If your conference needs an agenda, ticketing, sponsor booths and badge scanning, keep Whova. heer(ish) does one thing Whova doesn't: it lets a few hundred travelling attendees see who is staying at which hotel and make their own plans, with nothing to install, and with everything deleted two weeks after the event.
What each one is
Whova is an all-in-one platform. Registration, a multi-track agenda, exhibitor booths, lead retrieval, live polls, gamification, sponsor banners, and a Community Board where attendees post meetups. Its customer logos include Google, Ford and IKEA, and Capterra lists 2,489 reviews at 4.8 out of 5, so the people who buy it are happy with it. heer(ish) has none of that. An attendee opens a link, adds a card with a name, a photo, a hotel and dates, and sees a map of who else is in town plus a list of plans anyone can propose. A run at seven. A coffee, a boat tour. The organiser pays once per event and the agenda stays wherever it already lives.
| Whova | heer(ish) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Quote only, and the trial comes after a 20-minute demo call. Ticketing is 3.0% plus $0.99 per paid ticket. | Free up to 50 attendees. Larger events pay once per event, and for now the price is agreed with us directly. |
| What attendees install | iOS and Android apps, with a web portal as the fallback. An account with a password. | A link that opens in the phone browser. No app, no account. |
| Who is staying where | Nothing on the feature list. Floor maps of the venue. | The core feature. Hotels with faces on them, always a named place, never a coordinate. |
| Attendee-made meetups | Yes, "Suggest a Meet" on the Community Board. | Yes. Anyone proposes, everyone else taps yes. |
| Agenda, ticketing, sponsors, lead scanning, polls | All of it. | None of it. |
| Data after the event | Kept "as long as necessary". Deletion by emailing support with the names. The account follows the attendee to the next event. | Deleted 14 days after the last day, 30 in the US region, with a deletion receipt for the organiser. |
| Event size | Conferences up to trade shows with tens of thousands of visitors. | 50 to 500 travelling attendees per link. |
Where Whova wins
The operational side, all of it. If sponsors paid for booths and expect scanned leads, Whova delivers them and heer(ish) never will. Multi-track agendas with personal schedules, session Q&A, live polls, a leaderboard for the photo contest, hybrid streaming, and templates you reuse for next year. A 2,000-person association meeting with an exhibit hall is Whova's home turf and nowhere near ours.
Its Community Board also does something we like. Attendees post their own meetups and others join with a tap, which is the same idea as our plans, inside a far bigger product.
Where heer(ish) wins
Adoption. Whova's own blog puts the industry average download rate at 20 to 30% and then describes the campaign it takes to reach 90%. heer(ish) has no install to campaign for. The link in your newsletter opens the map in whatever browser the phone has, and the only thing an attendee types is a name.
Up to 50 attendees you can start without talking to anyone. Whova's trial comes after a demo call.
Deletion. Whova's privacy policy keeps personal data for as long as necessary, and removing an attendee means an email to support with their name. On heer(ish) the purge date is fixed when the event is created. Once it passes, every card, photo and plan is gone from live systems within 24 hours, and the organiser gets a receipt that says so.
And the map. Whova has floor maps of the venue and nothing for lodging. When 120 people at a residency are spread over eight hotels, the hotel map is the reason anyone opens the app at all.
Which one to pick
Whova, if you sell tickets through the app, have exhibitors, or run more than a couple of tracks. heer(ish), if your event is 50 to 500 people who travel in, registration already lives somewhere else, and after every edition someone tells you "I had no idea you were there too". Running both is fine as well: heer(ish) is one link, and it fits in a Whova announcement.