Linq Alternatives in 2026: Where to Go Now That Linq Sells Messaging APIs

Linq did not fail. It left. The company that sold NFC cards and a lead capture app to sales teams now sells iMessage, RCS, SMS, and voice APIs to people building AI agents, and it raised $20M in February 2026 to do exactly that. Good outcome for Linq. Awkward outcome for the roughly 12,000 people who rated the card app and the teams who ran booths on it.

This page is for those people. Most of them are individual networkers, and the right move for them is another card app; I will name two and move on. A smaller group used Linq as a booth scanner, and that group has a different problem with a different answer. Tendro is one of the answers, I work on it, so factor in that bias. This page sits on the event lead capture alternatives hub; for the category basics, start with the event lead capture guide.

What happened to the Linq digital business card app?

Linq pivoted to iMessage and RCS APIs for AI agents and raised $20M in February 2026. The card app still ships as The Digital Business Card App.

Here is what can be verified from primary sources as of September 2026.

The linqapp.com homepage leads with "APIs for iMessage, RCS, SMS, and Voice built for Agents." Nothing on the page, nav or footer, mentions business cards, NFC, or lead capture (https://linqapp.com/). TechCrunch reported the $20M Series A on 2 February 2026, led by TQ Ventures with Mucker Capital, and described the company's origin as "a digital business card that doubled as a lead capture tool for sales teams" that then "pivoted a few times" (https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/linq-raises-20m-to-enable-ai-assistants-to-live-within-messaging-apps/). TechCrunch says nothing about the card product being shut down.

The card app is still on the App Store, under a new name. The listing now reads "The Digital Business Card App," seller Linq, LLC, version 12.0.0 released 26 August 2026, 12,279 ratings at 4.85 (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1492946255). The release note for that version is one line: "Fixed Contact Exchange Setting." The help center is also still live and still refers to Linq One and Linq Blue plans.

So the honest status is de-prioritized and de-branded, not dead. Wave Connect, a competing card vendor, writes that Linq's "NFC cards, app, and digital profile platform have been effectively sunset" (https://wavecnct.com/blogs/best-linq-alternative). That is a competitor's reading, not a Linq announcement, and the page cites no Linq statement. I could not find any first-party end-of-life notice. Treat the app as working today with no visible roadmap, and plan accordingly.

Do you need a card app or a lead capture app to replace Linq?

If you used Linq to share your own contact info, you need a card app. If your team used it to scan badges at a booth, you need event lead capture.

Linq sold two things under one login, and the switch depends on which one you actually used.

The card side: a profile page, a QR code, an NFC card or badge, sharing your details with a tap. Realtors, recruiters, consultants, anyone who meets people for a living. This is most of the 12,000 ratings.

The capture side: a scanner for badges and business cards, contact tagging and notes, CSV export, HubSpot and Salesforce sync, an admin dashboard for a team. Sales and field marketing teams who worked booths. This is a minority of users and the majority of the revenue-relevant ones.

If you are in the first group, the next section is your whole answer. If you are in the second, skip to the exhibitor table. If you are both, read both, because the card apps have added scanning and the scanning apps have not added cards.

What are the best Linq alternatives for individual networkers?

Blinq and Popl are the direct replacements. Both are free to start, both share by QR or NFC, and both have far larger user bases than Linq ever did.

This is the short section, because for an individual the decision is easy and I have no product to sell you.

Blinq is the category leader by installed base. The iOS app carries about 130,000 ratings at 4.87, roughly ten times Linq's count. The free tier gives you two cards, unlimited sharing by QR, widget, email, or text, and Apple or Google Wallet passes. Premium runs $9.99 a month, $7.33 on annual, and adds the contact scanner, AI notetaker, enrichment, and contact export (https://blinq.me/pricing). Note that last item: on Blinq's free tier, contacts go in free and come out paid.

Popl is the other obvious landing spot, especially if you liked the NFC hardware. The iOS app lists about 102,000 ratings at 4.8, and Pro is $7.99 a month as an in-app purchase (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/popl-ai-lead-capture/id1503939262). Popl has renamed the app "Popl: AI Lead Capture" and is pushing hard into B2B, so an individual gets a more crowded app than Blinq but the same core card flow.

HiHello is the third name in every card roundup and worth a look if you want a plain card with no upsell pressure. I have not tested it as deeply as the two above.

Pick Blinq if you want the biggest network effect and the cleanest free tier. Pick Popl if you already own NFC cards and want to keep tapping. Either one is a five-minute migration once your contacts are exported, and the export steps are near the bottom of this page.

What are the best Linq alternatives for exhibitor and booth teams?

Tendro, BoothIQ, Popl Teams, Blinq Business, Mobly, and iCapture. Pick by pricing unit. Per-event or per-month beats per-seat for a booth team.

A booth team's problem with Linq was never the card. It was that a card app priced per seat per year was being used for a job that happens three days at a time, four or five times a year. Every tool below captures a lead at a booth and pushes it to CRM. They split on what the meter runs on.

Sourcing on that table. BoothIQ's price is public on its pricing page, "only pay during months you go to events" (https://getboothiq.com/pricing). Blinq's tiers are public (https://blinq.me/pricing); the Business tier is where event campaigns and CRM integrations sit. Popl pulled team pricing off its site in 2026: the pricing page now says pricing is "customized for your exact needs" with "unlimited users, unlimited events, unlimited leads" and no consumption fees, quoted over a meeting (https://popl.co/pages/pricing). The $5 a user figure is the last price Popl published, so treat any current Popl team number you see as reported, not published. Mobly publishes no price; the subscription shape comes from third-party roundups. iCapture's $8,000 floor is reported by third parties since Cvent gates the number. The pricing models breakdown walks through each unit and what it hides.

One honest note on "universal scanning," and it applies to every row including Tendro. On most major North American shows the badge QR encodes an opaque registration ID, a license plate that only the organizer's contracted system can resolve. Popl's own docs say it plainly: "Scanning only the QR code will not work" (https://support.popl.co/en/articles/10185562-the-universal-badge-scanner-tutorial). What these apps do is OCR the printed name and company off the badge face, then enrich from third-party data. Linq's scanner worked the same way. The badge scanner vs business card scanner post covers the mechanics.

How does Tendro compare to Linq for event teams?

Tendro is $499 per event with unlimited team members and CRM sync in under 10 seconds. Linq priced per seat and no longer publishes a card price at all.

Tendro is what I work on. Factor in that bias.

The difference is the unit. Linq's team product billed per user: third-party pricing guides put Linq One at $29 a seat a month or $249 a seat a year, and linqapp.com today prices messaging APIs only, with no card plan listed anywhere on the site. Tendro bills per event: $499 covers unlimited team members at the booth for that show, on their own phones, with no per-seat or per-device count and nothing owed in the months between shows. Teams running a full calendar get season-pass volume pricing through a sales touch. The per-event vs annual math runs the crossover for your calendar.

On capture, Tendro reads the printed badge face, business cards, QR codes, and handwritten notes with OCR, enriches and verifies the lead from third-party data, scores it hot, warm, or cold from the conversation notes, and does all of it offline, syncing when signal returns. Same mechanism Linq used for badges, with the enrichment and the offline mode built in rather than bolted on.

On sync, leads land in Salesforce, HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, Pipedrive, Zoho, or any CRM with a public API in under 10 seconds on a live connection, deduped and tagged to the event. Linq's card app synced to HubSpot, Salesforce, and GoHighLevel per its help center; if your CRM is one of those, the migration is a field mapping exercise, not a rebuild. The scan business cards to CRM post covers the card half of that workflow.

Where Tendro loses to Linq: there is no card. Tendro does not make an NFC product, does not host a profile page, and will not. If your reps still want to tap something in a hallway, that is a Popl or Blinq feature, and the next two sections cover both.

Pick Tendro if the booth is the job, the calendar is lumpy, and you want a price you can paste into a budget line.

Is BoothIQ a good Linq alternative for booth teams?

Yes, if you want a public price and a plain scanner. BoothIQ Team is $999 per month, billed only in months you exhibit, unlimited users.

With BoothIQ, subscribe for the month of your show, then cancel; CRM sync requires quote-priced Enterprise.

BoothIQ is the other tool on this page with a price you can read without a sales call. Team is $999 per month, billed monthly, unlimited users and scans, and the pricing page says outright that you only pay in months you go to events (https://getboothiq.com/pricing). Free Individual tier, no credit card. A four-month season runs $3,996.

What you get: universal badge scanning on a native iOS app, a three-step capture flow written for booth staff, with CRM sync on quote-priced Enterprise. What you do not get: a card product, ICP scoring, or follow-up automation. BoothIQ launched in June 2025 and has no G2 profile yet, so there is no review base to check against Linq's 12,000 App Store ratings. Full read at BoothIQ alternatives.

Pick BoothIQ if your team is iOS, your calendar clusters into seasons, and a monthly toggle is the whole ask.

Should Linq teams move to Popl or Blinq instead?

Yes, if reps still tap cards in hallway conversations. Both keep the card and add scanning. Blinq bills per seat like Linq did; Popl now quotes a flat team license.

This is the honest case for staying in the card category.

Popl is the closest thing to a like-for-like Linq replacement for a team. NFC cards, profile pages, a badge scanner, HubSpot certified integration, Salesforce and Marketo sync, an admin dashboard. Pricing is the catch: Popl no longer publishes a team price. Its pricing page says the license covers unlimited users, events, and leads with no consumption fees, and the number comes out of a sales call (https://popl.co/pages/pricing). The last public Teams price was $5 a user a month with a five-seat minimum, so budget from a quote, not from that figure. The 4,856 G2 reviews at 4.6 skew consumer, so weigh the rating accordingly. Full read at Popl alternatives.

Blinq Business is the same idea with a bigger installed base and a cleaner admin. $6.99 a user a month, $4.99 on annual, and the Business tier is where event lead capture, event campaigns, attribution, and CRM integrations live (https://blinq.me/pricing). Enrichment runs on lead credits on top of the seat price, so a heavy show will cost more than the seat math suggests.

The catch with Blinq is the one you already know from Linq. A five-rep booth team on Blinq Business annual is about $300 a year in seats, which looks cheap next to $499 per event until you add credits and until you notice you are paying for twelve months of a tool that gets used for nine days. Per seat is the right unit for a rep who networks every week. It is the wrong unit for a booth. Popl's flat license fixes the credit problem and hides the price instead; you find out what a booth costs after the demo.

Pick Popl or Blinq if the card is still part of how your team meets people. Pick a per-event or per-month tool if it is not.

What should you export from Linq before you leave?

Export contacts to CSV from the Contacts tab, or from the admin dashboard for team contacts. Then cancel Linq One under Manage Subscription.

Linq's help center is still live and the export path is documented, so do this now while it works.

Individual contacts: open the Contacts tab in the bottom navigation, choose contacts or tap Select All Contacts, tap Choose an Action, then Export, then send by email. Linq delivers a .CSV "ready to upload or import into your preferred CRM" (https://help.linqapp.com/en/articles/7260478-export-contacts-to-a-csv-file). The article does not say which plan the export requires and does not list which fields, notes, or tags come with it, so open the file and check before you cancel anything.

Team contacts: the admin dashboard's Contacts tab has an "Export (.CSV)" action for selected contacts, with search and filters, and it includes contacts synced from HubSpot, Salesforce, or GoHighLevel (https://help.linqapp.com/contacts-tab-overview-linq-admin-dashboard). The same page notes that some actions are unavailable when personal and team contacts are combined, so export the two sets separately if the button greys out.

If you already synced to a CRM, confirm the records are there first. The CRM copy is the one that survives.

Cancelling: Linq One is managed either through Apple Subscriptions on the device, through Menu, then Manage Subscription in the app, or by logging in at linqapp.com/welcome on the web (https://help.linqapp.com/en/articles/7925450-how-do-i-cancel-manage-my-linq-one-subscription). The help article says what you lose on cancel (Linq Phone, Linq One-only features) and says nothing about what happens to your contact data afterward. Export first, cancel second.

Why are Linq users looking for alternatives?

Three reasons: the company now sells messaging APIs, the card app got one bug fix in 90 days, and the brand is gone from the app name.

None of these is a complaint about the product. They are signals about where the product is going.

The company first. Linq's homepage, pricing page, docs, and press are all about messaging infrastructure for AI agents. That is where the $20M went and where the hiring is. There is no card-side roadmap to point at.

The release cadence second. The last card app update, version 12.0.0 on 26 August 2026, shipped a one-line fix. Compare Blinq, which shipped another iOS release the same week (1.122.0) and has added an AI notetaker, enrichment, and relationship intelligence features this year. Linq still works. It is not moving.

The name third. The App Store listing no longer says Linq anywhere in its title. "The Digital Business Card App" is a keyword, not a brand, and a company that stops putting its name on a product is telling you how much it plans to invest in it. When the rename happened I could not pin down; it is live as of this writing.

Meanwhile competitors are writing "best Linq alternative" pages and Capterra maintains an alternatives page for Linq, which aggregators only do where switching traffic exists. If you are reading this, you are that traffic.

How do you pick the right Linq alternative?

Answer two questions: who used Linq, an individual or a booth team, and what unit you pay in, seat, month, or event. That leaves one or two tools.

Who first. If Linq was your personal card, go to Blinq or Popl and stop reading. If Linq was your booth scanner, keep going.

Unit second. Count the reps who scan and the shows per year. Per seat (Blinq Business) scales on headcount and runs year-round. Per month (BoothIQ) scales on active months. Per event (Tendro) scales on calendar. Flat quoted license (Popl) scales on whatever the rep decides after your demo. Then the anchor everyone in this category is escaping: organizer rental scanners at $400 to $700 per device per event, up to about $735 onsite, per 2025-26 exhibitor order forms (https://www.aaos.org/globalassets/aaos-annual-meeting/exhibit-and-sponsor/exhibitor-service-manual/lead_retrieval_order_form.pdf). A five-rep booth at ten shows is roughly $25,000 to $35,000 a year in rentals before any software, and a Linq team that skipped rentals should not walk back into them.

Card third. If reps still tap cards in hallways, stay in the card category with Popl or Blinq. If the card was a Linq habit rather than a need, drop it and buy a scanner.

CRM fourth. Whatever you pick, test it in your own CRM instance before signing. Scan a contact that already exists and watch whether it merges or forks. The best event lead capture apps roundup has the five-test protocol.

Honest summary: individual networkers, Blinq or Popl. Booth teams that still want a card, Popl Teams or Blinq Business. Booth teams that do not, Tendro or BoothIQ. Follow-up automation, Mobly (Mobly alternatives). Fifteen or more enterprise shows inside Cvent, iCapture.

The desk test costs nothing. Tendro's free trial lets you scan the stack of badges and cards you exported from Linq, or the physical ones still in the drawer, no credit card, no show, and judge the enrichment on your own leads. CRM sync starts with your first paid event. Start the free trial and run last quarter's Linq contacts through it.