HiHello vs Popl

The two digital business card vendors people compare most often on this site, put side by side on what each one publishes and what each is built for — not on marketing. One lists a free plan and every price; the other lists none. Both were re-read on 13 September 2026.

The short answer

These are the two vendors people arrive at this site comparing, and they have ended up selling to different buyers. That settles most of the choice before you look at a feature.

Choose HiHello if you are one person or a small business. As of 13 September 2026 hihello.com/pricing lists a Personal plan that is "Free Forever" with four cards, Professional at $8 a month billed monthly or $6 a month billed yearly, and Business at $6 per user a month billed monthly or $5 billed yearly, every one of them purchasable online. It is the vendor in this pair that still sells a card to an individual with a price on the page.Choose Popl if your job is events. popl.co leads with "Your AI GTM platform for in-person events", and its pricing page sells unlimited events and conferences, an AI-native universal badge scanner, verified contact and company data enrichment, event campaigns with qualifying questions and CRM sync. Digital business cards are on the list — "Digital business cards for your team" — as one line item in an event-marketing platform. You will book a call to find out the price.Read HiHello's price with the toggle in mind. Its pricing page opens with a "Billed yearly up to 25% off" switch turned on, so the numbers you see first — $6 and $5 — are the yearly rates. Switch it off and Professional reads "$8 per month billed monthly" and Business "$6 per user/month billed monthly". Most comparisons, including earlier versions of ours, quote the yearly figure as if it were the monthly price.

Side by side

What to checkHiHelloPoplCompanyCard
Published priceYes — Personal free, Professional $8/mo monthly or $6/mo yearly, Business $6/user/mo monthly or $5 yearly, Enterprise customNone. Calls to action are “Request Pricing” and “Book a Demo”Yes — Free, Pro $7.99/mo or $5.99 yearly, Business $12/user/mo or $10 yearly
Free planYes — “Free Forever”, 4 cards, email signature, virtual backgrounds, Apple and Google Wallet — capped at “5 card & badge scans /mo”No free plan listed. Homepage FAQ: “Popl offers free trials and personalized demos”1 card, QR & link sharing, Apple and Google Wallet, no card scanner (lead capture is a Pro feature) — carries a small CompanyCard credit
Cards on the individual paid planProfessional: 16 cards, 20 scans a monthNot publishedPro builds on the one free card: unlimited links and files, custom branding, lead capture and analytics
Smallest team billBusiness is sold for “5-100 users” — five users, so $30/mo billed monthly or $25/mo billed yearlyNot publishedNo seat minimum: one user is $12/mo, two are $24/mo
How team billing worksPer user, monthly or yearlyNot per user: “you won't be charged extra per user, per seat, or per license”; the rate itself is not publishedPer user, monthly or yearly; the Business plan is “Talk to us about teams”
What it is built aroundA card for individuals, with lead capture and directory sync for teamsEvent lead capture and badge scanning at conferencesOne card for a small business or self-employed person
How you startSign up free; upgrade onlineRequest pricing, then a call; individuals are sent to the app downloadSign up free; teams talk to us

Read from hihello.com/pricing (with the “Billed yearly” switch on and off), popl.co and popl.co/pages/pricing on 13 September 2026; the “Popl for Individuals” link was followed the same day and redirected to popl.co/pages/download-popl. Vendor terms change — check both before deciding. CompanyCard figures are our own published rates on our pricing page, where yearly billing is labelled “Save up to 25%”.

Where each one genuinely wins

HiHello wins on the free plan and on price transparency. Four free cards, forever, with Apple and Google Wallet, a personal email signature and virtual backgrounds all on the $0 tier, and every paid price on the page. If you want to know what you will pay before you sign up, HiHello tells you and Popl does not.HiHello's Professional is a lot of card for the money. Sixteen cards, contact enrichment, card analytics and full customisation for $8 a month, or $6 if you pay for the year. If you run more than one role, side business or language and want a separate card for each, no plan on this page comes close.Popl wins on events, and it is not close. If you staff a booth, what decides your quarter is how fast a scanned badge becomes an enriched, deduplicated record in your CRM. That is the product Popl now builds, with a dedicated CSM and SOC 2 Type 2 on the plan card. And its pricing FAQ makes one structural promise HiHello's per-user model cannot: the plan is not charged per seat. A digital business card is not a substitute for any of that, and we would rather say so than win the click.The thing neither publishes is a team price for two people. Popl publishes no price at all. HiHello publishes one, but sells Business for 5 to 100 users, so a two-person business is on two Professional plans without shared branding or admin control. That is the gap a third option has to fit into, and it is a small one.

Where CompanyCard fits — and where it does not

We are the third option in that last paragraph, and it is worth being precise about how small the advantage is.

Where we lose. HiHello's free plan is four cards; ours is one, and it carries a small CompanyCard credit that Pro removes. HiHello Business is $6 per user billed monthly against our $12, and at five people or more it is simply cheaper. HiHello Professional and our Pro are within a cent of each other on either billing term — $8 against $7.99 monthly, $6 against $5.99 yearly — and HiHello's includes sixteen cards, contact enrichment and card analytics where ours includes one card. Popl is the better product for trade shows, full stop. Our Business plan is not self-serve either — the pricing page says “Talk to us about teams” — and it states plainly that billing is not live yet: paid plans are currently a preview, so nothing is charged.Where we hold up. Two things, both checkable on the pricing pages linked above. We publish a price, where Popl publishes none. We have no seat minimum, where HiHello Business starts at five users — which matters for a business of two to four that wants team features ($24 for two against a $30 five-user floor on monthly billing) and stops mattering at five. HiHello's five-scans-a-month cap on its free plan is not a point for us: our free plan has no card scanner at all, because lead capture is a Pro feature.

If you are a sole trader or a business of two who wants one good card this afternoon, with the price on the page and no five-user floor, that is the case. If you want four free cards or sixteen paid ones, take HiHello. If you are staffing booths, go and book the Popl demo.

Frequently asked questions

HiHello or Popl — which should I pick?

For one person or a small business, HiHello: as of 13 September 2026 it publishes a free plan with four cards, a Professional plan at $8 a month billed monthly or $6 a month billed yearly, and a Business plan at $6 per user a month billed monthly or $5 billed yearly, all purchasable online. For a team whose job is capturing leads at trade shows and conferences, Popl: its pricing page sells unlimited events, an AI-native universal badge scanner, contact and company data enrichment and CRM sync, and says its plan is not charged per user, per seat or per license — and you get the price on a call, because it does not publish one.

How much does HiHello cost?

As of 13 September 2026 HiHello publishes four plans. Personal is free forever with 4 cards, 1 user and 5 card and badge scans a month. Professional is $8 a month billed monthly, or $72 a year — $6 a month — billed yearly, for 1 user, 16 cards and 20 scans a month. Business is $6 per user a month billed monthly, or $60 per user a year — $5 a month — billed yearly, with unlimited cards and scans, and is sold for 5 to 100 users. Enterprise is custom for 101+ users. The pricing page's "Billed yearly" switch is on by default, so the first numbers you see are the yearly rates. Check hihello.com/pricing before deciding.

How much does Popl cost?

Popl does not say. As of 13 September 2026 its pricing page publishes no rates and no tiers; it is headed "Simple pricing for teams of all sizes" and the calls to action are "Request Pricing" and "Book a Demo". The homepage FAQ says "Popl offers flexible pricing for both teams and individuals. Contact us for a custom quote". The pricing FAQ does say how the price is structured: "you won't be charged extra per user, per seat, or per license". The "Popl for Individuals" link on the pricing page redirects to a page for downloading the Popl app, so the individual price is not on the web either.

Does Popl have a free plan?

Not a free plan. As of 13 September 2026 Popl's homepage FAQ says "Popl offers free trials and personalized demos" and that the trials are "designed for individuals to explore and experience the benefits of Popl Teams before committing to setting up a team". The pricing page lists no free tier; the only use of the word "free" on it is the footer link "Get the free mobile app". HiHello's Personal plan, by contrast, is "Free Forever" with four cards.

Is HiHello's free plan really free?

Yes, with one published limit that matters. As of 13 September 2026 HiHello's Personal plan is "Free Forever" and includes 4 digital business cards, a personal email signature, virtual backgrounds, Apple and Google Wallet passes and sharing by QR code, widget, email and SMS — but it caps you at "5 card & badge scans /mo". Handing your card out is unlimited; scanning other people's paper cards into your phone is metered. Professional raises that to 20 a month, and only Business, sold for 5 to 100 users, makes it unlimited.

Where does CompanyCard fit, and where does it lose?

It loses to HiHello on the free plan (four cards against our one, which carries a small CompanyCard credit), on the team rate ($6 per user billed monthly against our $12), and on cards per paid plan — HiHello Professional and our Pro are within a cent of each other on either billing term, $8 against $7.99 monthly and $6 against $5.99 yearly, and HiHello's includes sixteen cards to our one. It loses to Popl on event lead capture outright. What it has against this pair is narrow and checkable: we publish a price where Popl publishes none; we have no seat minimum where HiHello Business is sold for 5 to 100 users, which only matters for a team of two to four. HiHello's free plan caps its card scanner at five a month, but that is not an edge for us: our free plan has no scanner at all — lead capture is a Pro feature. Our pricing page also states that billing is not live yet — paid plans are currently a preview, so nothing is charged.

If you want a published price and no seat minimum

One card, priced in public, free to start, no five-user floor. That is the narrow gap CompanyCard fills between these two.