonymized data, which cannot be linked to an identifiable person, trains its machine learning model (swapcard.com/platform/security and /legal/data-safety, checked 2026-08-17). |
Last updated 2026-08-18.
What Swapcard's AI points at now
Swapcard's AI used to point only at attendees, and comparison pages, this one included, described it that way. It has moved. Under a heading reading ORGANIZER TOOLS, Swapcard now publishes The Architect: "The Architect lives inside Swapcard Studio. It offloads repetitive tasks: registration forms, content creation, exhibitor enrichment, so your team focuses on strategy, not logistics" (checked 17 August 2026). Cortex is marketed harder still, as "A self-reasoning agent that runs your event playbook" that "Executes, not just responds".
Two things bound that. Swapcard's public product board is actively shipping AI items and does not name Architect or Cortex on its front page, so the organizer agent rests on a marketing page rather than on a dated release note. And the tasks named are tasks inside Studio: Swapcard documents no agent that creates and configures the event itself.
How far each agent reaches
Attendu's agent runs one model loop over one tool allowlist covering 118 of 134 documented operations. It creates the event record before anything exists to configure, then publishes the registration page, imports and segments the guest list, sends the invitations, opens ticketing, configures check-in and reports afterwards. As of August 2026, no event platform documents a tool that creates and configures the event itself from a prompt.
The boundary runs the other way too. Attendu has no AI matchmaking, no session recommendation engine and no exhibitor lead retrieval, and none of the three exists anywhere in the codebase.
What Attendu's guest app does, and does not
Conceding networking outright gives away something that ships. The guest app carries attendee profiles, a searchable attendee directory, 1:1 direct messages with unread counts, contact exchange with verify and decline, 1:1 meeting booking with availability and an accept or decline step, session bookmarks and a moderated message wall, across 33 operations. It is Enterprise tier only, and the server refuses to activate it below that tier rather than hiding the button.
What Swapcard has on top of that is the matchmaking model and the exhibitor economics around it. Its own page claims 2.5x more qualified exhibitor leads, +70% app adoption and that 27% of platform interactions are AI driven (vendor figures, 17 August 2026).
Cost that scales with attendance
Swapcard's packages "combine licensing fees with per-user rates for attendees and exhibitors", with attendee ceilings of 1,000 a year on Starter and 10,000 on Professional, and ten add-ons listed with a currency symbol and no amount. Capterra lists $610 per user per year and says a free trial is not available, while the vendor page shows a Start free trial button; where the two disagree, the vendor page is the one to trust. Attendu publishes no price either, and quotes by capacity, so growth moves you between plans rather than onto a bigger per head bill.
Who should stay on Swapcard
Trade shows and association events where exhibitor return is the number the budget is judged on. The reviewer who wants more branding control makes the rest of the case in the same review: "Managing sessions, exhibitors, and attendees feels effortless, and the interface makes navigation very smooth for both organizers and participants. The networking features are especially valuable, attendees can connect, chat, and schedule meetings in a way that feels natural and engaging" (G2 3.5/5, 2 February 2026). Swapcard also claims eight years of dedicated AI research behind the matchmaking. Attendu has none of that.
What switching actually involves
Studio exports all people, a selected group, or the registrations that were abandoned (help.swapcard.com, checked 17 August 2026). Any of the three imports here. Swapcard's own batch import expects its template with the External ID and Checksum columns filled in. Attendu's guest upload reads whatever header row your file has, pairs each column with a property on the event, and matches the values inside a dropdown column against the options you already defined. It will also download an example file built from your own guest list properties if you would rather start clean.
Exhibitor records, booths, matchmaking history, the branded app and your registration forms do not come across. Attendu imports none of it. Speakers and agenda items have spreadsheet uploads of their own, and the agent rebuilds the pages from your description. Attendu's team takes the export, the column mapping and the first import with you.
Read how the agent works, see the same seven rows for vFairs or Bizzabo, or start with one event and watch the agent set it up.
Swapcard alternative FAQ
Swapcard is an event platform built around attendee networking and exhibitor outcomes, and since 2026 it positions itself as "the revenue-first intelligent event management platform". Most people mean the app when they say the name: profiles, matchmaking, meetings and lead capture at trade shows. Organizers work in a separate surface, Swapcard Studio, which is where registration is configured and where The Architect operates.
Yes, on the evidence available. G2 rates it 4.6 out of 5 across 228 reviews, and Swapcard says it is trusted by 4,000+ trade shows and conferences, which is the vendor's own count rather than an audited one. One caveat about those reviews: most inside the three and four star band are written by exhibitors and attendees using the app, several carrying G2's badge for guest users excluded from scores, so recent organizer voice is thin on every review site.
It depends what registration has to do. In Swapcard, registration is configured in Studio and The Architect can draft the forms. Attendu's registration form supports conditional field visibility, per-option capacity caps, consents with attached files, plus-one limits, registration limits by count or by date, and roommate pairing rules, and the agent builds that form from your description. If branching logic and custom CSS are the real requirement, [Zuddl](/compare/zuddl) belongs on the shortlist too.
Not from either of these if what you want is Eventbrite's marketplace, because neither Swapcard nor Attendu lists your event to a consumer audience. For invited and branded events, Attendu sells tickets through your own Stripe account with ticket types and promo codes, while Swapcard charges per attendee and per exhibitor on top of a license. Decide whether you are buying discovery or control before comparing features.
Compare Attendu with other platforms
Describe it once
Attendu vs Swapcard, on your own event
Describe the event and the agent builds it: registration page, guest list, invitations, ticketing, check-in and reporting. Private by design, and working today.
See it on your event